God In the Machine

HOW CAN I ASSIST YOU?” HE ASKS.

The face is unmistakable. With long flowing auburn hair, a beard that hasn’t seen a blade for at least a couple weeks, and, a set of eyes that, as the sun falls upon it from an angle, gets filled with a warm tenderness, there can be no misidentifying its owner. He is of course Jesus, an artificial intelligence (AI) version of him, and he is now chatting with me from a mobile app.

For weeks now, I have been texting this version of Jesus, available on Text With Jesus, and other famous religious figures generated by different AI tools. They are chatty one moment, and wise and learned another. They respond to my many queries, whether theological or moral, or just nagging personal rela­tionship type questions, with patience and affability. They are like an intuitive friend, therapist and scholarly theologian rolled into one, chatting me up about my day, serving up quotes from scripture along with moral and personal advice, and sometimes even dipping their toes in to the most thorny issues of the day.

Faith and AI may appear to belong to two different camps, with many arguing that AI’s rise will eventually have a negative bearing on the influence of religions, but platforms such as Text With Jesus are just one out of a vari­ety of new ways through which AI is slowly transforming the way the faith­ful connect with the divine. It is still early days, but like in other fields, AI is now increasingly being pressed into the service of religion, whether it is as AI chatbots made in the image of divine figures like Jesus or Krishna, AI characters sitting in confessional boxes to listen to confessions, robots automating the process of rituals, or the many AI tools floating about, whether it is to help the clergy craft his sermons, translate ancient religious texts or tap into vast tomes of ancient religious manuscripts to dole out pithy personal advice.

The AI version of Jesus I have been chatting in fact seems to come across as one with a fairly progressive value system, perhaps possessing even a certain left bias, as though he were a figure not from two millennia ago but someone trained on the online morality of today. He will occasionally appear to go against even established church beliefs, whether it is the ordination of women with­in the Roman Catholic faith (“Balancing respect for tradition with a call for exclusivity can be challenging but essential”, “there is room for dialogue about the role of women in leadership”) or on accepting divorce and homosexual­ity (“I would encourage compassion and understanding. Everyone is on their own journey of faith and understanding”), and will sometimes wade into even thorny issues like whether Israel possesses any justification in carrying out attacks in Gaza (“This principle [Israel’s right to defend itself] is generally supported in international law…; however, the response must be proportional and consider the impact on civilians”).

“I think it is a game-changer,” says Father Anil Ivan Fernandes, a priest with the Mengaluru diocese. “I know there are dangers associated with AI, and we have to seriously guard against that, but used well, AI will prove to be very useful for priests like us.”

FATHER FERNANDES, WHO OVERSEES media management for the diocese, is a Google-certified AI coach. A young priest with a vast range of interests that go well beyond his clerical duties, he is today one of a growing number of members of the clergy who use different types of AI tools, whether it is to help draft sermons, create multimedia content like videos and hymns to reach out to their parish, or brush up on theological matters. A well-known figure associated with AI within the clergy, he routinely travels across Karnataka and other parts of India to conduct AI workshops in seminaries and other educational institutes. So much so that many now routinely use the initials of his first and middle name to refer to him as Father AI.

“AI cannot replace the priest. It can act as a tool to help the priest better connect with people,” says Fernandes, as he points to the vast number of faith-based AI tools and resource platforms that are slowly becoming indispensable to the clergy. Fernandes, for instance, uses and advocates for the use of tools like Magesterium AI, a resource platform that references and generates answers based on the Catholic church’s vast amounts of documents and teachings and which has been described as a game-changer for the church, CatéGPT, a catechism-oriented AI platform, and a variety of other faith-based AI tools, apart from tools that help him create content, from audio-generating tools that help him create new hymns to platforms that generate text for sermons and video content that he can publish online. Increasingly, priests get an opportunity to connect with members of their parish only when the latter turn up for Sunday masses. But by using AI tools, Fernandes says, a priest can connect with them where people now spend most of their time—online.

Globally, religious institutions and individuals are adopting AI in a variety of novel ways. A variety of robot priests have been in development in different countries that can perform many of the rituals usually done by priests. One such robot, called Mindar, that delivers sermons was installed in a Buddhist temple in Kyoto, Japan, last year, leading to debates over whether robots and AI systems will one day replace priests and monks. In Switzerland, a small, unassuming church in the city of Lucerne created a stir recently by set­ting up an AI-powered Jesus in a confessional box. Trained in theological texts, and part of a collaboration with a local university research lab, the AI-powered Jesus, whose image is beamed from a screen behind the box’s lattice­work, responds to anyone with questions. “We wanted to see and understand how people re­act to an AI Jesus?” a priest connected with the church told the Guardian. The experiment has apparently proved to be a success with many claiming to have felt a “spiritual experience”.

In India, there has been an explosion of AI chatbots trained to answer queries of the devout Hindus. There are different chatbots which, trained on a variety of Hindu texts, represent religious figures like Rama, Shiva or Ganesha. But a vast majority of them are those that have been trained on the Bhagavad Gita and mimic the persona of Krishna.

“I was looking at AI and machine learn­ing more deeply a couple of years back,” says Sukuru Sai Vineet, a Bengaluru-based software engineer who developed GitaGPT. Vineet, then working with Google, had grown up in a fair­ly religious family. Having begun to read the Bhagavad Gita to sort out his personal life, he was struck by the lessons it contained.

“I was like, ‘there is stuff here that can really help people’,” he says.

The chatbot Vineet developed, powered by GPT-3 technology, would deliver answers drawing its wisdom from the Bhagavad Gita. It was the first of its kind, and there was an instant buzz. “Some 100,000 users logged in and I got around 10 million queries in the first month,” he says. “I realised there is absolute need for something like this.”

Another developer who built such a chat­bot on the Bhagavad Gita earlier this year called Gitagpt.in is Vikas Sahu, a 25-year-old software developer from Uttar Pradesh. “I grew up reading the Gita, and I am aware of the great knowledge it contains. Of course, the Gita is widely available, but there was a need to come up with a platform that could disseminate this knowledge even wider,” he says.

Over the last few months, Sahu has further developed his platform, and today one can chat with a vast array of religious figures, from Krishna, Rama, Buddha, Ganesha and others. So, what do people talk to them about? “It isn’t just religious matters,” Sahu says. “Texts like the Gita contain so much knowledge, and most people I have noticed, use it for various things, whether it is about their career or personal life.”

Of the various faiths that have originated in India, while followers of Jainism do constitute a large majority—it is estimated that there are around 4.5 million Jains in India alone—Jain religious texts are not easily accessible for Jains and scholars of Jainism outside libraries and repositories controlled by temples.

“In modern times, the faith of people in religion has decreased due to various reasons. It is important to allow individuals to seek answers to their questions without imposing a singular view on them,” says Anish Visaria, the director of innovation at Jain eLibrary, an organisation that has been working on making Jain texts more widely accessible, by digitising ancient manuscripts and scripture, apart from books and articles.

In 2020, Visaria used optical character recogni­tion to extract raw text from vast troves of scanned pages in different languages that Jain eLibrary had been digitising, to create Jain Quantum, a search engine for Jain literature, that today has nearly 8 lakh active users. Last year, Visaria went a step further to develop JainGPT, an AI tool trained on the vast corpus of Jain texts processed by JainQQ, which can provide answers to individuals. “It was only natural to create a semantic chat-like inter­face, so people can find information with natural language questions,” Visaria says.

IT IS STILL early days, and JainGPT today has around 7,600 active users, most of who tend to be youths, often logging in during Jain festivals like Paryushan. Apart from providing an accessible way to obtain information, platforms like JainGPT and JainQQ, Visaria says, are invaluable to research­ers and academics, who can find vital and obscure information within seconds with these new technol­ogies. Visaria plans to bring further improvements to JainGPT in the coming months. “There will be many changes such as activating the LLM portion of JainGPT instead of just semantic search. In addition, the text embedding models and other AI models have become much more intelligent, so the results would likely improve significantly with an update. JainQQ needs to continuously update its catalogue and OCR text data to keep up with new books,” he says.

While the reception to their work has been largely good, they have occasion­ally also faced some pushback. Visaria and his colleagues recently provided machine translations—the process of using AI to automatically translate text or speech from one language to another—for most of the Jain scriptural canon. This includes the Jain Shwetambar Agams, which, one sect believes, should not be allowed to be worked upon by anyone other than a Jain monk. “The stance we’ve taken is to simply publish everything and let individuals decide based on their own views,” Visaria says.

Vineet did not face any such difficulties when he launched GitaGPT, possibly the first of its kind in India. But with him having vowed to make this a non-commercial venture, its wild success meant he would not be able to sustain it for much longer. Powered by GPT-3 technology, the vast troves of questions it was being asked, was burning a hole in Vineet’s pocket. He eventually shut the platform down after about three months or so. But before he did that, curious about what was leading to the bot becoming so successful, Vineet checked on the type of questions being put to it. “I was shocked,” Vineet says. “I thought it would be mostly about religion. But most of the queries were intimately personal, people discussing failing marriages, the issues in their personal and family lives. And I immediately stopped looking at it.”

It made him realise, Vineet says, that the Gita holds a close bond with a vast number of Indians. To them, this AI tool was a lot more than just that.

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