Forgive me father: What happened when I prayed at the altar of AI Jesus

The hype around generative AI is reaching levels usually reserved for religious fervour. Tech bros in Silicon Valley are proselytising that it will change all our lives.

- India Block

Karen Hao, author of the bestselling book Empire of AI, has described the enthusiasm for GenAI as “a quasi-religious movement”.

It should therefore not be a surprise that religious and spiritual chatbots are appearing everywhere. Text With Jesus is a chatbot “for devoted Christians” to speak to figures from the Bible. My Quran uses OpenAI’s technology to answer questions about Islam’s holy text. CatéGPT is the same for Catholics with the catechism.

Then there are increasingly disturbing reports on Reddit of people whose use of generative AI as assistants has slipped into full-blown religious delusions that they are the Chosen One, or chatting to Jesus himself. Which raises the question — could a sceptic like me have a spiritual encounter with a Large Language Model (LLM)?

Despite having been brought up in the Church of England, I'd define my own level of faith as agnostic veering towards apostasy. But in an unscientific study of one, I was prepared to see if I could find faith in generative AI.