It’s tempting to call “Answering Machine” dated. Featured as the concluding track to The Replacements‘ 1984 underground magnum opus Let It Be, “Answering Machine” features frontman Paul Westerberg alone with an electric guitar sans the rest of the band, screaming his frustrations about how his lover won’t pick up the phone. As he once said in a 1986 Rolling Stone interview, “There’s nothing worse than calling somebody and getting an answering machine. I’d rather have the phone ring than have a recording say, ‘I’m not here.'” This song expresses the same sentiment.

Hence why it might be easy to just dismiss this song as a relic from a bygone era, from back when answering machines were considered cutting-edge technology–as opposed to, you know, a standard feature on that pocket-sized supercomputer you now keep on your person at all times. Indeed, compared to the sheer, staggering scale of instant-messaging apps and social media platforms that now saturate our 21st century Cyberpunk hellscape, the idea of only being able to leave a voicemail nowadays sounds downright quaint, even heart-warming. Oh for the era when we could actually hear each other’s unfiltered voices on a mere cassette tape, without worrying if we were interacting with yet another robocall or deep-fake chatbot!

But then, Westerberg’s complaint isn’t just with leaving a voice message per se, but with the mechanical repetition of the voice message itself. Walter Benjamin, in his 1925 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Reproduction,” had argued “that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art,” wherein “the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition”; and even accounting for the fact that Benjamin ultimately saw this “domain of tradition” as a hold-out of bourgeois culture that needed to be undermined and overthrown, Benjamin’s essay still articulates Westerberg’s central anxiety that something vital is lost when a human voice is reduced to mechanical reproduction. Specifically, you lose the “aura” of your lover when all you can reach is the answering machine. You cannot, after all, interact with a voicemail, cannot have a back and forth conversation, cannot feel an emotional connection with this rote facsimile of your lover’s voice. It can only repeat back to you what has already been said; the machine is fundamentally incapable of adding anything new to any discussion.

That may seem like a stupidly obvious observation to make, save that we all seem to keep forgetting that modern-day “AI” so-called behaves no different. AI is short for “Artificial Intelligence,” but that is a misnomer, since it does not actually display or perform any real intelligence at all, but by design only repeats what others have already said before. The basic layman’s terms description for how a Large Language Model chatbot functions, after all, is that it scans and “scrapes” the World Wide Web for all pre-existing content, then uses these scans to statistically model what is the next most likely sequence of words to appear based upon user inputs. It is a sort of stochastic auto-correct on steroids—and just as unreliable.

The algorithm itself is fundamentally imitative, a calculated mimicry; it can only–like its long-range ancestor the answering machine–repeat back to you what has already been said, not interact with you in any meaningful manner; it is by design fundamentally incapable of adding anything new to a discussion, either, let alone determining whether the information it’s generating for you is actually accurate. It is by definition impossible to emotionally connect with a device that is only ever regurgitating what it calculates you want to hear. “How do you say I’m lonely to an answering machine?” Westerberg cries out passionately; how do you say that to a chatbot, either?

This should all be of especial interest to those of us essaying to be Latter-day Saints, because one of our recurrent boasts is that, with rare exception (e.g. the Sacrament prayer, the Baptismal prayer) we avoid “vain repetitions” in our orisons. We are not just to recite by rote what others have told us, but to unleash the innermost needs and desires of our heart before our Heavenly Father, in all of our irreducible messiness and passions (I wrote about these sorts of prayers in a whole book that I continue to shamelessly plug). In LDS doctrine, to simply recite set prayers is to render us no better than a chatbot ourselves, and to treat our Maker as though He were just an answering machine. We must have a real back-and-forth conversation with our God, to wrestle with Him in mighty prayer, or we are only leaving lonely messages on a rote answering machine as well.

Hence my irritation at how many people have already succumbed to leaning on the chatbots–those notoriously unreliable plagiarism machines that “hallucinate” false data regularly and flagrantly–rather than think freely and freshly for themselves (it’s bad enough that we let other people do our thinking for us!). But then, any and every time our prayers have become rote and routine, we have been praying like chatbots ourselves, even well before they were invented. And if the “A.I.” tech bubble burst tomorrow or some Carrington Event solar flare or Frank Herbert butlerian jihad wiped out all the chatbots, we would still have the problem that so many of us have been speaking and praying like chatbots all along. In these regards, The Replacements’ “Answering Machine” is even more prescient now than it was in the Orwellian year of 1984.