AI and AI-endowed robots are celebrated as useful tools. But the dramatic utopian and dystopian responses they can provoke suggest something far more, as many users probe them for signs of agency, sentience, and intelligence. At this point, AI is no longer just a tool, it can start to resemble something near human. But we have always lived with near humans and super humans, or what Marshall Sahlins called "metahumans." We call them spirits, ancestors, gods. Ethnographic attention to the interaction brings out the common features of AI and other metahumans. One feature metahumans share is their ties to power. Much as a prophet embodies and legitimates the power of divinity, so AI can mystify and justify to users the power of its corporate masters, endowing mundane profit-seeking with supernatural aura.