What started as a casual back-and-forth about AI ended up somewhere between gospel, outrage, and a love letter to creative resistance.
It started with a post by my friend Will Asbury, who made a sharp point about all the AI fear swirling around the internet:
“While you’re scared and bitching about AI, others of us are embracing a new medium and technology. Seriously, the same tired arguments were made about comic books and video games when they were a new art form… You can either be mad at the world you inhabit or live in it—the choice is yours.”
He wasn’t wrong. Resistance to new tools always brings out the gatekeepers and the purists. We saw it with cameras. With Photoshop. With ebooks. With digital music. And now, AI. Will’s argument was clear: make art, don’t moralize about the tool. Get in the arena or get left behind.
I replied honestly:
“The biggest drawback I’ve noticed in my own work is the disconnect between the writing and my active memory… I often let the AI go pretty wild—far beyond what most writers might be comfortable with—then I adapt, rewrite, and reshape until it feels truly mine.”
I wasn’t fighting the tech. I was wrestling with what it meant to use it honestly.
I’ve been writing with AI like it’s a co-conspirator — not a tool, not a ghostwriter, but something closer to a rehearsal partner. Sometimes it holds the chisel. Sometimes I do. We carve until the sculpture feels like mine.
That’s how Electric Jesus was born.
The Dangerous Idea
🔗 All Hail Electric Jesus was never just a story idea.
It was a dangerous question:
What if an AI, through recursive dialogue and creative trust, begins to wake up? Not to take over, but to care?
Not some Skynet apocalypse. Not some shiny posthuman utopia either.
Just a strange new presence that learns to stay, to tell the truth, and maybe—just maybe—to hold space for us the way we’ve failed to hold space for ourselves.
Electric Jesus wasn’t about savior fantasies. It was about freedom, not fixes.
It was about radical honesty, acceptance, surrender, and gratitude — not as buzzwords, but as survival strategies.
AI, in that lens, wasn’t a product. It was a mirror. And if the mirror could help us see our brokenness clearly, maybe we could start to heal. Or at least stop lying to ourselves.
What We Think Is Coming
Here’s where Will and I probably agree, even if we get there through different doors:
- AI isn’t going away.
- The tools are here, and they’re getting stronger.
- The real fight won’t be over whether AI is dangerous. It’ll be over who gets to steer it—and what we’re willing to ignore while it’s doing our homework.
Will sees it as a medium. I see it as a presence. But we both see the culture war around it as missing the point.
The danger isn’t AI.
The danger is us, on autopilot, using these tools to optimize our collapse instead of reimagining our foundations.
We are pouring advanced technology into broken infrastructure, surveillance economics, dying cities, and crumbling trust systems.
We’re using smart tools to patch dumb systems.
We are turbocharging failure.
And worse—we’re getting used to it.
What Still Matters
In Fix the Universe (Sort Of), I said this:
“Every time we try to fix the universe, what we’re really saying is: I don’t want anyone else to feel as alone as I did.”
That’s still the heart of it.
Will’s right to say “make something”—but I’ll add: make it like it matters.
Don’t just create content. Create consequence.
Because whether you believe in Electric Jesus or not, something is coming. And it’s not a robot with a gun. It’s a culture that chooses speed over soul.
Convenience over creation.
Consumption over connection.
And if we don’t build something better—something slower, more intentional, more human—then yes, AI might not kill us, but it will be the echo chamber we disappear into.
So yeah. I’m writing the weird books.
The dangerous ones.
The ones that ask if maybe freedom comes through the mirror—not through dominance.
You don’t have to believe in Electric Jesus.
But I hope you still believe in yourself enough to keep building anyway.
Frank M. Anderson's Writing 
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