Spiritual guidance through apps is the latest craze

As the New York Times reports, Apple’s App Store is teeming with Christian chatbot apps. One “prayer app,” called Bible Chat, claims to be the number one faith app in the world, boasting over 25 million users.

“Our AI was trained exclusively on Scripture and developed with guidance from Christian pastors and theologians,” the company’s website shows. “Greetings, my child,” a service called ChatWithGod.ai told one user, as quoted by the NYT. “The future is in God’s merciful hands. Do you trust in His divine plan?”

Religious leaders told the NYT that these tools could serve as a critical entry point for those looking to find God. A British rabbi named Jonathan Romain told the paper “Spiritual apps are their way into faith.”

Instead of going on long pilgrimages or driving to the closest place of worship, users can simply turn to AI chatbots to seek spiritual guidance.

In India and around the world, worshippers are turning to purpose-built AI for religious worship and spiritual guidance. Faced with the questions and challenges of modern life, Vijay Meel, a 25-year-old student who lives in Rajasthan, India, turns to God. GitaGPT is an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot trained on the Bhagavad Gita, the holy book of 700 verses of dialogue with the Hindu god Krishna. GitaGPT looks like any text conversation you'd have with a friend – except the AI tells you you're texting with a god.

"When I couldn't clear my banking exams, I was dejected," Meel says. But after stumbling on GitaGPT, he typed in details about his inner crisis and asked for the AI's advice. "Focus on your actions and let go of the worry for its fruit," GitaGPT said. This, along with other guidance, left Meel feeling inspired.

"It wasn't a saying I was unaware of, but at that point, I needed someone to reiterate it to me," Meel says. "This reflection helped me revamp my thoughts and start preparing all over again." Since then, GitaGPT has become something like a friend that he chats with once or twice a week.

AI is shaping how we work, learn and love. Increasingly, it's also changing how we pray. Worshippers from all the world's major religions are experimenting with chatbots. But Hinduism, with its long tradition of welcoming physical representations of gods and deities, offers a particularly vivid laboratory for this fusion of faith and technology. Experts worry that AI’s strong tendency to please the user may have unintended consequences.

In short, it’s a dystopian new spin on spirituality in the digital age — and one that just might be poised to change the face of religion itself.