The mysteries of spirituality have been with us since the dawn of man — could A.I. help us to better think through some of life’s biggest questions? New York Times reporter Eli Tan joins host Krys Boyd to discuss how religious leaders are experimenting with artificial intelligence, asking questions and even generating sermons, and how this might connect with modern audiences searching for answers. His article is, “At the intersection of A.I. and spirituality.”
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Transcript
Krys Boyd [00:00:00] Some people find God in a house of worship. Some find God in nature or in other people. And now in 2025, there are people searching for God in the cloud. That is cloud singular meaning that network of remote servers that enable artificial intelligence from KERA in Dallas. This is Think I’m Krys Boyd. Like workers in many other professions, spiritual leaders have been experimenting with platforms like ChatGPT to help them perform daily tasks, including sermon writing. And now some of the people using this technology for faith are daring to ask, is it possible God can speak through AI? Eli Tan is a reporter for The New York Times covering the technology industry. He wrote about this for The Times in an article headlined “At the Intersection of A.I and Spirituality.” Eli, welcome to Think.
Eli Tan [00:00:52] Thanks so much for having me on.
Krys Boyd [00:00:53] You open your story on Congregation Emanu El in Houston, where this young associate rabbi wanted to deliver a sermon about being a good neighbor in the age of AI. Tell us about his idea.
Eli Tan [00:01:06] Yeah. So he this is actually how I kind of came across the story. He basically, you know, delivers the sermon over the speakers about AI and about being a good neighbor. And then after about a few minutes, you know, he actually walks up to the bomber himself and he says, the voice that you just heard may have sounded like my words, but they weren’t. They were. They were made by an AI. So it turns out that he had basically programed what he calls Rabbi Bot, which is an AI model trained on all of his old sermons, which can itself write and deliver in his own voice sermons that are kind of in his style.
Krys Boyd [00:01:43] Did he have to hire somebody to make Rabbi Bot?
Eli Tan [00:01:47] He did. Yeah. He actually hired a muslim data scientist from the University of Washington. And then they kind of collaborated and created the thing.
Krys Boyd [00:01:55] Why did he want to do this?
Eli Tan [00:01:57] You know, him and also kind of his senior rabbi. Right. There are two people that are just interested in technology in general. And I think, like a lot of, you know, rabbis or pastors who whoever it is kind of around the country, you know, they they have, you know, played around with programs like ChatGPT and just thought to themselves like, oh, I wonder if I can do my work with this as well.
Krys Boyd [00:02:18] I happen to look online at the congregation’s, you know, page of staff and clergy members. It seems like most of the folks who are in charge there are relatively young, maybe recognize that this thing is happening whether anybody wants it to or not.
Eli Tan [00:02:35] Yeah, it’s kind of interesting. Like Rabbi Hayon, Rabbi Fixler, he was the one that made Rabbi Bot, and he’s younger than his senior rabbi. His senior rabbi also used AI, but has had more kind of strict, you know, guardrails for it. Like he never even wanted to experiment with writing a sermon with it. But I think it’s definitely something we’re seeing amongst, you know, younger, younger clergy and younger religious leaders that they’re more willing to kind of experiment with it.
Krys Boyd [00:03:02] This was so interesting. Rabbi Fixler the human showed off the capabilities of his rabbi, but in a manner that reminded me of, like, Steve Jobs on stage introducing the first iPhone, right? He started asking it questions in real time and seeing what the bot would have to say.
Eli Tan [00:03:18] Yeah, he did. He just asked it aloud. And then this booming voice just kind of came over the speakers. As I put it, one of my stories, like almost from the heavens, is what it made me think of, just kind of coming down. But yeah, I hadn’t I hadn’t thought about it being kind of like a tech presentation. That’s a good observation.
Krys Boyd [00:03:33] What sort of answers did the Rabbi bot spit out in the digitized voice of Rabbi Fixler? I mean, were they things that he might have indeed said?
Eli Tan [00:03:43] Yeah, I think so. I think it it, you know, if you were just kind of casually listening, it would definitely pass for an actual sermon that in one case, actually, it kind of invented a quote from a Jewish philosopher. And when I was listening, I didn’t catch that it was an invented quirk. But then in one case, which was kind of, you could say, kind of funny, you’re kind of kind of strange. It actually added in the sermon or trying to add a section about how we should have empathy for the AIs that we create, like we do empathy for other human beings.
Krys Boyd [00:04:14] I mean, this particular bot was trained on the sermons of one particular rabbi, but presumably somebody could use a model like this and feed in content from many different religious leaders. I wonder how a bot would cope with contradictions, which, you know, are pretty vexing, even for lifelong religious scholars.
Eli Tan [00:04:34] Yeah, exactly. I mean, on paper, you’d think it could actually work pretty well because, you know, religions, they’re they’re just entirely based on or mostly based on, on text, right, in Scripture. So something like an AI, what it is really good at is just kind of ingesting a lot of text and a lot of data. So, you know, the, you know, when it was just kind of early on with a lot of these technologies, the questions people were asking. Where? Okay, well, it can’t really do it can’t really write these sermons at the level of an actual human being. So it’s not worth using. And now I think there’s kind of a different question of whether it’s okay if it can write a sermon that is as good as a human or even more profound as a human, then what do we do with it?
Krys Boyd [00:05:14] Yeah, I mean, those are really interesting questions. The idea that we might take guidance for how to live our lives morally from something that is just amalgamating what humans have said over time without a whole lot of context. I mean, it really does kind of take you down the rabbit hole.
Eli Tan [00:05:33] Yeah, it does. And I mean, there’s also kind of this larger theme going on with AI where people, you know, it’s easy to kind of develop a personal relationship where you’re not thinking necessarily, oh, yeah, this thing is just scraping the internet and coming back with an answer. It does kind of feel like you’re talking to a person, because that’s really how these these programs are designed to be, right? They want to want to make you think that you’re talking to a person on the other end. So yeah, definitely a lot of kind of ethical, ethical questions at that. That part of it.
Krys Boyd [00:06:01] What did you learn about how people are using AI with to help with theological research?
Eli Tan [00:06:08] Yeah. So in one example, the senior Rabbi Oren, he was he had kind of given his program like 20 years of his old sermons and all the texts that he had pulled. So basically, like he could, he could go and he could research through anything he’d ever written. Some people do this with different scriptures, right? You can, you know, upload the entire Bible to, to one of these programs. Then you can ask it to pull specific passages that you’d otherwise, you know, have to yourself go through either by memory or just looking in it. That would take a lot of time. But then, like some religious leaders said, you know, you know, having to kind of pass through it manually, like that’s kind of the point. Like that’s where you kind of get in touch with the spirit. And if you have an AI doing it for you, something might be lost along the way.
Krys Boyd [00:07:01] It is interesting, though, the ability to find things from one’s past. I mean, I think about, you know, there may be interviews I remember quite well from 15 years ago, and there may be others that I forget having even done.
Eli Tan [00:07:14] Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I now nowadays, you know, I’m a reporter, so I do a lot of interviews and they all kind of get saved in this, you know, recorded archive. And the program I used just introduced AI and I can kind of ask it to go back and look in and summarize things and whatnot. So it’s definitely something that’s happening. Yeah. Outside of religion. And then when you look inside it’s interesting as well.
Krys Boyd [00:07:36] Are the people using AI for theological research. Are they using like specially designed platforms or are they turning sometimes to things like ChatGPT?
Eli Tan [00:07:48] I think a lot of the time they’re turning to ChatGPT. If they wanted to have a specific research tool that was trained on their own writings. That’s something that they would want to program themselves. But from from my understanding, it seems like a lot of them, they have to they have kind of the ChatGPT or another one called cloud, where it’s just kind of a base model that’s free to the public. And then they also have one that’s specifically trained on their writing that they would use for more particular tasks.
Krys Boyd [00:08:15] Alright, Eli, it’s one thing to quickly find pieces of Scripture that might be relevant to what someone is looking into, but what about the interpretation of that scripture? Like, can AI help with that in a way that human scholars find theologically accurate?
Eli Tan [00:08:32] So that’s really where the controversy comes in. I mean, there’s this larger question which I kind of try to address in the piece, which is, you know, pastors and rabbis asking themselves like, Can God speak through the AI? And if the AI is going to give an interpretation of the Scripture, you know, is there a divinity in that? Of course, like the there’s the issue of hallucinations And you know what if AI just kind of, you know, made something up and but then there’s another question of like, is religion that, you know, just reading and interpreting and coming up with your own ideas or it’s it’s very convoluted. It’s it’s not something there’s a, there’s a direct, clear answer to.
Krys Boyd [00:09:10] I mean, there is so much wrapped up in this question, is it possible that God might speak through AI, I would imagine people feeling some people feeling like an omnipotent God can speak through any technology humans might dream up. It’s a tantalizing thing to consider, though, to the extent that AI generated responses are not directly mediated by a human right. So in some ways, asking AI for the answer to a deep spiritual question is more like consulting a magic eight ball than sitting down with your mom.
Eli Tan [00:09:39] Yeah, the thing is, they these AI, you know, all these everything they’re pulling from it is kind of human. Human created text. Right? I have had I had I talked to a few people that and one of them’s included in the story that basically he had a pastor at his long time church. And then the pastor left and he felt himself kind of like lost. And he was like wanting to be able to talk to that pastor again. So he uploaded all of that pastor sermons to a chat bot. And then when he had kind of times of need, he would ask this chat bot as like a substitute. And I after I published the story, I actually got emails from a ton of people that had done a similar thing, and a lot of them said they actually preferred to talk to the chat bot and the chat bot version of their pastor instead of the real version, which is kind of an it’s like one of those things where it’s like, yeah, if you feel if you feel there is divinity or God in this experience you’re having who is to tell you that there’s not?
Krys Boyd [00:10:31] Are there people who worry about false messages that might come from those same technologies, like messages from the AI that could lead people astray?
Eli Tan [00:10:41] Yeah, absolutely. I think when I talked to the people that were actually building these products, you know, a lot of them talked about, you know, needing to have the right kind of safety requirements and making sure that, you know, if certain keywords were said, you know, it would it would, you know, notify somebody or make sure that the conversation wasn’t going in kind of a dangerous direction at all. But that’s something, something like at large with these giant chat bot companies that that is, you know, if they’re struggling with kind of outside religion as well.
Krys Boyd [00:11:10] I mean, all of us who work in jobs that we imagine require a human touch to do correctly, like to sit back and say, well, my job will never be replaced by I mean, I know there are podcasts that are generated, you know, by AI. So that knocks me out of the running. Are there spiritual leaders worried that that this technology might be coming for their jobs? There might not be so many jobs for human spiritual leaders?
Eli Tan [00:11:38] I don’t think that’s a concern just because if you I mean, if you went to, you know, church and you just pulled everyone there and said, would you rather listen to an AI sermon or a human sermon? I’m pretty sure almost all would say a human sermon, but it does lend itself to, you know, I’m thinking of like a future where, like, there are these AIs that their sermons are, like 100 times more profound than anything a human has ever written. And then we all, you know, show up to these churches and we’d rather listen to the robots or something. I don’t think that’s what’s going to happen.
Krys Boyd [00:12:06] What kinds of ethical questions are cropping up as more religious leaders look to AI to help them do their jobs? Are there people who think it’s just wrong to go for this kind of assistance?
Eli Tan [00:12:22] Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there are plenty of people that think that, you know, anything generated with AI is just not it can’t come from the spirit and that it should be something that only human beings touch. And, you know, there are other people that say, if the pastors and the rabbis aren’t themselves writing the sermons, then how are they ever going to get good at that themselves? And are we not holding back, you know, is this going to be a terrible thing where, you know, all of a sudden nobody can actually write a sermon themselves because they’re relying on AI, which is kind of something you’re seeing and, you know, childhood education and high school education, where you have people that, you know, high schoolers that can’t read and write because they’re so used to using ChatGPT. So I would say, yeah, those are two concerns. Definitely.
Krys Boyd [00:13:03] Yeah it is. The idea of gaining skills is really interesting because, you know, we may not be learning as we use AI more and more, but the AI is learning based on the things we ask it.
Eli Tan [00:13:14] Yeah, absolutely. And there are there are other ways people are using it. Now. It’s not just sermon writing like in one case, there’s an app where if you’re delivering a sermon online, for instance, you can broadcast it out and it will in real time translate your words into other languages. And I’ve met pastors that basically have been doing this to like, gain these international audiences because they can, you know, broadcast their live sermon out in fluent Korean or whatever it is. So in that way, you know, it almost feels like we’re talking about the invention of the radio or the television or something where maybe A.I can make religion more accessible.
Krys Boyd [00:13:52] Eli, when people are using AI to help with scholarly research about theology or religion, I mean, are these questions fundamentally different than the questions they might pose, the help they might ask from, say, a graduate student research assistant?
Eli Tan [00:14:13] One of the pastors in the story actually compared the AI to a seminary student who was in his first week. So saying that, you know, it’s not like they can do a lot of things, but they can do, you know, work that would take, you know, maybe hours of somebody parsing through a book. They can kind of do it instantly. And it might not be something that gets you a really profound analysis, but it’s something that can kind of almost read the entirety of a bunch of scriptures just instantaneously, which in itself is very helpful.
Krys Boyd [00:14:43] Yeah. And that speaks to maybe the learning curve with how to best apply this technology, right? Like as people start to experiment with its use for religious purposes, maybe they’ll realize, like that sort of thing, that the searching for something is really useful, maybe not so useful to give you an interpretation of some ancient passage that is the subject of discrepancy.
Eli Tan [00:15:07] Yeah, absolutely. I had one pastor that compared AI to a bionic arm that could basically supercharge his work and just make everything more efficient, even if he was still the one that was doing the writing and all that. Which I think is something that is, is probably most likely it’s how people start using this technology as opposed to being completely replaced by it.
Krys Boyd [00:15:27] To go back to what you said a few minutes ago about A.I. being used to translate sermons and other materials into different languages. I mean, obviously, this could be really useful to communities where members of the congregation might be fluent in other languages than English. Years ago, when I was a reporter on the on the Mexican border, a story came up about this attack that had happened just south of the border. I wonder if there are concerns that any kind of translations for something as important to people as their faith might guess wrong at the key phrase or idea trying to be expressed?
Eli Tan [00:16:22] Yeah, I haven’t really thought about that, but I guess that could be kind of a concern. Personally, I don’t know. I you know, I’ve, I’ve never worshiped in a language that is not English and tried to translate it beyond, you know, like local, like Spanish congregations. But I don’t know, I could I could imagine that just, you know, if you’re someone that has like a pastor that you really like or, you know, and you’re abroad and you’re trying to, you know, understand what they’re saying and you have to, like, do all of these steps where you might have to, like, download a video and then get the transcript and then, you know, translate it. That would be much harder than just having it kind of translated in real time, even if maybe all of the the language didn’t, didn’t carry over.
Krys Boyd [00:17:05] Going back to this idea of an AI generated sermon, I mean, it might sound preposterous to people who show up for religious services and just expect a kind of a purpose written sermon. But not everybody knows this. Religious leaders have long been able to draw on books of pre-written sermons, right? Or at least books of outlines and ideas for inspiration. It’s a common tool.
Eli Tan [00:17:28] Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I had I had multiple clergy that compared it to the invention of the printing press, where now all of a sudden, you know, you have this tool and it’s not like the tool is. It’s not like when, you know, books were invented, it took away from religion. If anything, you know, it, it was really important and, you know, it was able to kind of spread the word of God in a way that it wasn’t before. Yeah. But I’m I’m not sure if the concurrent comparison that is completely apt. But yeah, I think that that really comes down to it. Like, is it is it a tool or is it kind of the religion itself?
Krys Boyd [00:18:05] We should step back here for a moment and acknowledge that pretty much every new communication technology over time has been pretty quickly used in some way in service to religion. You mentioned the printing press. That’s a huge example. What about things like radio and television? How did they change the nature of religious communication and how people interacted with their faith?
Eli Tan [00:18:30] Yeah. Well, when you had the radio, you know, in the in the 1920s and then the television sets in in the 50s, and then the next big one would be the internet in the 90s. I think what it did was it allowed, you know, local local preachers to basically become national preachers, where all of a sudden, if you’re speaking, you know, the Word of God, it’s no longer just in whatever, you know, whatever room or church or, you know, synagogue you’re in. But now all of a sudden you can kind of send this message over the airwaves and in some cases, right? It created, you know, this idea of like televangelism and, you know, it changed the way people preach because all of a sudden they did have these big audiences. I think like the distinction right. With I would be like went, you know, when the radio was invented, it’s not like the radio was ever telling pastors to include in its in its sermons about how we should care for the radio or whatever, like, I think there’s kind of a one level, one level added here where there’s almost like a sentience to it. But yeah, these communication tools, I mean, they’ve always changed the way people worship.
Krys Boyd [00:19:40] Some spiritual leaders have been interested in using this technology, maybe just to appeal to different kinds of people than typically show up for a service. What did Pastor Jake Cooper try? He’s an Austin, which people may know is a is a real tech hub these days.
Eli Tan [00:19:56] Yeah. So he he had an idea like other people. And so he was going to do an entire service created with ChatGPT. He was going to write the sermon with ChatGPT. He was going to write the children’s program. He was going to write a few hymns. And he did it. He he put it all together. And then he decided to market it with these posters of robots kind of around the neighborhood and say, you know, come to the AI sermon. And what he found, you know, is that, like new people actually show he called them gamer types, like, you know, kind of young techie people actually showed up to his, you know, his service that Sunday. And they had never been before. And they came because they were interested in coming to the AI sermon. So, yeah, that that’s the type of thing, you know, you have some some religious leaders argue like, oh, if we want to kind of appeal to these young audiences, maybe we should meet them where they are and kind of, you know, incorporate tech in a way that would be interesting to them.
Krys Boyd [00:20:52] So I would imagine some people find this really tantalizing, and the idea of creatively using AI to draw people into religious communities certainly seems like something that might appeal. I’m thinking of my mom, who is a pretty traditional Catholic, and she would be appalled. Like, to her, this is sacrilege. I mean, how much pushback are people getting when they try to use these things?
Eli Tan [00:21:17] Most of the people I’ve talked to, they’re using them in places that it’s already kind of acceptable, like particularly around where I live in San Francisco, around Silicon Valley, where everyone’s very techie and everyone loves AI or not, loves it, you know, is familiar with AI and some of these churches, they even have like working groups and Bible studies for people that are in tech. I’m not sure how well it would play over in other places. It kind of reminds me of like, you know, when, you know, more Christian churches started, you know, they started incorporating, like, folk music into the, you know, the services and the older generations, you know, hated it and said, get the guitar out of here. So I think that, you know, you’re always going to have like older generations wanting to do it their way and then younger generations wanting to do it their way. So I kind of see it as like a similar thing to that.
Krys Boyd [00:22:04] That’s such a good example because now like, like a, like a folk service might even strike us as old fashioned, whereas there was a time when that felt like a step too far for some folks.
Eli Tan [00:22:16] Yeah, absolutely.
Krys Boyd [00:22:17] Is there evidence that people, not religious leaders, just people who are interested in religion, are using chat bots to ask their spiritual questions? Just general chat bots?
Eli Tan [00:22:30] Yeah, absolutely. This is definitely something that’s happening. Yeah, I’ve I’ve heard it from, you know, some people I talked to from from readers that have emailed me. Yeah. They’re I mean, you know, in a larger way. Right. People are. Some people are dating chat bots. Some people are, you know, becoming friends with them. Some people are, you know, finding that this kind of anonymous chat bot is really easy to confide, personal, you know, things to in a way that talking to a human being is not an, you know, that definitely extends to religion too.
Krys Boyd [00:22:58] So I logged into ChatGPT today and I did two separate queries. One was give me proof that God is real, and the other one was give me proof that God is not real. The answers were fairly predictable and banal, based on the ways people tend to talk about these things. I have to imagine, though, there might be times when people go in earnest to one of these platforms seeking guidance, and then receive advice that their own faith tradition would not endorse.
Eli Tan [00:23:28] Oh, absolutely. I think the interfaith aspect of it is super interesting. I hadn’t talked to people that that brought up the idea of, okay, what if you, you know, it’s not just Christian scripture or Jewish scripture or Muslim scripture, like, what if you just combine them all together and then you made like this non-denominational, like chat bot that was like all knowing and could pull for and it could be like, oh yeah, you know, it’s it’s Buddhist, it’s Muslim, it’s everything. And then you could ask that chatbot questions like, how would that respond differently than like the, you know, the New Testament chat bot or whatever, which is kind of fascinating. I don’t know, I think that’s like kind of creepy and. Yeah, it’s definitely something, right, that you just wouldn’t be able to kind of do without that technology.
Krys Boyd [00:24:08] I can imagine that being really exciting for, you know, there are there are people who are just seekers, right? And they try different religions to see which one might feel right. It would be fascinating to be able to just have at your fingertips with the the click of a mouse. Different answers from different traditions.
Eli Tan [00:24:26] Yeah, completely. And I honestly would wonder if like, you know, in the future we’d have like new religions where, you know, it’s found it’s so easy to for I to combine a few into one that people just decide that that one’s, you know, better for them.
Krys Boyd [00:24:39] Of course. You know, we should also say that people can follow the same essential spiritual tradition and belong to denominations with very distinct ideas about things. Right? The answer to a muslim question might be very different, depending on whether somebody follows Sunni or Shia or Sufi tradition or something else. How much are spiritual leaders worried that I might not pick up on the distinctions, the way they would like I to pick up on the distinctions?
Eli Tan [00:25:08] Yeah, it’s definitely something religious leaders think about, and a lot of them like Christian churches in particular. There are quite a few that have these chat bots on their websites that are trained specifically on either like, you know, the Bible or they’re trained on like that church is like a, an archive of that, the church’s YouTube sermons, so that like, whatever the chat bot is saying is like it’s not control, but like it’s pulling from a data set that is very specific to the way that that church kind of operates in the types of sermons that go on there. And I can see that, you know, being true for for other religions as well, if that’s the type of thing they embraced.
Krys Boyd [00:25:48] What has Pope Francis had to say about AI, if anything.
Eli Tan [00:25:50] He actually talks about I pretty regularly it like comes up in, you know, these kind of, you know, addresses he gives and the for my for the purposes of my story, I think the one thing we found was that he, he said, you know, is as advanced as the technology gets, you know, the human spirit can never really be replaced. But also it’s I don’t think anyone’s had a chance to ask him kind of the, the nitty gritty details like, like we’re talking about here.
Krys Boyd [00:26:21] Is there a lot of discussion as far as you’ve been able to ascertain about AI’s potential effects on spirituality happening among the top leadership of most religious denominations?
Eli Tan [00:26:33] You know, I’m not sure how much they’re thinking about it. I know I’ve talked to some people that had mentioned like, oh yeah, you know, church attendance is going down and a lot of the higher up kind of leaders see I as one potential thing that they think could maybe get young people into church. And a lot of them talked about data about, you know, young kind of Gen Z is actually more spiritual than in other generations. And maybe the combination of being spiritual and tech savvy, like, that’s that’s another thing that that I could be helpful for. But yeah, I’m not really privy to the those kind of details and what they’re talking about at the really high levels.
Krys Boyd [00:27:12] Religion is so interesting because it can absolutely bring people together and cause them to be sort of self-sacrificing and consider others. It can also be a source of pretty significant tribalism and conflict. We have many centuries of histories of this. Are there concerns that I could be used to reinforce religious biases rather than challenge them?
Eli Tan [00:27:38] That’s an interesting question. I don’t know if I’ve really spent much time thinking about that. I mean, as it stands, I think, you know, if you were to, I guess you’d have to say, you know, if you asked ChatGPT a contentious religious question and, you know, you could see what what kind of religion it’s pulling from or what ideas and forcing. But as of now, I it’s not like, you know, these companies, these AI companies are, are like super, you know, one religion or the other. There is the goal to kind of spread a certain religion. I don’t think it’s something that they’re really thinking about top of mind. But there’s, you know, there was larger questions about like, we have this new Chinese chatbot called Deepseek. And one of the things is that, you know, it’s it’s heavily censored, and it has kind of an agenda in terms of when it talks about China. And I guess you could see something similar happening with religion. But right now, I don’t think that’s a huge concern for people.
Krys Boyd [00:28:32] How different is the experience of using Deepseek from using ChatGPT, which may be more familiar to people listening.
Eli Tan [00:28:40] Yeah. So one of the differences would be like if you ask it, you know, certain parts of Chinese history that the, you know, the Chinese Communist Party wouldn’t want you to know, and it will just tell you, you know, it can’t talk about that. If you ask it to, you know, say, criticize the Chinese government, that’s not something it can it can talk about. Or you have, you know, touchy political, geopolitical questions about Taiwan or something. It’s not going to answer. So just the idea that you can kind of these implicit biases from its creator or the government of its creator kind of coming through and just the ways you use it in your everyday life.
Krys Boyd [00:29:14] I don’t want to get too far afield on this, but it’s interesting to think about Deepseek, because for people who are not particularly interested in Chinese politics, it seems like a real challenger to US based AI platforms which are not open source, which are, you know, harder to access, may cost money. How worried are people about this in Silicon Valley?
Eli Tan [00:29:41] You know, I think that people were really worried when it came out, whatever that was a couple of weeks ago. Definitely seems like the the fear has died down a little bit. I mean, at the end of the day, you know, an open source model that just works more efficiently, right? It it does it kind of commoditize the, the I raised a little bit, but I think, you know, ultimately, like all the AI models are going to be trying to, to become more efficient and, you know, take less, less money and resources to operate. So in the end, yeah, I’m not really sure where it’s headed.
Krys Boyd [00:30:16] Eli, are there like particular faith traditions that you’ve noted that at the moment are especially interested in AI or are in fact trying to just keep it out of the hands of their leaders? Do you do you have a sense of that?
Eli Tan [00:30:31] From my sense, it seems like there are more kind of Christians that are really, really proponents of AI in terms of it, like taking over a lot of the human functions with most of the rabbis. And, and I’m speaking, you know, just however many dozen people I’ve talked to. Right. But most of the rabbis I talked to, you know, sort more as this kind of tool. And I definitely talked to a lot of like, Christian entrepreneurs that they really do believe that, like, you know, the AI will replace human beings in some matter of time.
Krys Boyd [00:31:03] Christian entrepreneurs, this is another interesting point. You know, whether these sites might be set up to make a profit. But the other question is, is this so different than a store that sells prayer beads or yamaka or Bibles or whatever the case may be?
Eli Tan [00:31:19] Yeah, that is an interesting question. I think everyone kind of has to answer that for themselves. I mean, part of the story is that, you know, as as more religious leaders use AI, there is this entire industry that’s kind of sprang up of these tools and services and websites and platforms. But, you know, in my in my experience talking with, you know, a lot of these entrepreneurs, they, they, you know, was it like they were trying to kind of take advantage of pastors and just, you know, sell them on whatever it was? But there definitely was this idea of like, you know, yeah, you’re in Silicon Valley. This is what we do. We build products, we build things. Why wouldn’t we? We build these things for our religious communities as well.
Krys Boyd [00:31:59] As a group, just based on your observations and your reporting, do you know how religious tech developers tend to be compared with other people in other professions? Like, are they more likely than average to lean toward agnosticism or atheism?
Eli Tan [00:32:14] Yeah, it’s kind of an interesting question. I mean, I think that the the kind of stereotype of Silicon Valley tech developer is that they are they are not religious at all. I remember there was a there’s a TV show called Silicon Valley a few years back, and there was one of the CEOs he got, he got outed as a Christian. And it was a he was a gay man. And but he wasn’t being out of it for being gay. He was being added for being Christian. Because it was you know, I’ve seen it as a crazy thing, kind of in Silicon Valley. But honestly, I think a lot of that kind of gets overplayed. Like there are plenty of people, whether it’s like in San Francisco or in Silicon Valley, that are religious.
Krys Boyd [00:32:51] How did you find people who were using this? Did you, like, do a search for churches and synagogues and other faith communities that said that they had these special services? Like, I’m just really curious about? You can’t just cold call every religious institution.
Eli Tan [00:33:10] Yeah, exactly. I mean, one of the things I found this Facebook group called Church Leaders using AI or something like that, and it was basically this, this group, and it was very active. I mean, thousands of people like tons of posts every day of people using, you know, AI image generators to recreate biblical scenes or, you know, discussing kind of the latest updates to these models. And from that, I kind of picked out some people I thought were interesting or were more kind of leaders of the group. And I talked to them. The other thing. Yeah, just just kind of looking around the internet and trying to find, you know, for each religion, you know, different people that had experimented with this stuff. Being in being in San Francisco. You know, I did take a few just in-person trips to, to churches around my neighborhood and around Silicon Valley and just kind of just ask people what they thought and if they knew of anybody in particular that was like, you know, pretty thoughtful about this stuff. And then that that’s what kind of led me to, to finding some of the religious leaders in the story.
Krys Boyd [00:34:10] I know a number of people whose jobs involve writing, not journalists, but people in other professions, and some who use things like ChatGPT as a tool. But, you know, talk about it openly and say it just really helps and saves time. Others maybe see it as kind of cheating and are a little bit less willing to talk about this. Did you come across people who didn’t really want to discuss how much they use AI in their sermon writing or whatever?
Eli Tan [00:34:39] Yeah, absolutely. I mean, for all the people in the story that they were like pretty open about, like experimenting with it and like the theological questions. There were a lot of people that just talked to me about, like, you know, like a Christian pastor who’s like, yeah, Saturday night I’m sitting at my desk and I just used it as like a way to, you know, save time, basically almost like cheating on the test. Right? Or it’s like, yeah, I’m just I’ve just procrastinated and it’s this, this tool, it’s like, not good for me. Or that I would never tell, you know, my, you know, congregants that I use this. But I think that’s the fear. You know, just like, you know, a student might, you know, use ChatGPT on an essay or something like, yeah, it’s I bet there are plenty of pastors that, you know, every once in a while are doing it, doing it like that, too.
Krys Boyd [00:35:25] Would you ever go to ChatGPT with a spiritual question?
Eli Tan [00:35:32] I don’t think so. No, I mean, some of these chat bots on these, on these churches websites, you know, they they prompt you to ask some pretty deep questions, like one of them in the story mentions, like, the first question is, you know, what time are the services for this church. And then the second question is, how does God discern the will for my life?
Krys Boyd [00:35:54] Gets deep fast.
Eli Tan [00:35:57] Yeah it does. And I mean, I tried it like, hey, you know, I ask these chat all sorts of questions like that. But I was I never felt personally very moved by any of the answers. Yeah. I guess that’s one of those things where. And I went to a Lutheran college. I mean, I’ve spent plenty of times, you know, and in church or, you know, at chapel, but I do think that there’s really some stuff like that. There’s really not a replacement for just talking to another human being.
Krys Boyd [00:36:27] Or just thinking deeply yourself. I mean, sometimes, you know, these answers are hard one, because they really only work for us if we have wrestled with them. It you know, it’s the bumper sticker version that I might present just may not feel authentic to us.
Eli Tan [00:36:47] Yeah. And also, I think some of these questions are kind of unanswerable already, right? Yeah. Like I remember when one of the questions on this website was like, you know why? If God exists, why is there suffering in the world? And it’s like, that’s not something anybody I’ve ever talked to has had a good answer for. Right? So yeah, it’s, you know, maybe one day these programs, they get so good that all of a sudden they break through and they’re coming up with the stuff. But a lot of it I think is just yeah, like you said, it’s like something we have to kind of wrestle with ourselves.
Krys Boyd [00:37:14] I think it’s interesting to think about how much human generated what today is human generated content in general, whether this is about spirituality or art or anything else, is probably already being shaped by AI without the knowledge of most of us who are consuming this content.
Eli Tan [00:37:33] Yeah, completely. I think AI is happening, you know, behind the scenes with a lot of stuff. And it’s interesting, you know, people like talking to religious leaders. You know, they talk about the backlash and it’s like we, you know, people are really immersed AI in some context. But, you know, when you’re doing a Google search or whatever it is, an AI is working behind the scenes to help you. It’s not like people are as averse to that. So I think that’s just going to be one of those questions here. Like as we, you know, in the next 5 to 10 years, like what are we comfortable with and what aren’t we comfortable with? Because obviously AI is going to be around like in plenty of ways.
Krys Boyd [00:38:11] What kind of laws do you think, as a journalist covering this industry might be appropriate around the use of AI? And like, how hard is it to put guardrails up without hindering free speech?
Eli Tan [00:38:28] I mean, I think that the main concern that I see right now is just the the idea of like the intellectual property and the fact that these AI programs are, you know, scraping all of the available data on the web. And then in some cases, like working to replace the people that kind of provided it, the data in the beginning, like, you know, and for journalists, for instance. Right. You know, you can you can have these bots that are like able to write stories in the styles of certain journalists. And then it’s like you hear that, you know, some newspapers all of a sudden are like using AI to help with their stories and laying off actual human beings. So I don’t know how we’re going to regulate that. Don’t if we’re going to be able to say, yeah, you’re not allowed to, you know, lay off a person or replace them with an AI or something. But I do think, you know, if if a human being creates something, it should it should feel kind of illegal for them to be then replaced by the very thing that they’re training. I don’t know, that’s that’s just how I feel about it.
Krys Boyd [00:39:24] I feel like I can still tell the difference online, at least between like human generated content and AI generated content, but I wonder how long that will be true.
Eli Tan [00:39:36] Yeah, I do too. I know that you know, all the all the data online. It’s all kind of been scraped. There’s like a kind of a finite amount. So now the big thing is that they’re, they’re having AI’s create their own, you know, data to, to train themselves on. So yeah, I don’t I don’t know how helpful it’ll be, but yeah. So it was something to watch.
Krys Boyd [00:39:56] The other question about the use of AI for spiritual purposes is whether anything we experience, like through a computer, will ever move us emotionally.
Eli Tan [00:40:12] Yeah, that’s one of those things I really am interested in that, because I think, I think it is possible for people to be moved emotionally, and anything like that’s what makes it so interesting. It’s not that it can, that I can just kind of like create something that like, appears to be like a human made its create something that can actually like, you know, impact us and it is emotional. And I don’t think, you know, I think the problem with that is like, if you have something that’s like deceptive or someone thinks it’s it’s a human being, but that’s not. But I mean, the fact that you can have like, you know, I’ve always been interested, like when I comes up with these poems or short stories and a lot of the time they’re terrible. But every once in a while you’ll hear one and it’s like, oh, wow, that’s actually really good. Like somehow it actually like, you know, got it some kind of like, you know, deeper, deeper thing with their own humanity. That’s really impressive. But then, of course, that’s where it gets into maybe that more black mirror territory where. Yeah. What does it say that when, when the robots can, can mimic humans to that extent?
Krys Boyd [00:41:17] Yeah, I’ve been surprised, especially with visual art. I mean, as you mentioned, a lot of it is really terrible, but sometimes AI will generate images, not the kind that are then manipulated or, you know, created by queries from an actual artist, but, you know, really simple things. And there some of them are beautiful.
Eli Tan [00:41:35] Yeah. Every once my thing is like, why are we having the eyes do the things that human beings like to do? Why are we having them right and do art? Like are we are we moving towards this dystopian future where the AIs are like creating like movies and books and art and we’re all just like working in, you know, fulfillment factories or something
Krys Boyd [00:41:56] That is such as interesting point.
Eli Tan [00:41:58] We should be using the AI. Yeah, to do the things we don’t want to do. So we have more time to do art instead. We’re like having it, you know, do all the fun stuff. Just seems kind of backwards to me.
Krys Boyd [00:42:06] Yeah. And I think that, you know, that contradiction definitely plays out when you when it comes to religion, like, I mean, some people maybe as kids are, are required to attend religious services they don’t have interest in later. But for the most part, this is something that we’re supposed to want to do voluntarily. Like the shortcuts don’t really make sense. But humans love shortcuts.
Eli Tan [00:42:30] Yeah, I had someone email me that said, yeah, I’ll send my AI to to church so that it can transcribe the sermon, and then I’ll stay home and I’ll watch football. Which I thought was pretty funny, but yeah, I don’t know. It’s. Yeah, yeah. It’s interesting.
Krys Boyd [00:42:44] The final thing and you touched on this briefly, one clear benefit people might see in turning to AI with spiritual questions is anonymity, right. Like your particular religious leader might be incredibly sensitive. And yet there are things we might wonder about that are hard to talk with another human about.
Eli Tan [00:43:05] Yeah, completely. Almost like its own kind of confessional context where, you know, and I think that’s one reason why, like, people can develop like interesting relationships with chatbots just because they feel like it is something that’s just between them. And yeah, I definitely think you see that in religion. And there’s some kind of there’s a comfortability to, to talking to kind of an entity that that is kind of anonymous in that way.
Krys Boyd [00:43:33] Have you ever longed for an Eli bot to help you with your reporting and writing?
Eli Tan [00:43:38] Well, actually, I wrote a this is kind of almost a companion piece to the religion story about AI dating where I cloned myself as an I, I call them Eli GPT and then I had my my AI clone date other AI clones and then kind of relay the the results back to me. So that’s probably the closest I’ve had in terms of cloning myself as an AI, I, I personally, I love writing to, I know I would never, I would never use AI to write my stories. It’s just something that feels more like a vocation to me. So I would never want to replace it. But yeah, that’s that’s how I feel about it.
Krys Boyd [00:44:15] How successful was Eli GPT compared to Eli Tan?
Eli Tan [00:44:19] People should go read the story. I, I even did a whole Modern Love podcast episode about it, but not that successful, unfortunately. But the thing that the GPT could do was that it could date hundreds of people a day, and it could go on hundreds of first dates a day, whereas Eli, the human being, you know, that’s that’s not something I can do. I can probably go on one. So yeah, that was that was the big difference.
Krys Boyd [00:44:43] Eli Tan is a reporter for the New York Times covering the technology industry from San Francisco. He wrote the times article titled “At the Intersection of AI and spirituality.” Eli, thank you for the conversation.
Eli Tan [00:44:55] Thanks so much for having me on.
Krys Boyd [00:44:57] Thank is distributed by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. You can find us on Facebook and Instagram and listen to our podcast. Anywhere you get podcast, just search for KERA. Think the website is think.kera.org. You can sign up for our free weekly newsletter there and learn about upcoming shows. Again, I’m Krys Boyd. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.
