AI is changing religion and religions are trying to change AI
Will chatbots supplant the advice of imams and priests or help them spread the word?
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Religious institutions and firms are scrambling to influence how AI is being developed and used to spread the faith.
PHOTO: ADOBE STOCK
The Economist
“We hope Pope Leo will see us as his soldiers,” says Matthew Harvey Sanders, the boss of Longbeard, a Catholic start-up. In a room near the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, the firm’s robots scan ancient books, manuscripts and codices. Scholars have long struggled to make accessible much of the “great wisdom sitting on shelves” of Catholic institutions, he says, but advances in AI mean “we can now understand the insights” of even the most worn, ancient texts. His firm then feeds this corpus into a more modern form of religious communication: Magisterium AI, a chatbot that draws on a curated library of Catholic doctrine and scholarship.
According to Sanders, it has millions of users across 190 countries, who use it to get “answers to profound questions”.
