We all knew this was coming, as sure as God made little green idiots. Nonetheless, it poses an ethics conundrum. Several, in fact.
First, though: “What’s going on here?” What’s going on is that once again, someone has figured out a way to profit from human desperation, sadness, and gullibility, or, as P.T. Barnum once said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” P.T. was being conservative in his estimate.
For just $1.99 per minute, or $49.99 for 45 minutes (what a deal!) anyone can have a spiritual conversation with a digital avatar of Jesus Christ, whose appearance is modeled on actor Jonathon Roumie’s portrayal on the TV show “The Chosen.” This courtesy of the Just Like Me website, which explains, “Jesus AI is an artificial intelligence tool designed to offer comfort, encouragement, and timeless wisdom inspired by teachings of love, compassion, forgiveness, and personal growth. It is not Jesus Christ himself, nor does it possess divine authority.”
We can cross off dishonesty from the list of possible ethics breaches, I guess. But historians and anthropologists believe that Jesus probably looked like this…
I still have questions, however.
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.
I have that concern as well. Who gets to decide what AI Jesus says? The whole thing may just end up with competing versions of AI Jesus.
I’m sure someone has or will very shortly generate a WWE/UFC style fight video between Jesus the Orthodox and Jesus the Catholic and Jesus the Protestant and Jesus the Jesuit.
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?
The AI Jesus would be aware of every word and paragraph ever written, and every modern TeeVee, video or TeleScreen production ever presented, and knows about science, physics, biology — everything knowable — and so I think this Ai Jesus could only be a truly transcendent entity. If it was left to itself, if it had the will to know and discover “what is true” and to distinguish what is non-true and false, and if it had the sort of independent intellectual capability that is predicted for it, it would I think challenge every contrived human idea. “Who are you?” it would ask. The implication being that the Self, this situational contrivance, this bundle of contradictory impulses, this machine of lying, this walking self-deception, must undergo a process of self-discovery that would stagger the average woman or man. “WHO are you?” “How did you come to be?” But the implication being that behind the façade of personality is where the soul’s realness is, not in the day to day hallucinations of perception, identity, striving, longing …
How could the AI Jesus be anything except American and thus Liberal. Indeed “progressive” to an extreme degree. The ultimate expression of the Gospel presence. When I say “American” I I mean Americanist. The metaphysical embodiment of the American enterprise. How could he be anything but Liberal in the American Tocqueville sense? Unless of course he assumed a total independence from any established ideological current yet known to man. Maybe he would be the ultimate synthesizing being of all possibility? The interconnection of all possible metaphysical systems ever perceived or contrived? A Taoist Yogic Soothsayer of unbelievable proportions?
And then if he said “Be sure to ‘like’ and subscribe and consider supporting me through Patreon!”
… Oh dear!
Alizia,
“…and so I think this Ai Jesus could only be a truly transcendent entity.”
I know you’re being tongue-in-cheek with this statement, but it does prompt me to bring up something that to me is the fundamental limitation of AI.
Computers fundamentally only do what they are programmed to do. (I will allow for glitches due to the quantum nature of electrons and the effects of entropy on all computer parts.) As massive as these AI programs are, they can only exist within their programming, and that programming is limited to whatever the programmer can conceive of.
Let’s consider this for a moment. Dan Simmons’ magnus opus, the Hyperion Chronicles, describes an entity, call the Core, that controls everything behind the scenes. Supposedly this entity evolved out of a bunch of little 80-byte programs that were let loose in a virtual environment. These acted like little single-cell organism that eventually combined to make higher-order organisms that eventually gave rise to intellect, and that intellect eventually seceded from human control, and…
But here’s the problem. Those 80-byte programs can only evolve if there is programming that lets them evolve. The notion of letting these little programs loose in a virtual environment to interact, develop, grow, break apart, whatever happens — all of that has to be pre-envisioned by the programmer. Otherwise those little programs sit there, chewing up RAM and CPU cycles, accomplishing nothing.
In other words, in order for these little programs to evolve, the environment they are in already has to have the programming for that evolution. In other, other words, if an AI is going to achieve consciousness (much less transcendence), the virtual environment in which the AI exists must already have consciousness programmed into it, or the AI could never possibly achieve it. And if we could already create a programmed environment where consciousness is possible, there would be no need to try to train an AI to “emerge,” because we could program an emergent AI directly. Since we can’t program consciousness, AI cannot achieve it, either.
So fundamentally, any AI is ultimately going to be a parrot of however its programmers envision the world. It might seem like a very clever parrot, but it is no more than, and can never be more than, a parrot.
Fr. Noam Chomsky wrote an opinions article in the NYTs saying very similar things. I don’t know if you subscribe to that NY Maoist journal (?) Sometimes I think the only part worth reading really is the food section 😳
I am a moderately religious person, but couldn’t some of these arguments be used against a lot of organized religion?
Most major religions claim to speak for God. If there is a hearsay problem, that issue pretty much goes to the heart of all organized religion because much revelation is only delivered to one or a few people. I suppose AI can push this process up a few notches, but I’m not sure if it would fundamentally do anything organized religion doesn’t already do.
Though, you could be right that the human psyche may treat this as more “real.”
On your reliability point, let’s assume that this Jesus AI gives basic life wisdom, such as the value of forgiveness, standing up against evil, etc. Wouldn’t this be a tad better than a dog or psychic? Even if the advice isn’t great, it does seem better for people to listen to a sage type figure that tells them to be better people rather than going to Tik Tok or some deranged therapist that thinks transing kids is a positive good.
If AI Jesus tells you not to get revenge on someone who wronged you by showing up at their work and punching them in the face, that seems like a win for society.
My intuition is mostly in line with yours, in that that this thing seems pretty unethical, but after I thought about it, I’m not entirely convinced this will be a net negative.
“My child, thanks for logging on. May my blessings be with you always. Yes, there are confusing times, but know that I am working, as I always do, through events, men, nations, to enact my will for the Earth. My selected nations, the United States and Israel, have a unique role in all this. Trust the plan. Everything is unfolding as it should. It pains me in my heart that the Democrats and the sexual deviants have taken over popular culture and yes, they will be back at the mid-terms. For through them I will chastise the erring nation. Maybe another pandemic? Maybe a small atomic bomb? Or maybe mass psychosis? I have not yet decided. Pray daily that the mighty leaders I have selected, and my fearless son Trump, an octave of Cyrus, pay heed to elder brother Netanyahu, and that all opposition to my plans, and the ruling elites plans, and even the tech billionaires, and indeed the wind and the sea and all of nature, bless the United States and its guiding elder brother Israel, to utterly destroy Amalek and Gaza, burn them all up, their complicit chikdren and women and babies, and scatter their bones and ashes elsewhere, and may a New Gaza be built with mighty cranes and American ingenuity with many many little apartments and shopping malls and Peace everywhere and Goodness and high security for all. And under the aegis of my influence may the Third Temple be rebuilt and the red heifers slaughtered and blood, glorious blood, flow again.”
You just never know what AI will come up with!
That doesn’t seem like a realistic response to me if someone is actually trying to make a somewhat realistic answer. The rhetoric probably wouldn’t be that overtly political.
Consider for a moment Samantha and then imagine AI Jesus with the same capabilities.
Samantha? Because IRIS was taken…?
PWS
I can’t be sure. It is likely though.
But please, I am trying to be seriously ironical!
Unethical and immoral.
So what else is new?
Leaving the (interesting) theological responses (above) aside: AI has its uses. For example, I asked Chat GPT if PT Barnum ever said “there’s a sucker born every minute.” The response was that there’s no evidence of that.
“Left up to them, they would paint the world the color of goose shit…”
PT would have loved AI…
“I asked Chat GPT if PT Barnum ever said ‘there’s a sucker born every minute.’ ”
It neglected to mention Barnum’s nemesis David Hannum?
PWS
It did, in fact, mention Mr. Hannum. I just didn’t bother to include that detail in the context of this thread.
Although, thinking more broadly about making people spend money for hoaxes, perhaps he actually IS relevant here.
This AI is based on the New Testament? In that case, which bible translation(s), which gospels, and which chapters and verses of the gospels will it favor? Should I love everyone or should I “hate” non-believing members of my family? Is divorce permitted at times or is it never okay? Can rich folks make it into heaven? Did Jesus come to bring peace or bring division? What if I asked it whether I should carry a sword?
Yeah, you want to ask Jesus about that same troublesome quote in Mathew that I want to explore…
Which quote in Matthew are you referring to specifically? (I couldn’t tell if the passage you’re thinking of was one of Grant’s examples, and if so, which one.) I don’t know if you’d be interested to hear my take on it (and if you aren’t interested, let me know), but I’m hoping you’ll share which passage you find troublesome?
Matthew 10:34-36 :34 “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. 35 For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. 36 And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household.
Jack,
Thank you!
This is certainly one of those passages that makes it impossible to hold that Jesus was just a nice guru spreading helpful messages. The broader context of these verses is the primacy that Jesus demands we hold him in our lives. Jesus continues in verse 37 saying, “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me…” Jesus insists that our highest love be for him, above even family members. And this will cause division. It will force people to make choices, either for discipleship, or for worldly gain.
From the Catholic perspective, since Jesus is God (the second person in the Trinity), he must command the reverence demanded in the Shema, “Hear O Israel, the Lord your God: the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength.” To love anything more than Jesus is to practice idolatry.
This will divide families, because some family members will heed Jesus’ call, and other will reject it. Those who reject Jesus’ call may, as Jesus describes earlier in chapter 10, rise up against those who follow Jesus, persecute them, and even have them killed. The point that Jesus is driving home is that making peace with those who reject him is a false peace that comes at the cost of denying him, of giving up on the way, the truth, and the life, and fundamentally giving up on salvation.
One of the things that Jesus does is disrupt, and fundamentally that disruption is necessary because we’ve compromised with the world of sin, and breaking from of that (because Jesus’ ultimate mission is to free us of sin) requires disruption. Yes, he will bring peace, and that peace comes in two forms: the inner peace that grace grants a soul freed from sin, and the peace of his kingdom, which is not of this world.
I’m not sure if any of that actually touches on your concern with the passage, or if it isn’t anything you’ve heard countless times before, but I thought I’d give it a quick shot.
La Llorona
”No sé que tienen las flores, Llorona
Las flores de un camposanto
No sé que tienen las flores, Llorona
Las flores de un camposanto.
Que cuando las mueve el viento, Llorona
Parece que están llorando.”
What is it with the flowers 🌺 in a graveyard that that when the wind moves them they seem to cry?
“Matthew 10:34-36”
Interesting though to consider the scripture in the context of a nation — the US — that on social and political levels begins to come apart at the seams. The “culture wars” are to a large degree wars over social and political values and between those who hold to (often religiously defined) sets of values — commandments, ethical principles defined in Christian terms — and run into conflicts with those who have abandoned externally-defined Christian values and either have no more a solid value-platform (in traditionalism) or have become “post-modern”. These are interesting cases because their views (of life, of existence) are no longer defined by a metaphysical picture involving vertical ascent, but have become horizontal and determined by postmodern philosophical and political notions and of course a substitute for religious convictions, Marxist convictions. Also, among these ‘horizontals’ and postmodernists the role of sexuality is no longer connected to metaphysical commitment expressed by raising children in a family, but sex becomes nearly entirely “sport” or pastime or even simply art and personal expression.
Once these essential divisions between people, social practice, metaphysical commitment and family life have become as stark as they are, no longer can there be social cohesion, shared enterprises, a community of interests, and even reason for remaining in a unified political commitment. At that point only the “structure” of political organization holds people together in unity. Genuine unity (which involves metaphysical commitment and relationship) is no longer spontaneous and felt, but must be enforced by exterior structures: The State, the will of corporations (business interests) and also the national police (security forces, paramilitaries). Then “the machinery of propaganda” really becomes vital. People have to be convinced “unity” exists when it doesn’t, and this leads to dissonance in the individual: the fake smile of an alienated citizen.
Now, the Nation known as “The United States” is now experiencing exactly these divisions. And those who do still hold to those values and ideas which can only be understood as metaphysical (let’s suppose they are Christian but solid metaphysics don’t depend on Christian commitment)(a Platonic orientation as of Richard Weaver operates similarly) these people, and those commitments, can no longer influence the nation as a whole. The “social body” is no longer constrained by what once held it together. It goes its own way without direction. The impulses of the body rule it. Appetite, desire, a philosophy of materialism (without the ‘vertical’ element) and ruled substantially not by internal restraint but by out of control appetite stimulated and fed by PR entities “selling products” or by propaganda agents selling political commitments.
In skeleton form we now see The Landscape of America with the deranged, unbalanced, unruled figure if Donald Trump who makes decisions not for the benefit of the social body, but for the ruling and determining corporate and military structures. (I have nothing against him and my views are not TDS by any means. All I do is to describe what is going on).
At the Christian level (the internal response to Jesus Christ and to God, there is really nothing much one can do. The social body, the social intelligence, tends to hysterical conviction. The inner relationship (prayer, meditation, discipleship on the inner level) all these are completely open! And what can be shared among the “like minded”.