I guarantee you all of this is 100% serious to millions of people. You can find people on Hacker News who believe that LLMs are sentient, self-aware beings, or who believe in panpsychism and that, therefore, computers have souls. This sort of belief is not at all uncommon.
Fundamentally this is no different than any other kind of shamanism or divination, just using a computer as an oracle instead of, say, tarot cards or a Ouija board. And the interpretation of TFA is typical end-times Evangelical Christian "Mark of the Beast" extrapolation onto the new scary thing. It just seems weird because it exists outside of the traditional context of religious and spiritual practice which provides it with the veneer of respectability and normality.
Fundamentally this is no different than any other kind of shamanism or divination, just using a computer as an oracle instead of, say, tarot cards or a Ouija board. And the interpretation of TFA is typical end-times Evangelical Christian "Mark of the Beast" extrapolation onto the new scary thing. It just seems weird because it exists outside of the traditional context of religious and spiritual practice which provides it with the veneer of respectability and normality.