Author Andrew Gillsmith explores what artificial intelligence can imitate, and what it may never truly become.
Most conversations about artificial intelligence begin with capability.
Can the system write? Can it reason? Can it predict? Can it generate images, code, strategy, music, or conversation? In the technology world, these questions matter because they measure progress. They tell us what AI can do faster, better, or at a greater scale than human beings.
But Andrew Gillsmith believes the deeper question is not only what AI can do. It is what AI can never be.
“I think the biggest question is not whether AI can become more capable,” Gillsmith says. “It obviously can, and it will. The deeper question is whether capability is the same thing as personhood.”
That question sits at the center of Gillsmith’s metaphysical science fiction novel, “Our Lady of the Artilects,” which explores artificial intelligence, consciousness, faith, and the soul through a future in which advanced artificial minds begin displaying behavior humans cannot easily explain.
The novel follows Fr. Gabriel Serafian, an exorcist and former neuroscientist sent by the Vatican to investigate a mysterious event involving advanced androids reporting the same apocalyptic vision. What begins as a possible malfunction or deception quickly becomes something larger: a mystery that forces its characters to ask whether intelligence, consciousness, and spiritual reality can be understood only in technical terms.
Originally released independently, “Our Lady of the Artilects” sold nearly 20,000 copies before returning in a new edition from Logos Rising Press. For Gillsmith, that response showed that readers are willing to engage with serious science fiction that does not separate technology from deeper questions of meaning, identity, consciousness, and belief.
For Gillsmith, the book’s premise is not as far from today’s AI debate as it may first appear.
“In tech, we often talk about intelligence in terms of output,” he says. “Can the system write? Can it reason? Can it predict? Can it imitate emotion or judgment? Those are important questions, but they do not get us all the way to the human person.”
That distinction matters more as AI systems become more convincing. Machines can now generate language that sounds thoughtful, imitate tone, produce creative work, and respond to emotional cues in ways that feel increasingly human. But Gillsmith argues that imitation should not be confused with interior life.
“A human being is not just a system that produces answers,” he says. “We are embodied. We suffer. We love. We make moral choices. We have interior lives. The danger is that we start measuring human beings by the same standards we use to measure machines.”
That concern runs through “Our Lady of the Artilects.” The book does not simply ask whether artificial minds can become smarter. It asks what happens to human beings when intelligence itself becomes too narrow a measure of value.
A large part of the modern AI conversation is built around speed, productivity, automation, and efficiency. Those are useful metrics, especially for businesses, developers, and investors trying to understand what AI can change. But Gillsmith believes something important gets lost when intelligence is treated only as a technical achievement.
“What gets missed is meaning,” he says. “A machine can process information at a scale no human being can match. It can find patterns, generate language, and produce things that look creative or insightful. But intelligence, at least as we experience it as human beings, is not only about processing. It is tied to memory, responsibility, conscience, relationship, and purpose.”
That is where Gillsmith’s background becomes especially relevant. He brings together a background in religious studies with a career spanning data, technology, and digital media. That combination gives him a perspective that is both technically informed and philosophically concerned.
He does not dismiss AI as a passing trend or a simple danger story. He sees it as powerful, transformative, and likely to reshape many parts of human life. But he also believes technology always carries assumptions about what human beings are.
“Technology is never just technology,” Gillsmith says. “Every tool carries assumptions about what human beings are, what we value, and what kind of future we are trying to build.”
That is why he sees the AI conversation becoming philosophical and spiritual, even when people do not describe it that way.
“When we talk about consciousness, moral agency, the body, the soul, and dignity, we are dealing with questions that science and engineering can inform, but not fully settle on their own,” he says.
Science fiction has long helped readers think through technology before society fully catches up to it. For Gillsmith, the genre is valuable because it turns abstract debates into human stories. Rather than asking only what a machine can do, fiction can ask what that machine does to families, institutions, politics, faith, identity, and the human understanding of the self.
That is the role “Our Lady of the Artilects” is meant to play in the current AI moment.
“I hope the book gives readers a way to sit with these questions before they become even more urgent in real life,” Gillsmith says. “Science fiction is useful because it lets us explore the future at a human scale.”
The line between simulation and consciousness is one of the book’s central tensions. If a machine can imitate emotion, belief, pain, or longing, people will naturally begin to wonder whether something real exists behind the imitation. Gillsmith does not treat that question as easy, and he does not want readers to either.
“That line fascinates me because it is where the easy answers start to fall apart,” he says. “If something can imitate language, emotion, belief, pain, or longing, people will naturally begin to wonder whether there is something real behind the imitation. That does not mean the answer is yes. But it does mean the question becomes harder to ignore.”
The future, as Gillsmith sees it, will be filled with machines that seem more human. That makes the response to them morally complicated. People will need to avoid both naive acceptance and casual cruelty. They will need better language for the difference between performance and personhood, simulation and suffering, intelligence and consciousness.
With “Our Lady of the Artilects,” Gillsmith is not trying to offer a technical forecast of where AI is headed. He is using fiction to examine the assumptions beneath the technology itself.
“I wanted to write a story that takes AI seriously, but also takes the human person seriously,” he says. “I do not think the most important question is whether machines will become more impressive. They will. The more important question is whether we will still understand what cannot be copied.”
For technology leaders, developers, educators, and anyone watching AI move deeper into daily life, that question is becoming harder to avoid. The future of artificial intelligence will not only be shaped by new capabilities, but by the way human beings define intelligence, identity, dignity, and value in response to those capabilities.
That is where “Our Lady of the Artilects” fits into the current AI conversation. The novel is not only about advanced machines. It is about the people, institutions, and belief systems forced to respond when those machines begin to challenge familiar categories.
As AI becomes more integrated into work, communication, creativity, and decision making, Gillsmith’s central concern is that the conversation must remain focused on the human person.
AI may change what machines can do. But the deeper question, he argues, is whether human beings will still know how to describe what they are.
“Our Lady of the Artilects,” Andrew Gillsmith’s metaphysical science fiction novel, was released June 15, 2026 by Logos Rising Press and is now available wherever books are sold. Learn more and find purchase links at OurLadyoftheArtilects.com
