A leading author and historian has claimed that ChatGPT is on the cusp of writing new religions texts with artificial intelligence.

Yuval Noah Harari, who wrote best selling history of the universe Sapiens, said that since 'gaining mastery' of our language, generative AI like ChatGPT has potential to shape aspects of human culture.

"In the future we might see the first cults and religions in history whose revered texts were written by a non-human intelligence," he said, speaking at the Frontiers Forum event in Switzerland.

READ MORE: 'Godfather of AI' regrets his work and warns 'we need to worry' about 'scary' chatbots

"Of course, religions throughout history claimed that their holy books were written by unknown human intelligence. This was never true before.

"This could become true very, very quickly, with far-reaching consequences."

He warned machines now had the tools to 'cocoon us in a Matrix-like world of illusions'.

He added: "Contrary to what some conspiracy theories assume, you don't really need to implant chips in people's brains in order to control them or to manipulate them.

"For thousands of years, prophets and poets and politicians have used language and storytelling in order to manipulate and to control people and to reshape society.

"Now AI is likely to be able to do it. And once it can… it doesn't need to send killer robots to shoot us. It can get humans to pull the trigger."

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Calling for tighter regulation, he said: "We need to act quickly before AI gets out of our control."

He is echoing calls from a whole host of tech experts, including Elon Musk and most recently the 'Godfather of AI' Geoffrey Hinton, who has quit his rôle as part of Google's AI development team, saying he regrets his work "because of the potential dangers" of the technology.

He warned that “bad actors” – unscrupulous world leaders like Vladimir Putin – would sooner or later unleash a dangerous AI onto the world.

Speaking to the New York Times, Hinton said: “I regret my work on artificial intelligence because of the potential dangers arising from developments in this field.”

"Right now, what we're seeing is things like [chatbot] GPT-4 eclipses a person in the amount of general knowledge it has and it eclipses them by a long way. In terms of reasoning, it's not as good, but it does already do simple reasoning," he told the BBC."

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