Can artificial intelligence pray? Technological entrepreneur Yossi Tsuria wanted to find out.
He asked the chat -bout of AI to cause a prayer.
If Joe prayed for the health of his son, Mr. Tsuria asked in 2023 how he should pray? The car replied: “Heavenly father, at this difficult time I come in front of you with a heavy heart.”
Why did we write this
Can your next spiritual guide be artificial intelligence? AI offers Christians, Jews and other alternatives to priests, rabbis and other leaders of faith.
But Mr. Tsuria thought about Orthodox Jews, not Catholics. He reviewed his question.
A few seconds later, AI caused a new prayer: “Amen. Dear God, in this difficult time I turn to you with a heavy heart. My beloved Perry, my young, collides [a] The battle … I stand next to him, I feel the weight of anxiety and fear. “
This was a sign that even in the early days the chat -bots of AI captured the language, at least some of the large religions. And since then, people began to contact the chat bots as therapists, spiritual advisers and even companions.
Last fall, the Catholic Church in Switzerland temporarily established AI Jesus – a hologram, lively AI in confession. The leaders of Vera made the sermons written by AI. And numerous applications were developed that offers a generated AI manual through prayer and meditation.
Nevertheless, many researchers and leaders of religious leaders are skeptical of the depth and religious leadership of the chat bout and see restrictions in technology known as generative AI. On the one hand, many chat bots do not very well cope with complex moral or religious problems. They also tend to a stereotype of non -Western religious traditions.
But the achievements of the seemingly endless possibilities for the study and practice of their faith. With this, any number of questions arise about what it means to consider spiritual and moral difficulties with the help of a machine that has no conscience.
“I am in some ways excited about this,” says David Brenner, chairman of the board of directors in AI and FAITH, an organization that combines the discussions in AI, religion and ethics. “But I really believe that we should be careful in how we use it and how we can continue to bring our human understanding of how we work best to interact with this technology.”
Many of the issues that, according to AI developers, are also studied in faith, he says: “Who are we animals in our creation? What is the meaning and purpose of life? How do you maintain truth and justice in life? How do you save the agency? “
A number of researchers agree that, correctly used models with large languages (LLM), such as ChatGPT, can be tools for answering these questions and encouraging a deeper spiritual reflection. For example, models trained on the Torah can synthesize what the Holy Jewish text about forgiveness says. But people are divided into how insightful the answers are actually from LLMS, as well as their correct use in a religious context.
“The God, in which I believe, is those who embody the truth and understanding,” says Johnny Flynn, who has just received a degree in religious research and philosophy from the University of North Carolina in Charlotte. “If I ever try to interact with the spiritual … Then I would like to go to a source that also has understanding and can understand the truth.”
While the chat bots deliver words with sympathy and emotions, they do not feel or do not even know what emotions are. For example, get angry, is “to believe that you were offended in some unjustified way,” says Alba Curry, a Lids University Lecturer in the United Kingdom.
LLM cannot make this kind of judgment. Instead, he uses the forecast. Trained in more written words than a person, could read advanced technologies in his whole life in order to guess with high accuracy about what word will be further in the sentence and craft answers that imitate the conversation. This makes them sounding human and it is easy to talk to them.
Metaphysics and AI
This may be a problem for someone who is looking for a real spiritual advice. “Large language models are now Sikofant. They really want to give you what you want, ”says Dr. Curry. This is not the same as “strength and sand”, which, for example, a priest or rabbi can offer someone who is faced with a question of religious duty.
Models are also not very well tuned to emotional vulnerabilities. And people who worked as explorers of AI and served as spiritual advisers, they say that they are not interchangeable.
Marcus Schwarting, a researcher of artificial intelligence, occupying a doctoral degree at the University of Chicago, is ordered by Minister Stefan, a Christian who is a trained care. In this capacity, M -N Svarting met weekly with a person seeking support. This suggested comparing him how conversations could go with Chatbot compared to him.
“I do not think that the AI model is able to have such a sense of presence,” he says.
Nevertheless, it does not exclude all the methods in which AI can be a useful tool for spiritual research. If anyone talks with AI, he performs 90% of the work, he says. “I really don’t think that something metaphysical happens to the AI model, but there may be something metaphysical with you.”
Other researchers say that chat bots can help someone think about how to admit sin to the pastor or other religious authorities, or can provide communication when reading the holy text.
“The Christian community may begin to understand that this is that the application that would be useful for our community,” says Dr. Curry from Lids University. But “we will never use large language models for these really deep moral debate.”
Until now, the vast majority of material chat bots are trained in Western, which leads to bias against religions from other parts of the world, says Flower squareInformatics professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands. LLM demonstrates the nuances when discussing the main religions in the United States and Europe. However, c studyShe and others found that oriental religions, such as Hinduism and Buddhism, are very stereotypical, and Judaism and Islam are stigmatized.
Chat bots, as a rule, encourage positive things, such as respect for various faiths and protect certain ideas, such as religious violence or suicide, such as suicide. (Nevertheless, many companies have yet to develop reliable guarantees against machines involving the latter). Values are determined by companies developing and learning AI, which means that their employees will influence how religion is portrayed.
This is another reason to attract the leaders of faith in the conversation, says Elias Kruger, a scientist of data, who began a blog called “Theology of AI” in 2016. There is a potential in the use of theological thinking to study AI from an ethical point of view, he says.
“Ethics is connected with our relations not only to each other as people, but for our entire universe,” he says. “Previously, we treated cars and built human things as things, and now we switch to them as creatures.”
This shift can be of problems when it comes to adhere to certain individual faiths faithful to the values. There is a risk that many Abrahamic traditions would be called idolatry, since AI seems to share some attributes with the concepts of different belongings about God, such as omniscience, omnipotence, ubiquity, says Brenner from AI and Vera. But he lacks others, such as love, care, care, truth and other qualities that create a “complete dimension of God”.
AI will change only if the engineer people do this, says Mr. N. Kruger. Most models are developed and supported by the work force of the silicone valley that distorts men. “How do we begin to solve the problem, expanding the capabilities of people of many religions and various layers to become builders?” Says Mr. Kruger, who has the degree of a master of theology from the Fuller seminary. “I think this is really what will change the arc of AI development.”
The purpose of religion
Many faiths are concerned about the risks of thinking that AI is an omniscient. “This has been done to give us an answer, regardless of whether this answer is true,” says Meredith Gardner, director of literacy in the ethical government. The group subscribed to a recent letter with a request to abandon the proposed moratorium on the regulation of AI.
AI can play the role of the spiritual director in the assignment of questions and suggestions of hints, says Rev. David Kim, General Director of Goldenwood, who developed Bota seminars and holds seminars with believing groups interested in studying AI tools. For him, this returns to the idea of ”encouraging intelligence.” Imagination has always been a key part of his own path of faith, he says, and he sees AI as a creative tool.
“We certainly know everything that can go wrong with this, but, given theological obligations, we have this mandate to move forward with things that we develop to a very encouraging orientation,” he says.
Despite the fact that AI has no consciousness, Mr. Kruger says that he has no doubt that people can use it to explore their faith. But it is important to maintain a sense of perspective and not seek spiritual leadership only from Chatgpt, he says.
“Religion should be about whether this brings us closer or isolate us more?”
