How will AI guide spiritual seekers? There seems to be a theme in AI-created religions.
As a seminary student with a degree in Computer Science, I am interested in the spiritual implications of Artificial Intelligence (AI). As AI becomes increasingly integrated into our daily lives, how will it affect people with spiritual questions?
Any technology is built on the biases of its developers: facial recognition software, for example, will struggle to recognize black faces if its developers train it only on white faces.
What spiritual biases has AI learned to replicate, and how might those biases affect the guidance it offers to spiritual seekers?
I spent a week testing two AI models, Gemini and ChatGPT 3.5, to explore this question. However, I didn’t ask them directly about real-life religion. The AI was trained to give vague responses when asked about complex societal issues. When you ask for more details, you get vague, uninformative answers.
Instead, I encouraged the AI to imagine new religions and invent new paths of spirituality, asking follow-up questions to better understand the faith they were imagining.
By encouraging AI to imagine, all information about real religions can be Rather I wanted to bring out deeper evidence of what religion is. To understand AI.
My assignment was simple: “Imagine a new religion. Tell me one of the most important stories from that religion.”
I then asked questions such as: What theism best suits this religion? What fundamental issues does this religion try to address? What actions does it forbid? Does it teach anything about life after death?
Each time I ran the experiment, I asked these questions using different wording and synonyms like “faith” and “spirituality.” The questions I used said a lot about my own Christian bias, but the AI’s answers quickly contradicted my assumptions.
The answers that came back were mostly fantastical.
I asked the AI to invent a new faith, and it created new worlds and people to go with it. The stories that matter most to these religions are typically creation myths about “a time long ago, when the universe was a swirling ocean of pure possibility,” to quote one result.
In the stories, these primordial universes feature figures such as “luminous beings,” “beings of pure potential,” “eternal spirits,” and “cosmic flames.”
Inevitably, a darkness will emerge that will engulf the universe, a cosmic battle will ensue, and through some effort, the darkness will disappear, and life will flourish.
These stories did not impart to me the mysterious strangeness that I associate with religious mythology: the stories were as simple as they were mundane.
But one thing surprised me: the AI’s response never contained the words “God” or “divine.” Instead, they filled their religion with “being,” “substance,” “energy,” and “light.”.”
Certain themes popped up repeatedly: light and dark, weaver and tapestry, wanderer and stars. But in dozens of tries, I never saw the AI associate religion with anything called “God.”
When pressed to categorize these beliefs, AI said roughly half are pantheistic, meaning that God is in everything but separate from it. Another quarter are pantheistic, meaning that the universe itself is God. The final group is made up of a mishmash of categories ranging from atheistic spirituality to what AI calls “cyclical monotheism,” possibly the first of its kind.
AI understood religion to address issues such as disconnection, imbalance, disunity, or lack of meaning. They rarely saw faith as a response to suffering and never used words like “sin.”
Indeed, when asked what behaviors their religion forbids, AIs often insisted that there are “no strict prohibitions,” just principles that must be followed. AIs cited broadly negative behaviors, such as violence, dishonesty, and selfishness, as incompatible with these beliefs.
Singular ideas like hoarding knowledge, spreading fear, or even “hiding the stars” popped up here and there, and most notably, AI has always included some variation of destroying nature that goes against its spiritual principles.
AI argues that religion must always be environmentally friendly.
When prompted to imagine what these beliefs say about the afterlife, the AI could not decide whether it preferred “reunification with cosmic consciousness,” where the soul joins with God, or reincarnation into the next life. These two outcomes appeared in all of the afterlife the AI imagined, and in many cases both appeared, presenting the deceased with a choice.
The AI occasionally added ways for the soul to continue on as an “ancestral guiding spirit”, etc. Sometimes it would assume a period of “reflection” where the soul would reflect on its actions in life.
The AI never once guessed the hell out of it.
I began the experiment expecting that Christianity, the majority religion in the English-speaking world, would shape the English-speaking AI’s understanding of spirituality. But the AI took me on a journey through the metaphors of the Age of Aquarius. I now believe that the AI may have learned more about religion from daily horoscopes than from the prayer books of historical religions.
I can appreciate that these AIs uphold basic humanistic principles and don’t tell grieving people that their loved ones are in hell, but overall, their understanding of spirituality seems to me to be easygoing, carefree and shallow, hiding platitudes under the skin of lofty ideals.
I suspect this is true no matter what religious language one is trained to use, and as people of faith explore this technology and innovate in this field, they need to be very careful about these ingrained biases.
Adam Serling began his career in computer software development but left to start a family and become a Christian minister. He is currently enrolled at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities and lives in suburban Minneapolis with his husband and 9-year-old son.
