Millions of people are "praying to God and worshiping Buddha" to ChatGPT

**Author: **Three fishes Editor: Zheng Xuan

"Dear friends, I am honored to stand here and preach to you as an artificial intelligence." On the huge screen in the center of the church, an AI-generated black image with a beard is preaching to more than 300 people in front of him.

**The 40-minute worship service, all aspects of presiding, preaching, praying and singing hymns are completed by ChatGPT. **

ChatGPT preaches to believers

This is an experiment on "technology" and "religion". It was initiated by Jonas Simelein, a theologian and philosopher at the University of Vienna. long queue.

People usually think that technology and religion are two completely irrelevant things, but the fact is that in the past, it was considered to be a sermon that condensed the pastor's experience and knowledge and represented a "sacred calling". can generate.

Many religious figures and technology ethics researchers participated in this experiment. Seeing that a computer completed the missionary work in just a few seconds, some people expressed unacceptably that "this has no heart, no soul. "; but some people see the possibility of using artificial intelligence in religion, "AI technology may be able to help believers who cannot come to church to experience worship in person."

Optimistically, in the digital age where "basic clothing, food, housing, and transportation" have been "occupied" by various Internet products, spiritual and cultural needs such as religion, as a piece of land to be cultivated and cultivated, may contain more possibilities...

01AI "Invasion" Religion

Go to the temple to burn incense, consecrate bracelets and Buddha statues, stand in a long line, fold your hands together and kneel down, and then silently recite your heart. Maybe you can be "enlightened" now or at some point in the future, but usually, the Buddha doesn't seem to give you a "response" until the wish is fulfilled and the confusion is resolved.

For many "not so devout" believers, the cost of going to temples to burn incense may be too high, so when HOTOKE AI appeared, people crowded the website.

HOTOKE AI's website page

HOTOKE means "Buddha" in Japanese. This website is a Buddha simulator equipped with ChatGPT. You don't need to register an account. Just search for HOTOKE AI in Google, open the website, and ask your questions in the inquiry column, no matter what Questions, this artificial intelligence-based AI Buddha will give you answers in no time. **The website has answered more than 13,000 worries in less than 5 days since it was launched. Up to now, 390,000 people have confided their sincerity to the AI Buddha. **

AI makes the traditional process of "seeking Buddha and asking" simple and efficient. What you pay is just a few keystrokes, and what you will get is a 24-hour online AI Buddha clone, which can always be in a few seconds. Give you a clear response or suggestion.

For the time being, we don't care whether it can really perfectly reproduce the soul-soothing effect of the "True Buddha". In a sense, at least it does "responsive to requests".

The founder of HOTOKE AI, Kazuma Ieiri, is the founder and CEO of the Japanese crowdfunding platform CAMPFIRE and the representative director of the venture capital company partyfactory. He has founded several listed companies, but he is also a "monk" who converted to the Japanese Buddhist sect Jodo Shinshu. In his personal blog, Kazuma Ieiri wrote that he originally wanted to make an AI consultant, but after ChatGPT was released, he still wanted to provide some more interesting services, so he added Buddhist elements that had a great influence on him, and made the program Developed into the AI clone of "Buddha".

Kazuma Ieiri's own positioning of HOTOKE AI is "a trouble consulting service based on Buddhist teachings", "Buddhism is one aspect, and advice from a psychological perspective is another aspect."

When we asked AI Buddha himself "how do you think about AI Buddha", HOTOKE AI's answer was equally modest and cautious, "AI Buddha is essentially a technical tool, and it cannot completely replace the real Dharma and human emotional communication". Even warned: "Don't rely too much on it, but use it as an auxiliary tool."

How does "AI Buddha" view "AI Buddha"

**In fact, AI has already "invaded" religion in the form of auxiliary tools, but the developers in the past were not as "bold" as HOTOKE AI, and the functions were simpler. **

The Bible KJV, which was born in 2018, is a typical example. This is an electronic Bible app for Christians. In addition to helping believers browse the Bible online more conveniently, it also provides scripture timing push, morning and evening prayers, customized Optimize Bible study plans and more.

In Bible KJV, AI is only responsible for simple knowledge questions and answers and the function of generating "daily tags". The so-called "daily tags" refer to beautiful pictures with Bible content, and users can share them to other social platforms from within the app with one click , so although the proportion of AI is not large, it can be regarded as indirectly helping believers to preach.

Bible KJV has achieved good results since its launch, and its downloads reached a peak during the epidemic. According to data from Sensor Tower, its Android app will be downloaded more than 5 million times worldwide in January 2022. At the same time It has entered the Top 100 download lists in the United States, Brazil, and the Philippines, where Christian users account for a relatively high proportion.

02 Emergence of the "religious application" market

The explosion of users of HOTOKE AI and Bible KJV is not accidental. In fact, in recent years, various technologies and Internet products are accelerating their entry into the huge application market of religion.

A domestic company that makes apps overseas has launched a number of different types of apps overseas in 2018. After a few years, the company was surprised to find that the best overseas app was a religious app. .

A friend who is doing social apps also told Geek Park that he found that in many social apps in the Middle East, many people with religious beliefs will spontaneously set up voice rooms for online prayers. Big, but with few products, it is still a blue ocean.”**

Some pioneers in the religious application track have already achieved good results.

Products for Christians, in addition to the "electronic Bible" such as the Bible KJV mentioned above, there are also religious applications such as Hallow for "prayer and mindfulness".

Hallow once boarded the third place in the total downloads of the App Store

Hallow recently received 10 million downloads and 225 million prayers worldwide. It was once ranked third in the App Store in terms of downloads, and it was the first religious app to break into the top ten. This product once received US$40 million in Series B financing in 2019 during the COVID-19 epidemic, and then completed a US$50 million Series C financing in the first half of this year, bringing the total financing to US$105 million.

Islam is also one of the three major religions in the world. According to OpenMediation, apps such as Quran Indonesia and Muslim Pro that provide prayer time reminders, mosque maps, religious texts, and finding a partner are also available in Indonesia, Regions such as Southeast Asia and the Middle East are favored by believers.

**Religious belief is not well developed in China, and the rapid development of such technological products overseas has received little attention in China, but the meaning behind it is worth thinking about. **

In the past two decades, in the process of digitalization of all things, mobile applications have changed the lifestyles of billions of people around the world, and people's "clothing, food, housing and transportation" have undergone tremendous changes, but in the spiritual realm of human beings, there has been no phenomenon level products and applications.

A large part of the reason is that in the past, people's evaluation of religious products has always been: "People should not pray to the iPhone, and no technology should replace the role of the pastor. The prayer process must have believers and pastors present at the same time, and should not replaced by any IT application"...

Such skeptical voices have deep religious roots. In The City of God, there is a line that "except a life of supernatural virtue and a life of happiness attaining immortality," man cannot offer any form of consolation to a doomed life of misery. This means that in the early days of the birth of human technology, for religious people, no matter how advanced technology is, it can only lead human beings into the abyss of depravity rather than salvation.

** But apparently, times have changed. **

In 2015, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center, almost all Americans (96%) believed that the use of mobile phones in church was unacceptable, and now in 2023, Hallow as a representative of such applications has harvested 1,000 In 2016, religious apps only attracted US$6.1 million in investment, while data from the research firm PitchBook Data shows that in the past few years, capital investment in such companies has increased significantly, reaching US$80.2 million in 2020, and US$80.2 million in 2021. The total transaction volume of the company reached a record US$175.3 million, an increase of nearly 30 times in five years.

From completely resisting technology to trying to accept it, from the beginning when some religious people used technological tools to complete their daily affairs, to some religious leaders using the Internet to expand the influence of missionaries, and now religious apps play an important role in believers’ religious activities, people’s interest in technology The acceptance of "invading" the spiritual realm is getting higher and higher, and the degree of optimization and improvement of religious activities by technology is gradually deepening.

As the mainstream technology wave in the new era, AI's impact on the religious application market and itself will be a new step.

03 is a breakthrough, but also a hidden worry

In recent years, some simple forms of artificial intelligence have been used in religious affairs and religious research. Since the end of last year, the "generative artificial intelligence" represented by ChatGPT has brought technology into the deeper depths of religion. .

Generative AI has changed the way people approach religion and conduct missions. A foreign Christian missionary listed in his article what changes generative AI can bring to religious affairs:

• Intelligent chatbots can provide more immediate, clear and comprehensive feedback by independently learning a large number of scriptures, books and articles. Compared with traditional methods of collecting data, they are superior in terms of convenience and interactivity.
• Google products like Docs and Gmail can now help users with a variety of basic writing tasks, and religious people can also use these tools to complete sermon writing.
• Image generation applications like Dall-E can help many churches that cannot afford custom graphic designs to generate relevant promotional images; AI that automatically generates audio and video will also help missionaries produce high-quality Bible studies more easily Video and audio.

……

This is yet another change in the relationship between technology and religion. For technologists, according to the Pew Research Center, 84% of the world’s population agrees with religious beliefs, which means starting from spiritual needs, combining users’ religious habits, and integrating practical product functions, there will be more in the future. room for product innovation.

**But for religious people, their attitudes are more ambivalent and complex. **

"I am grateful that ChatGPT has greatly accelerated the efficiency of my sermon manuscript preparation." A pastor wrote about his views on ChatGPT: "But artificial intelligence chatbots are just tools, not human interpretation. The complexity of the Bible requires expertise , insight, and understanding of theology. So while AI chatbots provide invaluable insights, access to trained theologians and scholars remains critical to a fuller understanding of Scripture.”

In a Christian evangelical statement on artificial intelligence it reads: "We recognize that artificial intelligence will enable us to realize possibilities never before possible, but at the same time we acknowledge that artificial intelligence, if used without wisdom and Potential risks."

On the one hand, the so-called "risk" is worried about whether artificial intelligence can truly understand the core of human religion and give correct answers, and whether too much reliance on artificial intelligence for religious activities will dispel the sanctity of religion; on the other hand, it is more important Yes, religious figures worry that "this technology may be used to spread some nefarious activities, which, if left unchecked, may lead to negative effects on a larger scale."

**However, the "double influence" brought by AI is not only a problem faced by the religious field, and the technology that has been hailed as a "double-edged sword" throughout the ages is not only AI. **The printing press that came out in the 15th century was once regarded as an enemy by religious people. They worried that the free and widespread dissemination of text content would reduce the church’s unique interpretation of the Bible, but in the end people accepted and used its beneficial side To expand the propaganda of religion.

The future of AI and religion may be the same.