AI’s Religious Pretensions

In my previous post, I wrote about the version of God that emerges from much talk of AI and its powers. In this post, I want to talk about the idea of religion that is emerging from some of the news coverage about AI’s religious pretenses. As in my other post, the concept of religion is also, I think, far too small. Though they try to make room for something like the “spiritual” in AI, the way that its cheerleaders talk about religion narrows the range of ways that religion has worked or works with real people. For example: there is no community. No ethics. No discussion. No deliberation. No family meals. No communal ritual. Really, the religious ideas about AI seem to be about knowing a lot of stuff and having the capacity to combine and recombine that stuff in novel ways. To be sure, generative AI is a long way from my Apple II Plus, and even my MacBook, but it remains pretty far behind my guitar or even my prayerbook. I don’t want to bother with questions about whether AI can pray, given that it has access to the full text of all the prayerbooks. It can certainly process the prayers in accordance with someone’s rules about how they ought to be uttered. I know lots of humans capable of that too. This might be a point in favor of AI, but it misses a whole portion, and perhaps the majority share, of what religion and religious life is about.

But even the question “can AI agents pray?” misses part of the experience of human prayer. Namely, that it is done with people. The fact that people I don’t know showed up for me so that I could recite prayers in memory of my father. The fact that I then felt responsible to those people to return the favor or obligation. That we all took time out of our days, to engage in a collective activity, even when the specifics of that activity might feel meaningless or fruitless. But gather we did to stand together and sing together. We said good morning to one another. We shook hands. We drank coffee and ate together. We noticed when someone wasn’t there and welcomed them back when they returned. All of that is part of religious life, too. And it is largely missing from the whole AI-as-religion conversation.

Instead the AI-religion obsessives are fixated on omnipotence, which is only one of the qualities often attributed to transcendent beings. But what about ethics? What about moral codes of behavior? What about charity or any of the other activities that keep people considering the best interests of others. Even if they don’t always deliver on that promise, the concept that one’s actions are tied to other actors and that one ought to think about those other actors when taking action is a pretty core tenet in many of the systems we call “religion.”

AI appears to have none of those things. It’s all omnipotence all the time. As if it were enough. But it is not enough. It is a pretty small version of religion, if it is a version at all.