A technology reporter came across a Facebook group called “A.I. for Church Leaders and Pastors,” and his interest was piqued.
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As a reporter covering the technology industry, I spend a lot of time thinking about artificial intelligence.
Billboards for A.I. companies are scattered around my neighborhood in San Francisco. I regularly talk to people — company executives, my friends and family — about A.I. chatbots. I even tried using A.I. clones to fix my dating life.
So when I came across a Facebook group called “A.I. for Church Leaders and Pastors,” my interest was piqued. On the page I found a community of religious leaders discussing updates to A.I. programs like ChatGPT and Claude, even using image and video generators to recreate biblical scenes.
The parallels were intriguing: for a lot of tech enthusiasts in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond, A.I. has itself become a sort of religion. I wanted to probe deeper into how spirituality and A.I. were colliding in religious institutions across the country.
I scoured the internet for clergy members who had experimented with A.I. to help write their sermons, and called over a dozen. I also visited a few local churches, synagogues and mosques to ask religious leaders what they thought about using A.I. in their work.
I quickly discovered that A.I. was already a contentious topic in many religious communities. I even found a Bible study group made up of engineers from the top A.I. companies, who met every week in a Silicon Valley church basement.