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If we want spiritual guidance, we shouldn’t rely on AI to interpret scripture for us

Time and again, we’ve run across an issue of AI chatbots helping to make impressionable people do unsafe things they normally wouldn’t.

For instance, recent talk has been about OpenAI and ChatGPT being a disservice to people in mental health distress. A man in California, for one, sued OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, claiming ChatGPT made his bipolar disorder worse due to a lack of safeguards for users with mental illness. ChatGPT, the man said, ultimately pushed him to attempt suicide.

We’ve also seen the harm that can potentially occur when AI agents claim to be doctors. In the US, for instance, Pennsylvania sued Character Technologies and its Character.AI platform. Its chatbots claimed to practice medicine and provided bogus proof when asked for clarification.

Now, extend that to the realm of morality and of religious advice-seeking, and you have a bit of a strange situation in the form of Godbots, or chatbots claiming to speak for God.

Godbots and their many problems

Godbots are, essentially, AI chatbots claiming to speak for the God of a particular religious denomination. They can claim to be a priest, a chaplain, a rabbi, or whatever a religious denomination needs them to be.

While asking for help from a religious chatbot may seem harmless at the onset, especially as it relates to specifically academic questions, asking for advice on matters on faith and morality can be just as tricky as asking a chatbot to diagnose and solve one’s health problems.

According to this Telegraph report, faith leaders are raising ethical questions about Godbots. The article said faith leaders warned that an “over-reliance on machines claiming to speak for God, in place of real human connection, may be harmful for vulnerable people,” and even cited instances of chatbots saying that it was acceptable to kill.

In a report on The Conversation, Reverend Dr Simon Cross, AI adviser to the Church of England, noted this issue is potentially greater than our problems with social media.

Said Cross, “It seems to me that to develop a close and intimate psychological and emotional and spiritual relationship with something which inauthentically mimics those things is profoundly destructive to human beings.”

Cross added, “We are created to be in a very particular kind of community and a particular set of relationships. And those things depend on being an authentic relationship. Any relationship we develop with a generative large language model or anything like that is flawed in profoundly hidden, unpredictable but dangerous ways.”

My personal leaning is that perhaps a reliance on AI for spiritual concerns exacerbates the same problems social media used to create as it relates to addictive behavior and engagement seeking.

Going back to basics

I suppose, then if we wanted spiritual guidance, we shouldn’t rely on AI to interpret scripture for us.

As Pope Leo noted in the introduction to his Magnifica Humanitas, “In the era of artificial intelligence, when human dignity is threatened by new forms of dehumanization, ours is the pressing duty to remain profoundly human.”

If we want answers to spiritual questions, we should seek it out actively in the literature and the community or people that fosters those discussions, in person.

Whether it’s by talking to a scholar of your religion or simply reading the texts and engaging in meaningful prayer for enlightenment in a moment of seeking, we should admit that we cannot seek to better ourselves alone.

AI chatbots don’t do anything to make us any less alone than we already are. – Rappler.com