Ask ChatGPT improve your spiritual life, and the natural-language processing artificial intelligence chatbot has loads of suggestions.
But Americans are skeptical that artificial intelligence, or AI, has much to supply in the way in which of reliable religious guidance.
Sixty-eight percent of individuals don’t think AI could help them with their spiritual practices or “promote spiritual health,” in line with the latest research from American Bible Society (ABS). Fifty-eight percent say they don’t think AI will “aid in moral reasoning” and just one out of each 4 people say they feel optimistic concerning the impact the technology can have.
“Americans are more fearful than hopeful about artificial intelligence,” said John Farquhar Plake, an ABS program officer and editor-in-chief of the State of the Bible series. “People don’t know the way AI will change the culture—but they’re mildly uneasy about it.”
ABS surveyed about 2,500 people for its annual report on Scripture engagement and related topics. While technology has been an everyday a part of the survey, that is the primary yr ABS dedicated a set of inquiries to the subject of technology that performs tasks traditionally related to human intelligence.
AI is rapidly evolving, and currently includes the whole lot from Amazon’s “virtual assistant” Alexa to chatbots running large language models that may pass the bar exam. People are pushing the technology further day-after-day, and a few Christians who work in tech are enthusiastic about the chances—dreaming of algorithms which may at some point help people grow, learn, and go deeper of their faith.
“It isn’t difficult to assume how pastors and church leaders can use these tools for the work of every day ministry,” A. Trevor Sutton, a Lutheran pastor and the writer of Redeeming Technology, recently wrote. “It won’t be long before generative AI technology is woven into the background of our church lives.”
And yet a majority of Americans are uncomfortable with that concept. Questions about using AI to know the Bible or connect with God reveal that many feel “an amazing deal of uncertainty” concerning the advancing technology, Plake said.
Few religious people sounded excited concerning the idea of replacing their current devotional practices with technology-enhanced Bible studies.
“People who’re most connected to the Bible and have had their lives deeply impacted by studying and understanding the Bible are somewhat skeptical that that have may be replicated by a machine learning model or a generative AI model,” Plake said. “Practicing Christians who perhaps know their pastor or minister or their priest thoroughly, they’re skeptical that that private touch and that real relational engagement with God’s Word and God’s people may be replicated by a technology like this.”
People who’re less engaged with a non secular community and fewer prone to spend time reading Scripture were more optimistic concerning the potential of AI, in line with the survey. Those who need to read the Bible but should not currently doing so—a bunch ABS calls the “movable middle”—can imagine that the tech might give them a spot to begin.
It may be daunting, Plake identified, to choose a book with greater than 700,000 words for the primary time and search for the answers to life’s biggest problems. For someone like that, AI may very well be a godsend.
“You can ask an AI, ‘Where did Jesus say …’ and ‘Give me a summary of that,’” Plake said. “Then open the book or open your favorite Bible app, turn to that page or that chapter and verse and browse it for yourself.”
Derek Schuurman, a pc scientist who teaches at Calvin University, said there are some obvious ways in which AI will contribute to people’s spiritual lives. The technology is an amazing tool for Bible translation and is already being used to speed up translation projects. AI can provide transcriptions of sermons in real time, producing captions for individuals who have hearing impairments. There are probably 1000’s of other uses that churches will find too, from pairing sermon themes with worship songs to scheduling volunteers for church activities.
Schuurman has been getting a variety of questions on AI, though. Many people have utopian fantasies concerning the potential advantages and lots of fear a sort of Frankenstein scenario, where the thing that scientists created activates humanity and becomes an existential threat. He doesn’t think either of those views is correct.
“The Bible is unequivocal in its rejection of anything in creation as either the villain or the savior,” Schuurman told CT.
Instead, the pc scientist thinks Christians should concentrate on the role they must play in shaping the technology and establishing the moral framework for its use.
“The church, I feel, has something to say about justice and about loving our neighbors and about cultivating spiritual disciplines and practices in our lives,” Schuurman said.
Some of the anxiety about AI might just be a stage of the technological development, in line with Brad Hill, the chief solutions officer at Gloo, a technology platform for ministry leaders.
“It’s actually quite normal at this stage in a recent technology for people within the church, people of religion, to have reservations,” he said. “We saw this with the web, we saw this with broadcast TV, even the printing press.”
And there are reasons for that, Hill said. When things are changing quickly, people don’t know what they’ll lose. Right now, the developing technology produces programs that appear to own a variety of knowledge but lack wisdom.
Hill said he wouldn’t personally depend on ChatGPT for spiritual input, for instance.
“I trust ChatGPT to assist me with recipes or administrative tasks,” Hill said, “but I might take its input with large grains of salt relating to anything spiritual.”
But Hill and Gloo have chosen to pursue the positive potential and encourage Christians to search out ways to make use of AI somewhat than avoid it.
“AI is basically necessary and arguably may very well be one of the crucial necessary technology advances in our generation,” he said. “We have an ethical imperative as believers to know how we would use it redemptively and the way we would use it for good.”
So far, though, most Americans are skeptical that’s really possible.
