by WEBB WRIGHT
Large language models trained on religious texts claim to offer spiritual insights on demand. What could go wrong?
Just before midnight on the first day of Ramadan in 2023, Raihan Khan—then a 20-year-old Muslim student living in Kolkata—announced in a LinkedIn post that he had launched QuranGPT, an artificial-intelligence-powered chatbot he had designed to answer questions and provide advice based on Islam’s holiest text. Then he went to sleep. He awoke seven hours later to find it had crashed because of traffic. A lot of the comments were positive, but others were not. Some were flat-out threatening.
Khan felt pressure at first to take the chatbot offline, but he ultimately changed his mind. He believes AI can serve as a kind of bridge that connects people with answers to their most profound spiritual questions. “There are people who want to get close to their religion [but] are not willing to spend the time to get to know more about it,” Khan says. “What if I could make it all easily accessible through one prompt?”
QuranGPT—which has now been used by hundreds of thousands of people around the world—is just one of a litany of online chatbots trained on religious texts. There’s Bible.Ai, Gita GPT, Buddhabot, Apostle Paul AI, a chatbot trained to imitate 16th-century German theologian Martin Luther, another trained on the works of Confucius, and yet another designed to imitate the Delphic oracle. For millennia adherents of various faiths have spent long hours—or entire lifetimes—studying scripture to glean insights into the deepest mysteries of existence, say, the fate of the soul after death.
The creators of these chatbots don’t necessarily believe large language models (LLMs) will put these age-old theological enigmas to rest. But they do think that with their ability to identify subtle linguistic patterns within vast quantities of text and provide responses to user prompts in humanlike language (a feature called natural-language processing, or NLP), the bots can theoretically synthesize spiritual insights in a matter of seconds, saving users both time and energy. It’s divine wisdom on demand.
Many professional theologians, however, have serious concerns about blending LLMs with religion. Ilia Delio, chair of theology at Villanova University and author of several books about the overlap between religion and science, believes these chatbots—which she describes disparagingly as “shortcuts to God”—undermine the spiritual benefits that have traditionally been achieved through long periods of direct engagement with religious texts. And some secular AI experts think the use of LLMs to interpret scripture is based on a fundamental and potentially dangerous misunderstanding of the technology. Yet religious communities are embracing many types and uses of AI.
One such emerging use case is biblical translation. Before now this work was painstakingly slow; translating ancient sources into the English King James Bible, first published in 1611, took seven years and a host of devoted scholars. But LLMs are expediting the process, enabling scholars to expand the Bible’s reach. A platform called Paratext, for example, uses NLP to translate esoteric terms from scripture—such as “atonement” or “sanctification”—to produce what it describes on its website as “faithful translations of the scriptures.” And in 2023 computer scientists at the University of Southern California launched the Greek Room, a project that aids translation of the Bible into “low-resource” languages (that is, languages for which few, if any, written records exist) through the use of an AI chatbot interface.
Scientific American for more