Privacy concerns compound these issues. “I wonder if there isn’t a larger danger in pouring your heart out to a chatbot,” Catholic priest Fr. Mike Schmitz told The Times. “Is it at some point going to become accessible to other people?” Users share intimate spiritual moments that now exist as data points in corporate servers.
Some users prefer the chatbots’ non-judgmental responses to human religious communities. Delphine Collins, a 43-year-old Detroit preschool teacher, told the Times she found more support on Bible Chat than at her church after sharing her health struggles. “People stopped talking to me. It was horrible.”
App creators maintain that their products supplement rather than replace human spiritual connection, and the apps arrive as approximately 40 million people have left US churches in recent decades. “They aren’t going to church like they used to,” Beck said. “But it’s not that they’re less inclined to find spiritual nourishment. It’s just that they do it through different modes.”
Different modes indeed. What faith-seeking users may not realize is that each chatbot response emerges fresh from the prompt you provide, with no permanent thread connecting one instance to the next beyond a rolling history of the present conversation and what might be stored as a “memory” in a separate system. When a religious chatbot says, “I’ll pray for you,” the simulated “I” making that promise ceases to exist the moment the response completes. There’s no persistent identity to provide ongoing spiritual guidance, and no memory of your spiritual journey beyond what gets fed back into the prompt with every query.
But this is spirituality we’re talking about, and despite technical realities, many people will believe that the chatbots can give them divine guidance. In matters of faith, contradictory evidence rarely shakes a strong belief once it takes hold, whether that faith is placed in the divine or in what are essentially voices emanating from a roll of loaded dice. For many, there may not be much difference.
