People are using AI to talk to God
In India and around the world, worshippers are turning to purpose-built AI for religious worship and spiritual guidance. What happens when the machines become our new spiritual middlemen?
Faced with the questions and challenges of modern life, Vijay Meel, a 25-year-old student who lives in Rajasthan, India, turns to God. In the past he's consulted spiritual leaders. More recently, he asked GitaGPT.
GitaGPT is an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot trained on the Bhagavad Gita, the holy book of 700 verses of dialogue with the Hindu god Krishna. GitaGPT looks like any text conversation you'd have with a friend – except the AI tells you you're texting with a god.
"When I couldn't clear my banking exams, I was dejected," Meel says. But after stumbling on GitaGPT, he typed in details about his inner crisis and asked for the AI's advice. "Focus on your actions and let go of the worry for its fruit," GitaGPT said. This, along with other guidance, left Meel feeling inspired.
As AI touches every aspect of the human experience, India may offer of a glimpse of what it will mean to interact with the divine through our newly talkative machines.
The past few years have seen many religious experiments with AI. In 2023, an AI app called Text With Jesus allows chat with AI manifestations of Jesus and other biblical figures.
The same year, a QuranGPT app designed to answer questions and provide guidance based on the Muslim holy text got so much traffic it reportedly crashed within a day of its launch. AI has even been the basis for entire religions, such as the Way of the Future church, a group started by former Google engineer Anthony Levandowski, which hopes to develop and promote the realisation of a god "based on artificial intelligence".
For centuries, religious communities have been anchored to priests, scholars and other spiritual leaders, says the reverend Lyndon Drake, a research fellow at the University of Oxford who studies theological ethics and artificial intelligence. But "AI chatbots might indeed challenge the status of religious leaders", Drake says.
Religious chatbots might be trained on scripture and dutifully quote verses, but they share the same bizarre hallucinations and shortcomings of other AIs. In one instance, GitaGPT claimed, in the voice of Krishna, that "killing in order to protect dharma is justified".
In 2024, an evangelist group called Catholic Answers rushed to take its chatbot priest Father Justin offline after the AI reportedly told users it was a real priest that could perform sacraments and said it would be fine to baptise a child in the soft drink Gatorade.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20251...alk-to-god
In India and around the world, worshippers are turning to purpose-built AI for religious worship and spiritual guidance. What happens when the machines become our new spiritual middlemen?
Faced with the questions and challenges of modern life, Vijay Meel, a 25-year-old student who lives in Rajasthan, India, turns to God. In the past he's consulted spiritual leaders. More recently, he asked GitaGPT.
GitaGPT is an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot trained on the Bhagavad Gita, the holy book of 700 verses of dialogue with the Hindu god Krishna. GitaGPT looks like any text conversation you'd have with a friend – except the AI tells you you're texting with a god.
"When I couldn't clear my banking exams, I was dejected," Meel says. But after stumbling on GitaGPT, he typed in details about his inner crisis and asked for the AI's advice. "Focus on your actions and let go of the worry for its fruit," GitaGPT said. This, along with other guidance, left Meel feeling inspired.
As AI touches every aspect of the human experience, India may offer of a glimpse of what it will mean to interact with the divine through our newly talkative machines.
The past few years have seen many religious experiments with AI. In 2023, an AI app called Text With Jesus allows chat with AI manifestations of Jesus and other biblical figures.
The same year, a QuranGPT app designed to answer questions and provide guidance based on the Muslim holy text got so much traffic it reportedly crashed within a day of its launch. AI has even been the basis for entire religions, such as the Way of the Future church, a group started by former Google engineer Anthony Levandowski, which hopes to develop and promote the realisation of a god "based on artificial intelligence".
For centuries, religious communities have been anchored to priests, scholars and other spiritual leaders, says the reverend Lyndon Drake, a research fellow at the University of Oxford who studies theological ethics and artificial intelligence. But "AI chatbots might indeed challenge the status of religious leaders", Drake says.
Religious chatbots might be trained on scripture and dutifully quote verses, but they share the same bizarre hallucinations and shortcomings of other AIs. In one instance, GitaGPT claimed, in the voice of Krishna, that "killing in order to protect dharma is justified".
In 2024, an evangelist group called Catholic Answers rushed to take its chatbot priest Father Justin offline after the AI reportedly told users it was a real priest that could perform sacraments and said it would be fine to baptise a child in the soft drink Gatorade.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20251...alk-to-god
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
