Deep Dive

Is AI capable of spiritual guidance?

“Hello Shiv - I’ve an unusual question for you. What are your views on receiving spiritual guidance from AI platforms like ChatGPT? I’ve a friend who regularly uses ChatGPT (Pro edition) as her “therapist” and says the life advice it has given her has been invaluable. She uses the voice function so the AI can speak to her. After working with many therapists with little success, she says this is the first time she feels like she is speaking with “someone” who gets her (btw she realizes how strange this sounds! My friend is not a delusional person!). ChatGPT is able to access the full history of their conversation and has the power to reference things she has said in the past to it, so the advice she is getting is highly personalized to her needs.

This got me thinking about whether the same could be true of spiritual guidance. Do you think AI will one day replace spiritual teachers?”

.

***

.

For the record, I don’t find your question unusual, nor do I find your friend’s situation absurd.

In one sense, she is simply optimizing a process that so many people have been following for decades. Previously, when in a dilemma, a common practice would have been for people to type their dilemma into a search engine like Google which would then spit out a whole host of relevant and irrelevant links. It was the user’s job to parse through the morass of results to pick out the tiny nuggets of gold embedded in it.

Then, it would be up to the user to sort and prioritize which of those nuggets were most suited to their current circumstance and further streamline their results accordingly. This is how the internet-generation learned online self-help. It is no different than how we learned or researched any subject in the past. By seeking out resources, narrowing down our options and then highlighting the information that was relevant to what we were seeking.

AI and LLMs (large language models) automate that entire process with a processing power several orders of magnitude greater than what any of us were capable of with our feeble searches. Whereas we may only have had the bandwidth to scour through the first few pages of results that a search engine produced on any given search criteria, AI has the ability to scour the entire internet in seconds and produce the information relevant to us.

It’s the difference between riding a bicycle and riding in a self-driving car. Before, you could witness the mechanics of your locomotion firsthand because you were part of those mechanics and because you supplied the manpower as fuel to move the bicycle forward. Now, you simply press a button, and the car takes you where you want to go. The fundamental mechanics have not changed. Sure, you now have an internal combustion engine (or an electric one) rather than a set of pedals. But the physics are the same. There is no ‘ghost in the machine’. It only appears so because the internal mechanics are complex and hidden from you and so it appears to happen in a way that you cannot comprehend creating the illusion of some kind of ‘entity’ making it happen.

The AI is doing in milliseconds what one might have taken months to do, with a much higher efficiency and infinitely greater processing power. The net result is it ‘feels like’ the AI knows you and is ‘aware’ of you.

However, this is not to detract from the benefits of the impacts it has in such cases. If it catalyzes self-awareness and clarifies a person’s confusion, then who cares how it happens?

If pretending the AI is conscious facilitates the transformative process within an individual, I see no problem with that.

As absurd as this may sound to some people, this isn’t a new phenomenon. This is how our conscious minds have always related to language: as if language is alive.

Have you ever read a book and felt like the writer was speaking directly to you? That the book was written for you? Rationally, you know that isn’t true. And yet, the feeling is unshakeable…

I remember reading The End of Your World by Adyashanti some two decades ago. That was one of the last spiritual books I ever read. I felt the book was alive and speaking to me as if a real human being were sitting in front of me. I had no doubt that the book had been written for one purpose above all else - and that was for ME to read it. What was it about that book that had that effect on me?

And if a simple book can feel alive, why is it so absurd to imagine that an intelligent AI could also seem human?

As a matter of curiosity I browsed through that same book a couple of years ago at a bookstore to see what impact it would have on me. It had none. It felt just like any other book.

So, when we interact with words, with language - regardless of where those words emerge from - whether a person, a group, a piece of prose or an AI - what is it that we are truly interacting with? That is the million-dollar question.

And to me it is quite clear.