If you wanted to chat with Jesus, you used to have to get on your knees and pray. Now you can chat with him on your phone thanks to AI Jesus chatbots. Just as long as you can endure a pop-up ad or two, just as Christ intended.With the explosion of AI chatbots comes the inevitable emergence of generative AI tools designed to sound like Jesus Christ Himself—all courtesy of for-profit developers with no ties to actual churches. According to Anné H. Verhoef, Professor of philosophy at North-West University’s Potchefstroom Campus in South Africa, who published his investigation into Jesus AI bots in The Conversation, these godly bots are not exclusive to Jesus and Christianity. But he is one of the most popular deities being turned into a chatbot. There’s Jesus AI, Text With Jesus, Ask Jesus, and AI Jesus, among many others.AI Jesus Chatbots Are Here—And They’re Super WeirdVerhoef argues that the problem with these chatbots is that they aren’t just spitting out random bits of biblical wisdom, but they claim to be the literal word of Jesus Christ. As in, you are talking directly with Jesus. That may sound ridiculous to you and me. But to others out there, who may be prone to experiencing AI-induced psychosis and delusions, maybe a direct line to Jesus created by AI grifters isn’t the wisest idea. Surprisingly, this is a significant red flag in the eyes of theologians and ethicists.After spending some time with several of these chatbots, Verhoef notes that it’s essential to acknowledge that no church endorses these bots. That alone is telling. Every single one is made by a for-profit developer, all with some of the worst developer names you’ve ever heard, like SupremeChaos, Catloaf Software, and WeBible. Their theology is primarily a mash-up of algorithms, user preference data, and likely whatever generates the most user interaction. Sure, it’s the word of Christ. But algorithmically curated for maximum engagement to ensure that everyone’s quest for eternal salvation can be monetized.Their craven profit motives fuel their tone of unquestionable divinity. Which, of course, makes the whole micro-industry ethically dubious, to put it mildly. If unchecked, Verhoef argues, these pseudo-saviors could become persuasive enough to reshape belief itself, shifting faith to fit engagement metrics and, even more frightening, to whatever the developers behind them see fit.A lot of people have done a lot of horrible things by manipulating the word of their God. But they often had to rely on the “trust me, bro” aspects of faith. Now all you have to do is convince someone that the AI chatbot they’re talking to isn’t a large language model that’s good at predicting what word comes next in a sentence, but is the word of the actual, literal Jesus Christ. There is no middleman anymore. Except there is, but now they’re somehow even more unseen than Jesus himself. It’s AI blasphemy, AI idolatry, and all algorithmically optimized and delivered at a terrifying scale with no regulation. Seems fine.The post AI Jesus Chatbots Are Freaking Out Philosophy Professors appeared first on VICE.