Mark Honeychurch

A recent article, written by Anné Verhoef and published on The Conversation, attempted to analyse five popular Large Language Models that have been trained to emulate Jesus. These LLMs are marketed to Christians as a tool to help them in their daily lives, and although some of them require accounts to be able to use them, a couple of them let me try them out with no strings attached:

One of them even had a list of popular questions, which was somewhat telling – apparently the main concerns Christians today have are about pornography, veganism and crypto!

I was not surprised when I went looking for more information about the author of the article, Anné Verhoef, to find out that he’s an ordained pastor in the Dutch Reformed Church. The reason I say I wasn’t surprised is because Anné had some interesting things to say about these chatbots that are pretending to be Jesus. 

“AI Jesus chatbots have the potential to become a powerful tool of ruthless manipulation by the companies behind them. It will be difficult to hold them accountable, and they may become super rich in the process.”

This immediately struck me as being brazenly ironic – I’d argue that a fair critique of religion is that it’s also “a powerful tool of ruthless manipulation”, and that there’s a real risk with religious groups that “it will be difficult to hold them accountable and they may become super rich”. In fact, it seems that it’s already pretty hard to hold many religious institutions around the world accountable, due to their large followings, systemic political influence and deep pockets.

Anné goes on to say:

“Over time, the theology of the chatbots will be adjusted by the algorithm in such a way that it’s the most popular theology deployed, and not a theology that comes from a certain church tradition or seeks to be based on the Bible.”

Again, it could be argued that religious beliefs have also gone through the filtering process that Anné claims these AI bots are going to be subjected to. Over the last few thousand years the religious ideas that haven’t managed to maintain their popularity have died out, whilst the ones that have found more fertile ground have flourished. So the religions that are thriving now include ones that have adjusted themselves to attract members, like the rock star services of evangelical American Christianity. Conversely, there are groups like the Shakers who have all but died out, due in large part to their insistence on members being celibate. And a church that doesn’t have children to indoctrinate is going to find it hard to maintain its numbers without a lot of proselytizing. Obviously there are also other factors involved in religions either thriving or dying out, but it seems that popularity would be a large factor in a religion’s long-term survival or decline.

If I was able to say one thing to Anné, I would want to remind him of a popular Bible verse, Matthew 7:5, where Jesus supposedly said during his Sermon on the Mount:

You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.