The chatbots claiming to be Jesus: spreading gospel or heresy?

The canonization of Carlo Acutis by Pope Leo XIV on 7 September was a sign of how the Catholic Church is increasingly embracing the digital world.

Acutis, who died of leukaemia in 2006 at the age of 15, was known for using the Internet to further his faith, maintaining a website documenting Eucharistic miracles recognized by the church. It earned him the moniker God’s influencer.

But the work of a saintly teenage tech-wizard is just one way that new technologies are finding their way into religious practice: artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots and ritual-performing robots are already taking on spiritual roles that are conventionally filled by humans. Worshippers have mixed feelings about them.

AI Jesus

The rise of generative AI chatbots has led to the creation of tools that purport to offer people the opportunity to speak directly with religious figures, such as Jesus Christ. Anné Verhoef, a philosopher at North-West University in Potchefstroom, South Africa, analysed five popular Jesus chatbots by asking them questions about themselves and basic theology, and found some worrying trends.

None of the chatbots he studied were developed or endorsed by any church, and it is not clear what religious texts they were trained on. Four of the five were created and managed by private companies — with names such as Catloaf Software, a mobile-development company in Los Angeles, California — whereas the fifth is run by a Christian group in South Korea with no official connection to any church. All are free but supported by advertisements, with one offering an ad-free premium subscription.

“It’s difficult to know if they are really about religion, or just milking money from the faithful,” says Verhoef.

Another concern is that most religious AI bots claim to be Jesus rather than an AI impersonation developed by humans. “If this is really about Christianity and being sincere about faith, they should not be pretending to be God,” he says. “The possibility for abuse is huge” — if people believe a chatbot is actually divine, they might be convinced to follow its instructions for nefarious purposes, Verhoef says.

Jesus chatbots are growing in popularity and have hundreds of thousands of users, Verhoef estimates. The AI technology is also being used in more official capacities. Last year, as part of an experiment with a local university, a Catholic church in Lucerne, Switzerland, installed a Jesus chatbot in its confessional booth that could answer theological questions and offer spiritual guidance. In 2023, hundreds of Lutherans in Nuremberg, Germany, attended a church service generated and delivered by chatbot ChatGPT. Both were reasonably well-received, says Verhoef. Many of the functions of a priest could be replaced by AI chatbots in the future, but he sees a problem with it.

“If a sermon is prepared by an AI not a person, how seriously can we take that as a spiritually inspired sermon or thought?” asks Verhoef.

Religious acceptance

Christianity isn’t the only religion using generative AI tools. There are also Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish and Islamic chatbots, but some religions are more open to adopting new technologies than are others, and for different uses. Hinduism and Buddhism, for example, already incorporate some simple forms of automation in their rituals. Some temples in India have begun using robotic arms to perform the Hindu aarti ritual, in which a devotee offers an oil lamp to the deity to symbolize the removal of darkness, and one temple in Kerala has an AI-driven animatronic elephant.