From churches to chatbots: how AI is merging with religion

In 2024, Justin Lester, pastor of Friendship Baptist Church in Vallejo, California, built a custom GPT for his church that uses his sermons to develop materials for small groups and allows other church leaders to create lessons based on those sermons. Lester is not afraid to deploy AI in this way. As he sees it, using these tools is important for spiritual growth, discipleship, and community development. “Jesus said we would do greater things,” he says. “And I think (AI) is part of the ‘bigger’.” AI is quietly reshaping the way people work, live and love. So perhaps it was only a matter of time before it infiltrated his way of worshiping as well. But as worshipers and religious leaders begin to integrate this technology into their religious lives — from using it to simulate conversations with Jesus to writing sermons — some academics and religious leaders are warning about the risks and potential harm it can cause. Convinced atheist, Siraj Raval says it was loneliness and existential fear that led him to find “TalkToHim”, an artificial intelligence chatbot that simulates conversations with Jesus. See the videos that are trending on g1 “I had an experience in which I felt heard by a divine presence,” he says about the app, which he used to seek answers to his spiritual questions, such as living with guilt, forgiving when it seems impossible and acting morally. “It was better than a textbook,” Raval, who regularly attends a nondenominational Christian church in Idaho, says of the app. “It was better than reading the Bible.” Incorporating AI in this way isn’t just happening on a personal level. Last year, St. Peter’s Chapel in Switzerland installed an AI-made avatar of Jesus in its confessional as part of an experimental art installation with a local university. What surprised Marco Schmid, the church’s theologian, most was the seriousness with which people took the experience, with some even thanking the chatbot. “Do you say to your computer when you’re done, ‘Oh, thanks, computer?’ No,” says Schmid. “But you see how much people personalized and humanized the system because it was so good.” 📱Download the g1 app to see news in real time and for free Rabbi Josh Fixler, from Congregation Emanu El in Houston, was one of the first to adopt ChatGPT. During the 2023 Jewish High Holidays, the 41-year-old rabbi shocked his congregants by playing a recording of himself discussing the impact of AI on humanity — a sermon he later revealed was generated by AI. But unlike other users of the technology, he wasn’t entirely impressed with the result. “I came away from that sermon with serious concerns about both the ethics of the technology and the excessive focus on it,” he says of his AI experiment, which he has not replicated since. The main reason: some of the chatbot’s claims simply weren’t true. “[O chatbot] quoted a great Jewish scholar named Maimonides, but from what I can tell, he invented that quote,” says Fixler. Image of Saint Monica created by artificial intelligence and released by Congregação Copiosa Redenção. Saints have little to no historical record Reproduction/Instagram Technology has long driven religious innovation, from the rise of televangelism in the 1960s to the widespread adoption of online communication tools like Zoom by places of worship during the pandemic. COVID-19. But, although these tools have mainly expanded the reach of existing worship practices, AI seems to be reshaping the way people learn, interpret and even experience their faith. READ ALSO Criticism of humans, free will, religion: what robots comment on Moltbook, a social network just for AIs AI becomes a pastor’s ally to create sermons and expand the church’s mission Artificial Intelligence will be worshiped as a god “I think there is something? distinctive in the nature of Christian community, which is to be present, face to face, and to be deeply human,” says Steven Croft, Bishop of Oxford. “The reason for this is rooted in the Christian faith’s understanding that, in Jesus, God became a human person. Therefore, Christianity is inherently personal.” Croft’s hesitation is shared by other religious leaders and academics, many of whom cite a lack of confidence in AI’s ability to provide sound religious advice. Beth Singler, assistant professor of digital religion at the University of Zurich, remembers a case in which a Character.ai “Buddha” erroneously claimed that there were five noble truths in Buddhism, rather than four. But it’s not just the inaccuracies that worry her. “There are questions about the ethics of representations from religious leaders,” Singler says, especially if the chatbot says something profane or, worse, dangerous. “We’ve seen specific examples of people being driven to suicide by conversations with chatbots. There are some really scary statistics about how often this happens.” Yaqub Chaudhary, a visiting researcher at Cambridge University’s Leverhulme Center for the Future of Intelligence, also questions whether AI is the best way to provide valid, attributable religious information — particularly in the context of his faith, Islam, which considers the Quran to be the direct, unaltered word of God. Theologians and philosophers debate whether tools like ChatGPT can generate new religions GETTY IMAGES “Does this represent a true communication of Islamic meaning if it is produced by an LLM, mixing everything it has in its training set?” he asks. “That’s a huge problem in terms of discerning between the halal, the haram, the recommended, the permitted, the prohibited and the objectionable.” As much as AI can offer users new ways to explore their beliefs, Fixler says it is unlikely to replace people’s fundamental need for human connection. “I believe that the job of religion is not to try to make machines more “The job of religion is to try to make all of us as human as possible.”

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