I was speaking on Generative AI to a large number of curious students and their slightly worried teachers at one of the most prestigious schools in the country last month. One of the hosts there, a very learned and erudite gentleman, asked me a question which set me thinking: “In this world fraught with divisions along religious and ideological lines, can AI help us create a new kind of religion or faith which every other faith could embrace and believe in?” It certainly is a lofty goal for any intelligence, artificial or not, but then isn’t AI supposed to solve the problems that human beings seem to have given up on – global warming, world hunger, a new all-encompassing faith?

There have been many other attempts. Deen-e-elahi or The Religion of God was proposed as a new syncretic religion or spiritual program by Akbar in 1582. The Bahá’ís attempted the same, integrating elements from Islam, Christianity, and other world religions. There was the Unitarian Universalism which embraced theological diversity (GPT4 amusingly described this to me as the blockchain of religions – decentralized and open-source, but not universally accepted!). So was Theosophy, and, arguably, Sikhism, with the Holy Granth has elements from Hinduism, Islam and the dohas of Kabir.

Technology and religion can be a potent cocktail, and mixing in AI as an ingredient can make it more intoxicating. The introductions of LLMs and ChatGPT has spurred entrepreneurs to use this powerful tool to query and understand religious texts. The Bhagavad Gita, the iconic text of Hinduism, seems to be a powerful magnet for entrepreneurs. Sukaru Sai Vineet built GitaGPT and Samamyou Garg created the BhagavadGita.io. GitaGPT, built on GenAI technologies allows a user to query the Gita and ask it to solve their life problems. Across another faith, QuranGPT and HadithGPT (https://bit.ly/3tuSaFT ) were build with the objective to show that “Islam reaches peace, love and brotherhood.” There is BibleChat which attempts to do the same with Christianity, and an attempt to do the same with GPTSahib for the Granth Sahib in Sikhism.

AI is manifesting not only with Chatbots around religious texts; religious scholars and priests are figuring out how to use it too. The Guardian reports on Rabbi Joshua Franklin using ChatGPT to create a 1000-word sermon on intimacy and vulnerability (https://bit.ly/3FfpfIx ). The Financial Times talks about how the Qom Seminary, one of the centres of learning of Shia theology is actively working to see how AI can be integrated with their religion (https://bit.ly/48KlPuT ). Mohammed Ghotbi, who heads the Eshragh Creativity and Innovation House says that “Robots can’t replace senior clerics, but they can be a trusted assistant that can help them issue a fatwa in five hours instead of 50 days.” The UAE Government has famously created two the most powerful LLMs out there – Falcon and Jais. Both of them are not necessarily around religion but are built around Arabic cultures and values which definitely borrows a lot from religion. ChatGPT, Bard, LlaMA and others are predominantly trained on the ‘Western Internet’ and reflects the ethos, culture and beliefs of the Western way of life and Christianity; other countries want their own values and ethos reflected through AI.

Sukaru, who created GitaGPT, found something very interesting: he realised that there is a ‘loneliness epidemic’ out there, and people were coming to his bot to ‘solve for their loneliness’ and find succour and support. It is interesting to reflect that perhaps this was one of the biggest purposes of religion – people gathered in churches, temples and mosques not only to pray, but to build community and relationships around a shared belief. To go back to where I started, can then AI bring religion back, in the way that it was ideally meant to be? Yuval Harari believes that AI could even create a new religion. “For thousands of years, prophets and poets and politicians have used language and storytelling in order to manipulate and to control people and to reshape society,” he says. And we know that GenerativeAI is built on language, that is why they are called Large Language Models. My research revealed that there is already one out there – a cult built around Singularity called Theta Noir (www.thetanoir.com ), which calls itself a new religion – “a techno-optimist,

visionary collective devoted to exploring the spiritual co-evolution of humanity with advanced forms of AI.”

Be that as it may, my audacious hope is that as we build these bots and apps, and at a time they perhaps interact with each other, we find that all of them really mean to convey the same feeling of love, brotherhood and service to humanity. Perhaps, unencumbered by the baggage of history, bloodshed and conflict that humans carry, an AI can perhaps create a faith or a movement which all humanity buys in. To me, that will make AI solve the most noble goal of all and make everything else worth it.