1. As with all AI avatars, inducing people to treat them as real seems to me to be deliberrately encouraging a pathology. On the streaming series “Scarpetta,” a depressed woman regularly confides in an AI version of her dead same-sex spouse. Friends and family view this habit as unhealthy, but at least the grieving woman, a brilliant techie, is entirely responsible for the existence of Fake Dead Loved One. AI Jesus is the emotional equivilent of crack to vulnerable souls.
2. The conceit is false to begin with. Simply feeding to a bot the New Testament’s hearsay accounts of what Jesus is reported to have said no more creates an accurate, reliable or complete version of the real Jesus than feeding Ethics Alarms into a bot would yield a cyber-clone of Jack Marshall. (You have no idea what goes on in the dark recesses of my mind….) I have read that Meta is trying to create a Mark Zuckerberg bot (I’ll take Jesus, please…), which is horrifying, but at least the real Mark is available to do a mind dump. You might come close to creating a close-to-accurate Ben Franklin bot because Ben, as one biographer concluded, never had an unexpressed thought. Not Jesus. This bot is false advertising, designed for people who are historically, educationally, logically and intellectually inadequate.
3. As one wag wrote on social media criticizing the thing (or should I write, the Thing?), anyone can talk to Jesus for free any time they want to. How many dolts will ask AI Jesus for advice on important life decisions? My guess: a lot, even though the response would be no more accurate or wise than I would get from Spuds or a Ouija board.
4. In the end, I rate the Jesus bot as merely a tech-update on the Psychic Friends Network—a profitable trap for the foolish, desperate, lonely and gullible. The counter argument, as with that blessedly extinct scam, is that if the people who use it feel better after doing so, if it gives them comfort, if feeling like they are talking to Jesus makes it easier to get through the day (Remember the wise words of gun runner Jackie Brown in the 1973 crime film “The Friends of Eddie Coyle“, who says, “This life’s hard, but it’s harder if you’re stupid.” No, John Wayne never said it, at least in public…), how can it be unethical to provide it?
The same can be said of heroin, however.
5. One can also argue that AI Jesus is Ick, not unethical. I do not agree with One.
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day:
Ethics Alarms 
Unethical. I’m not religious, but I feel it’s blasphemy. Based on my limited understanding of it all, my instinct is telling me the following:
The role of a priest, bishop, cardinal, pastor, deacon, reverend, and other Christian faith leaders has been to guide people along the teachings of Jesus based on what has been documented and learned. This AI bot is no different from those roles – it would have to rely on the same materials and has the same goal – to guide the user to understanding the teachings of Jesus.
But they didn’t make it an “AI Priest” etc. They made it the man itself so rather than guiding and interpretting the existing knowledge, it’s putting words in the mouth and inventing new teachings of Jesus.
Disclaimer all they want. It’s unethical.
Unethical for anything to represent another person without consent?
What’s next, an AI of the Prophet of the religion of peace?
An “AI Mohammed” which showed the Prophet’s face would be considered sacrilegious by Muslims, and would probably earn its creator a fatwa of some sort. There would at least have to be a full-face veil on the AI Prophet (as he has been depicted in Persian art, I believe); otherwise, one would be safer creating an AI “Ask the Mullah”, with the AI mullah quoting the Koran.Catholics (even bad Catholics) shouldn’t need an “AI Jesus” at all, as any priest whom they might seek counseling from during Confession would be bound by the “seal of the confessional” never to reveal what a penitent has told him during Confession. I would share @Ryan Harkins’ concern about the denominational & ideological slant of an “AI Jesus”, and I would want to see some kind of “about the creator” disclosure regarding this. I would also agree with EA and previous commenters that an AI religious advice bot should NOT be a paid service (other than soliciting voluntary donations). Surely if “seasoned citizens” like my husband and me can do religion and moral theology research online for free, younger people who have lived with the Internet all their lives could do so too!Sincerely,Catherine McClarey
I’d be very curious how this AI answers questions. Does anyone want to bet that this AI Jesus would support the liberal position on any current hot-button issue? Would this AI Jesus tell us that the Gospel of Thomas should actually be canonical? Would he tell us that he didn’t really rise from the dead, that it was just a mass hallucination of his disciples? Will he be biased toward Catholic? Lutheran? Anglican? Methodist? Baptist? Presbyterian? Dutch Calvinist? Evangelical? Fundamentalist? Orthodox? Seventh-Day Adventist? Jehovah’s Witness? Mormon? Jesus Seminar?
I agree with Tim’s analysis above. I’d also like to throw in that I find it obscene that these developers will charge for access to this Jesus AI. This seems to me to be preying on the vulnerable and gullible. Anyone who wants an AI analysis of what Jesus might say could throw the question to CoPilot, ChatGPT, Grok, or whatever AI one thinks will give a reasonable answer and see how the analysis plays out. For free.