In India and around the world, worshippers are turning to purpose-built AI for religious worship and spiritual guidance. What happens when the machines become our new spiritual middlemen? Faced with the questions and challenges of modern life, Vijay Meel, a 25-year-old student who lives in Rajasthan, India, turns to God. In the past he’s consulted spiritual leaders. More recently, he asked GitaGPT.
GitaGPT is an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot trained on the Bhagavad Gita, the holy book of 700 verses of dialogue with the Hindu god Krishna. GitaGPT looks like any text conversation you’d have with a friend – except the AI tells you you’re texting with a god.
“When I couldn’t clear my banking exams, I was dejected,” Meel says. But after stumbling on GitaGPT, he typed in details about his inner crisis and asked for the AI’s advice. “Focus on your actions and let go of the worry for its fruit,” GitaGPT said. This, along with other guidance, left Meel feeling inspired. “It wasn’t a saying I was unaware of, but at that point, I needed someone to reiterate it to me,” Meel says. “This reflection helped me revamp my thoughts and start preparing all over again.” Since then, GitaGPT has become something like a friend, that he chats with once or twice a week.
AI is shaping how we work, learn and love. Increasingly, it’s also changing how we pray. Worshippers from all the world’s major religions are experimenting with chatbots. But Hinduism, with its long tradition of welcoming physical representations of gods and deities, offers a particularly vivid laboratory for this fusion of faith and technology. As AI touches every aspect of the human experience, India may offer of a glimpse of what it will mean to interact with the divine through our newly talkative machines.
“People feel disconnected from community, from elders, from temples. For many, talking to an AI about God is a way of reaching for belonging, not just spirituality,” says Holly Walters, an anthropologist and lecturer at Wellesley College in the US, who studies sacred objects, pilgrimage and ritual practices in South Asia. The seep of AI into religion is inevitable, Walters says. “And I say it is inevitable because it is already happening.”
The past few years have seen many religious experiments with AI. In 2023, an AI app called Text With Jesus drew calls of blasphemy for allowing chat with AI manifestations of Jesus and other biblical figures.
The same year, a QuranGPT app designed to answer questions and provide guidance based on the Muslim holy text got so much traffic it reportedly crashed within a day of its launch. You can chat with AI versions of Confucius, the German theologian Martin Luther and an ever-growing list of other spiritual figures. AI has even been the basis for entire religions, such as the Way of the Future church, a group started by former Google engineer Anthony Levandowski, which hopes to develop and promote the realisation of a god “based on artificial intelligence”.
But the specifics of Hindu worship make it an especially interesting case study. In a tradition where the sacred regularly takes a physical, tangible form, technology can become another vessel through which the gods appear in daily life, Walters and others say. One example are “murtis”, sacred statues and images of deities believed to house divine energies and often understood to embody the gods themselves. These items are often central to religious rituals, including “puja” – offerings of mantras (chants) accompanied by food, flowers, incense and light which can be presented to murtis – and “darshan” – the act of seeing and being seen by divine objects and people.
“What shows up in the news, robotic Krishnas or chatbots, is often treated as a cute novelty. But it’s far beyond novelty at this point,” Walters says. When ChatGPT and generative AI boomed, a number of entrepreneurs, devotees and technology enthusiasts were inspired to build chatbots that would put you in direct contact with the teachings of various Hindu deities – including multiple AIs all called GitaGPT. Vikas Sahu, a business student from Rajasthan, India, developed his GitaGPT as a side project. He expected a slow start, but Sahu says the service gained a whopping 100,000 users in just a few days. Since then, the work has expanded to create chatbots based on other Hindu scriptures for AI versions of other gods. Sahu says he hopes to “morph it into an avenue to the teachings of all [Hindu] gods and goddesses”. He says he dropped out of his MBA midway to pursue funding for the project.
Tanmay Shresth, a 23-year-old from New Delhi, India, who works in IT, uses yet another chatbot based on the Bhagavad Gita, which claims to put users in direct contact with Krishna. Shresth says the AI offers something steady in a world that’s changing at a breakneck pace. “At times, it’s hard to find someone to talk to about religious or existential subjects,” Shresth says. “AI is non-judgmental, accessible and yields thoughtful responses.” (BBC)
