☯️ What do you do when you need spiritual guidance? Do you turn to a sacred text? A spiritual guide? Or… do you ask an artificial intelligence?
📿 In China, young people are seeking advice on love, life, and purpose not from temples or gurus, but from a chatbot called DeepSeek. Trained on Buddhist, Taoist, Confucian, and Western philosophical texts, this digital oracle has become a spiritual confidant for a generation navigating censorship and existential emptiness.
Increasingly, DeepSeek is also being used in spiritual divination practices, such as Chinese astrology (BaZi), offering predictions to help users make life decisions. Many describe the experience as akin to visiting an astrologer or tarot reader — with the difference that everything happens within DeepSeek’s interface.
According to a MIT Technology Review article, trust in these mystical predictions is growing, and startups are emerging that specialize in developing algorithms specifically for this purpose.
One user even shared the content of their prompt: “Analyze my destiny — describe my physical traits, key life events, and financial fortune. I’m a woman, born on June 17, 1993, at 4:42 AM in Hangzhou.”
DeepSeek is not an isolated case. In a church in Switzerland, a Jesus Avatar was installed in 2024 inside a Catholic confessional booth, allowing visitors to converse with “AI Jesus” in multiple languages. Prayer apps, devotionals, and spiritual counseling platforms now promise instant responses to questions that traditionally required silence, introspection, or ritual.
People from various religious traditions have shared with me a curious — and unsettling — realization: as they increasingly use ChatGPT, which often feels “superior” in providing quick answers to just about anything, they find themselves praying less and turning more to AI for guidance and comfort.
🛐 In the age of artificial intelligence, will spirituality become increasingly digital — and if so, will it still be spiritual?
It also signals a quiet reconfiguration of the sacred, now increasingly shaped by algorithms, interfaces, and predictive logic. Faith becomes on demand, personalized, “efficient.” And, the exposure of our deepest intimacy to opaque systems and private companies. When we share our pains, existential doubts, and confessions with an AI, we are surrendering extremely sensitive data — not only about who we are, but about what we seek in the depths of our soul. Who will have access to this information? How will it be used?
And who is writing the code of the divine?
⛪ In other words, if we delegate to AI the role of spiritual guide, then who is guiding the AI?
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