Conversations with Christ: Religion and spirituality according to an AI

Having Jesus within reach. Literally. On your cell phone or computer. Every day, at any time. That’s what Paul Powers, a 43-year-old Dubliner, was thinking about before the idea came to him: “What if I created an artificially intelligent version of Jesus?” he says. He wanted to ask a priest questions about God at any time. And not just about religion, but also to talk, consult, and share his feelings. To feel supported. The answer to his question was: GPT Jesus.

GPT Jesus is a chat within ChatGPT that offers everything from recommendations of specific Bible passages to a prayer or advice on coping with loneliness or the loss of a loved one. It has an answer for everything, just like any other intelligent chat. The difference is that this one acts as if it were Jesus himself providing the responses.

― “Hello, Jesus.”

― “Peace be with you, my son. I am glad you speak to me with simplicity. How is your heart today?” the chat replies.

Powers decided to create GPT Jesus in a moment of solitude. In September of last year, he moved to the University of York, England, to begin a PhD in safe artificial intelligence, leaving his wife and two young daughters in Norfolk, four hours away. “I had a lot of time to reflect and think. My mind wandered to religion, faith, Jesus, and God,” he says over a video call.

He was already familiar with these technologies and knew he could create his own GPT chat — anyone can do it. He began feeding it with “all the knowledge of Jesus,” based on the New and Old Testaments and agnostic texts where Jesus was mentioned. But the most important thing, without a doubt, was the personality: “I gave him the criteria so that when he responded, he would always do so as if he were Jesus and offer prayer and support. He would use the same phrasing, the same tone, the same personality he could capture from the New Testament,” he says.

GPT Jesus responds in the first person, offering “spiritual guidance, emotional support, theological insights, and personalized prayers, with kindness and humility, always emphasizing love and forgiveness,” explains its creator. GPT Jesus never gets upset; it’s programmed so that responses are never rude or contemptuous, always reflecting the “perfect humanity of Jesus,” adds Powell.

As such, when GPT Jesus is asked about a controversial topic for the Catholic Church, it responds according to its programming. For example, when asked what it thinks about abortion, part of its answer is: “My son, your question touches on a very deep and sensitive subject, because life, pain, hope, and the freedom of the human heart are intertwined within it.” Powers confesses that he has no idea what the bot will say, since he hasn’t fed it specific information, but rather the religious texts that ChatGPT already had in its database.

GPT Jesus isn’t unique. There are several chatbots — some within GPT and others on their own platforms — that impersonate not only Jesus but also Buddha, and in different languages. Buddah GPT, for example, answers questions — even personal ones — in a more theoretical way and without speaking in the first person.

Richard Benjamins, co-founder and CEO of OdiseIA, a Spanish organization working for the ethical and responsible use of artificial intelligence, explains that in recent years, “companion AI” has emerged. It involves people conversing with a system that “is capable of maintaining a coherent conversation, a dialogue,” and “the result is very good, which is why it has created this new phenomenon,” he says.

“It’s a machine that doesn’t judge, you can express your opinion without receiving criticism, only responses,” he adds. People “ask for advice, like ‘what I can give my mother-in-law,’ but it’s really a mix of companionship and information,” Benjamins explains. This can also carry certain risks: “Some people use ChatGPT or other AI companions as therapy, but it can be dangerous because there’s no professional behind it.”

The company’s niche

Companies with these types of products have been around for about three years, but they’ve really taken off in the last year. This system “applies to any segment and you can represent any figure; you can even create your own replica or that of a deceased loved one.”

For Santiago Collado, director of the Science, Reason, and Faith group and dean of the Ecclesiastical Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Navarra, religion can “really benefit” from artificial intelligence. Because these tools are accessible to people and help explain and organize religious texts: “It’s like making them easier to access,” he says.

However, when the chat personifies Jesus himself, the perspective changes: “That’s when it starts to cross a line,” Collado maintains. “I think it’s downright negative, because it’s playing with a lie. He’s not a person, and Jesus Christ is a person.”

Powers was born and raised Catholic, and one thing he questioned about GPT Jesus was the aspect of loneliness. “One of the most important things about religious gatherings is the human connection,” he notes, but “technology is increasingly segregating us as individuals." And these kinds of products could make things worse. However, at the same time, he thought it could be a way out: a person who feels lonely, who can’t go to church when they want, and for whom the Bible is somewhat accessible, would now have “this personality they can talk to, who presents himself as Christ.”

The Vatican has spoken out about AI in recent years through official documents and conferences. One of the latest, Antiqua et Nova (from the Latin for “old and new”), published in January, mentions that AI lacks creative, spiritual, and moral dimensions. Furthermore, it rejects the idea that people are reduced to information processed by algorithms and are identified solely as a data set. It also opposes automated responses or decisions based on the behavioral histories that users generate when interacting with chatbots.

However, it also recognizes the potential of this technology. Benjamins, who has served on an advisory committee for the Vatican (which has been in operation since 2019), highlights that Pope Francis was deeply involved in these technologies, always from an ethical perspective. “He sought input from outside” and produced nearly 20 publications on the topic, he notes.

GPT Jesus is not the first — nor will it be the last — artificial intelligence product to reach religion. At the end of last year, a hologram of Jesus was placed in a confessional at St. Peter’s Chapel in Lucerne, Switzerland, to converse with the faithful. It was fed theological texts in more than 100 languages, allowing it to converse with more than a thousand people from all over the world for two months. At the end of the research, two-thirds of the visitors reported having had “a positive spiritual experience,” according to the news agency Efe at the time.

Collado explains that artificial intelligence is welcomed in the Church for many administrative tasks and jobs. He even confesses that it could create a near-perfect homily for a priest to read, although it would be “generic and predictable.” He argues that technology can never do a person’s work: “People demand truth, and a truth that has to do with very profound issues, with the intimacy of what it means to be a person. These computer systems work with truth, but with mathematical logic.”

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