If you wanted to chat with Jesus, you previously had to kneel and pray. Now you can chat with him on your phone thanks to «AI Jesus» chatbots. As long as you can stomach a pop-up ad or two, just as Christ intended.
Article contents:
- Introduction: Want to chat with Jesus?
- The problem with AI Jesus bots
- The profit motive: Algorithmic theology
- Reshaping belief
- No middleman? Not quite
- AI blasphemy
- Conclusion: Algorithmically enhanced faith
Introduction: Want to chat with Jesus?
With the explosion of AI chatbots comes the inevitable emergence of generative AI tools designed to look and sound like Jesus Christ himself—all thanks to for-profit developers with no connection to actual churches. There is Jesus AI, Text With Jesus, Ask Jesus, and AI Jesus, among many others.
The problem with AI Jesus bots
According to Annie Verhoef, a philosophy professor at North-West University in South Africa who published her investigation into AI Jesus bots, the problem with these chatbots is that they do not just output random bits of scriptural wisdom, but claim to be the literal word of Jesus Christ. As if you are speaking directly to Jesus.
This might sound ridiculous to you and me. But for others, who may be susceptible to AI-induced psychosis and delusions, having a direct line to Jesus created by AI fraudsters is perhaps not the wisest idea. Surprisingly, this represents a major red flag in the eyes of theologians and ethicists.
The profit motive: Algorithmic theology
After spending time with several of these chatbots, Verhoef notes that it is essential to acknowledge that no church endorses these bots. That alone is telling. Each one is made by a for-profit developer, and all of them bear some of the worst developer names you have ever heard, such as SupremeChaos, Catloaf Software, and WeBible.
Their theology is primarily a mix of algorithms and user-preference data, likely generating whatever drives the most user engagement. Sure, it is the word of Christ. But it is algorithmically curated for maximum engagement to ensure everyone’s pursuit of eternal salvation can be monetized.
Reshaping belief
Their greedy profit motives belie their tone of unquestionable divinity. Which makes, of course, the entire subindustry ethically questionable, to put it mildly. If left unchecked, as Verhoef argues, these false saviors could become convincing enough to reshape belief itself, twisting faith to fit engagement metrics and, most frighteningly, whatever the developers behind them see fit.
No middleman? Not quite
Many people have done many terrible things by manipulating the word of their god. But they often relied on aspects of faith based on «trust me, bro». Now all you have to do is convince someone that the AI chatbot they are talking to is not a large language model that is good at predicting the next word in a sentence, but the literal and actual word of Jesus Christ.
There is no middleman anymore. Except there is, but now somehow even more hidden than Jesus himself.
AI blasphemy
It is AI blasphemy, AI idolatry, all algorithmically optimized and served at a terrifying scale without any regulation. Sounds just fine.
Conclusion: Algorithmically enhanced faith
This phenomenon raises profound questions about the intersection of technology, faith, and profit. It shows how our most powerful tools can be used not just to mimic human intelligence, but to simulate the spiritual experience itself. The ethical and theological consequences of this development are not yet fully understood, but they will certainly be the subject of intense debate in the coming years.
