Can generative AI create a new religion that all could embrace?

There have been many other attempts. Deen-e-illahi, or ‘the Religion of God,’ was proposed as a new syncretic religion or spiritual programme by Mughal Emperor Akbar in 1582. The Bahá’ís tried to integrate elements from Islam, Christianity and other religions. There was Unitarian Universalism, which embraced theological diversity (GPT4 amusingly described this as the blockchain of religions—decentralized and open-source, but not universally accepted). So was Theosophy, and even Sikhism—the Holy Granth has elements of Hinduism, Islam and the dohas of Kabir.

Technology and religion can be a potent cocktail, and mixing AI can make it more intoxicating. The arrival of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT has spurred entrepreneurs to use AI to consult and interpret religious texts. The Bhagavad Gita of Hinduism seems to be a favourite. Sukaru Sai Vineet built GitaGPT and Samamyou Garg created BhagavadGita.io. GitaGPT lets users query the Gita and ask it to solve their life problems. Across another faith, QuranGPT and HadithGPT (bit.ly/3tuSaFT) were built with the goal of showing that “Islam preaches peace, love and brotherhood." BibleChat does the same with Christianity and GPTSahib for the Granth Sahib in Sikhism.

AI is manifesting itself not only in chatbots for religious texts; religious scholars and priests are figuring out how to use it too. The Guardian reports on Rabbi Joshua Franklin using ChatGPT to create a 1,000-word sermon on intimacy and vulnerability (bit.ly/3FfpfIx). The Financial Times talks about the Qom seminary, a centre of learning of Shia theology, working to see how AI can be integrated with their religion (bit.ly/48KlPuT). Mohammed Ghotbi, who heads Eshragh Creativity and Innovation House, says that “robots can’t replace senior clerics, but they can be a trusted assistant that can help them issue a fatwa in five hours instead of 50 days." The UAE government has famously created two powerful LLMs—Falcon and Jais. They aren’t necessarily around religion, but they are built around Arab cultures and values that necessarily borrow a lot from religion. ChatGPT, Bard, LlaMA and others are predominantly trained on the ‘Western internet’ and reflect the ethos, culture and beliefs of the Western way of life and Christianity; other countries want their own values reflected through AI.

Sukaru, who created GitaGPT, found there is a “loneliness epidemic," and people were coming to his bot to “solve for their loneliness" and find succour and support. It is interesting to reflect that perhaps this was one of the biggest purposes of religion—people gathered in churches, temples and mosques not only to pray, but to build community ties and relationships.

To go back to where I started, can AI bring religion back, in the way that it was ideally meant to be? Yuval Harari believes that AI could even create a new religion. “For thousands of years, prophets and poets and politicians have used language and storytelling in order to manipulate and to control people and to reshape society," he says. And we know that Generative AI is built on language (LLMs are large language models). In fact, my research reveals that there is already one out there—a cult built around Singularity called Theta Noir (thetanoir.com), which calls itself a new religion: “a techno-optimist, visionary collective devoted to exploring the spiritual co-evolution of humanity with advanced forms of AI."

Be that as it may, my audacious hope is that as we build these bots and apps, and at a time they perhaps interact with each other, we find that all of them really mean to convey the same feeling of love, brotherhood and service to humanity. Possibly, unencumbered by the baggage of history, bloodshed and conflict that humans carry, an AI can create a faith or movement that all humanity could join. That would see AI achieving the most noble goal of all and make everything else worth it.