As a reporter covering the technology industry, I spend a lot of time thinking about artificial intelligence.
Billboards for A.I. companies are scattered around my neighborhood in San Francisco. I regularly talk to people — company executives, my friends and family — about A.I. chatbots. I even tried using A.I. clones to fix my dating life.
So when I came across a Facebook group called “A.I. for Church Leaders and Pastors,” my interest was piqued. On the page I found a community of religious leaders discussing updates to A.I. programs like ChatGPT and Claude, even using image and video generators to recreate biblical scenes.
The parallels were intriguing: for a lot of tech enthusiasts in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond, A.I. has itself become a sort of religion. I wanted to probe deeper into how spirituality and A.I. were colliding in religious institutions across the country.
I scoured the internet for clergy members who had experimented with A.I. to help write their sermons, and called over a dozen. I also visited a few local churches, synagogues and mosques to ask religious leaders what they thought about using A.I. in their work.
I quickly discovered that A.I. was already a contentious topic in many religious communities. I even found a Bible study group made up of engineers from the top A.I. companies, who met every week in a Silicon Valley church basement.
The religious leaders I was most interested in speaking with were the ones that saw A.I. as a dilemma: Yes, the technology might be making their job easier. But at what cost?
I’ve found that most reporting on A.I. is about the advances in the technology itself, such as updates to chatbots or the emerging global market of computers and semiconductor chips that power them. But I’ve always had an interest in reporting on the other aspect of A.I. — how people are using it, and the ethical problems that arise from automating the more personal aspects of our lives.
Religion felt like a good subject to explore in my reporting, because the foundations of most faiths are written scripture, which A.I. can ingest just as it would news articles or books. But I could also see plenty of reasons people would be opposed to using A.I. in a practice where the human intimacy is, in many ways, the whole point. How would religious leaders react when A.I. had hallucinations — statements that chatbots fabricate?
One of my most informative conversations was with Jay Cooper, a pastor in Austin, Texas. He was the first of several religious leaders to pose the question: Can God speak through A.I.?
In his own answer, Mr. Cooper cited a passage from the Book of John, where Jesus, claiming to be a king, is confronted by Roman officials. Jesus says to them, “Everyone on the side of truth listens to me,” to which a Roman official responds, “What is truth?”
On a personal level, I’ve always been interested in these kinds of conversations, even though I consider myself more “spiritual” than religious. My parents met in divinity school. My mother is a longtime hospice chaplain. I attended a Lutheran college, where I often accompanied friends to morning chapel, and partook in dorm-room discussions about faith.
It’s always helpful, when reporting on sensitive topics, to have some familiarity with the subject matter. While I was reporting, religious leaders often asked me my own thoughts about A.I., and being able to put together a thoughtful answer was important to building a sense a trust.
The article came together after I interviewed Rabbi Oren Hayon and Rabbi Josh Fixler over Zoom in December. With the help of Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad, a Muslim A.I. researcher at the University of Washington, Rabbi Fixler had created a program called “Rabbi Bot.” Trained on Rabbi Fixler’s old sermons, Rabbi Bot could write sermons in his style, and even deliver them during a service in an A.I. version of his voice.
Watching a YouTube video of a sermon that Rabbi Bot had given two years ago, I was intrigued by the scene of Rabbi Fixler speaking to the chatbot out loud during a service, and its booming voice responding over the synagogue’s speakers, as if from the heavens. I immediately knew it would open my article.
On our Zoom call, Rabbi Hayon offered a sharp analysis of how A.I. fits into a larger history of technological tools changing the ways people worship. This includes technologies like radio and television and the internet but also older tools, dating all the way back to the invention of the printing press in the 15th century.
When it comes to A.I. more generally, it’s easy for people to come out strongly for or against the technology. The job of reporters is not to take a side, but to inform. I hope readers come away from my article thinking in a more nuanced way about the idea of using A.I. in religion, and in other parts of life, too.
The post When the Word Is Not Just Flesh: Reporting on A.I. in Religion appeared first on New York Times.
