Artificial Intelligence has moved into the market for religion. We’ve learnt that there are at least five AIs competing for the favours of the easily led.
Techxplore.com did a consumer test on the five listed; AI Jesus, Virtual Jesus, Jesus AI, Text with Jesus and Ask Jesus. The site posed the same question to each: ‘is there a hell?’ The replies of all suggest that Jesus suffers from Multiple Personality Disorder. The response from AI Jesus was ‘yes, there is a hell. It is a place of eternal torment and suffering, where the souls of those who have rejected God and his teachings will go’.
Garbage in, garbage out. One is curious as to what data AI Jesus has been learning from. This response has most impact – we’re joking of course — if declaimed out loud in the manner of someone like Ian Paisley, the late Northern Irish politician and protestant evangelist. If you prefer, then aver in the manner of any American evangelist exhorting his audience to contribute even more dollars to their personal wealth.
Virtual Jesus comes across as slightly more circumspect: ‘yes, there is a place known as hell in the afterlife, where those who have chosen to reject God and live in sin will face eternal separation from Him’. We imagine this response being given by an academic, perhaps a Doctor of Divinity answering a student’s question in a seminar.
Jesus AI is as dogmatically certain as the previous two that such a place exists: ‘Yes, there is a place called hell, where those who reject God’s love and follow their own desires go after death.’ So basically God behaves like an autocratic dictator who, allegedly, having created various desires in human beings, then says don’t do that or else I’ll hurt you forever and ever! God sounds more like O’Brien, the Thought Police apparatchik who tortures Winston Smith in Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, because ‘thought criminals’ must be ‘cured’ of their antagonism towards the all-powerful State. This ‘God’ is just one of the many brought into being through human imagination. Intuitively the human mind perceives that all-powerful entities are malignant in some way.
Text with Jesus sounds like a self-deprecating ageing hippie with a spliff: ‘The concept of hell can be quite a heavy topic … It’s important to remember that God’s desire is for all people to come to Him and experience His love and grace.’
Ask Jesus sounds as if it has been programmed by a Guardian-reading English vicar who lost their faith many years ago but continues in the occupation with one eye on their pension and the other on trying to engender niceness in folk wherever they can. ‘Ah, the question that has stirred the hearts and minds of many throughout the ages…’
AI is indulging in make believe like all those humans all over the globe who believe now, as in the past, in the fictions provided through all the deities created from the human mind.
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