The Free Press: Can AI Help Us Find God?, by Tyler Cowen (George Mason):

Just as artificial intelligence is changing every other part of our lives, so it is changing religion. Spiritual leaders have taken note: Pope Leo XIV has warned of how AI could deaden our emotional lives. The Mormon church, by contrast, has embraced AI as a tool for religious learning, as long as it doesn’t supplant the connection with God. Secular observers (and I am one) should be equally interested.

Believers have always come to religious leaders with questions about their personal lives, Church doctrine, the Bible, or just for general everyday advice. But the current generation of AIs know more about the Bible, Quran, and other religious texts than most human specialists do. And AIs are very good at answering questions.

In the face of this machine, why would anyone bother becoming an expert in these texts?

There is already a BibleGPT AI advertised as “a faster route to divine wisdom,” and a GitaGPT trained on the central Hindu religious text, the Bhagavad Gita. Over time, it is quite possible that our religious knowledge, and many of our religious connections, will be intermediated less by human beings and more by machines.

That is itself an evolution in the nature of religion, just as attending services on television or Zoom was, but this time the human connection is yet further away. Transmitting information has been one of the ways priests, or really any experts, form connections with people. AI, though, makes transmitting information trivially easy, and so it takes away some thunder from the clergy.

Religious knowledge has become easy to access with as much detail as you might wish. You can learn about Vatican II or the Talmud ad infinitum. But it may mean something different to practitioners when it does not come from another human. An AI can write a sermon; in fact, if some confessional accounts can be believed, a majority of sermons are now at least co-authored with AI. But can it deliver that sermon and move worshippers to go out and do good works? With where things stand now, I doubt it.

One possible scenario is that our religions, at least as we experience them in person, become more charismatic, more heart-pumping, and more thrilling. We will want more and more of the uniquely human element, and to hold the attention of their audiences, churches will provide it. If so, AI will be riding a trend that we already see in the U.S., as older mainline denominations have ceded ground to evangelical ones. …

[I]f you wish to remain or become a person of faith, be ready for religion to change, and be flexible in your own mindset. The printing press changed what Christianity meant, ultimately cleaving it into multiple branches as Martin Luther’s writings and the vernacular bibles were broadly disseminated. AI is likely to do the same with our current set of religions. Your favorite interpretations of religious thought and belief, as taken from the past, may lose their salience, and so you will have to adapt too. Humans will always look for a sense of the divine. We have yet to see if, and how, AI will help them find it.

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