Don’t Ask AI Your Questions About Faith
By Heather Brady, originally published by Sojourners.
When it comes to questions about faith, theology, and God, AI technology can be dangerous. When AI summarizes the theology from across the internet that it thinks you want to read, it creates the kind of echo chamber that inhibits spiritual growth and reinforces only the information and ideas we want to hear, instead of offering knowledge from a sound theological basis.
“I worry for pastors, in some ways, that it won’t help them stretch their sermon writing muscles, which is where I think so much of our great theology and great sermons come from, years and years of preaching,” Thomas Costello, a pastor at New Hope Hawaii Kai in Honolulu, told The New York Times.
In an article in The Seattle Times, Phil EuBank, a pastor at Menlo Church in Menlo Park, Calif., compared AI to a “bionic arm” that could boost his productivity. But when AI writes a sermon, “there’s that Uncanny Valley Territory … where it may get you really close [to a sermon written by a person], but really close can be really weird.”
And Greg Epstein, Harvard Humanist chaplain and author of a forthcoming book on AI’s impact on religion, told The Harvard Gazette that some people have started seeing AI itself as a higher power.
“If religious and secular people aren’t careful, what artificial intelligence is promising or threatening to do is really supersede religion or outpace it,” Epstein said.
It can be tricky to find trustworthy resources online where a curious reader can go to find accessible answers to faith questions, and Google can be a helpful tool in those moments. But if you’re Googling a faith question (who among us hasn’t, at this point?), a little extra effort goes a long way. Scroll past the AI Overview and look at the options that appear below it, vetting sources yourself and comparing what scholars say to each other. Thinking critically about what you see in the search results will give you a clearer picture of the possible answers you could find, helping you make decisions that will be useful instead of providing out-of-the-box answers from an AI robot trained on every bit of theology it can find on the Internet, from the good to the bad to the just plain weird.
This article was originally published by Sojourners and is partially reproduced here without the permission of the author, who is not affiliated with this website or its views.
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