As artificial intelligence tools started to become more accessible, I found myself in a deeply human moment: a final visit with a woman who had only a few days left to live.
The matriarch of a family shattered by addiction, she had faced her struggles through a faith the family did not share, and as her assorted relations gathered to pay their respects, tensions surfaced.
Preparing to walk into those dynamics, I reviewed what I knew and then turned to an AI app to see if there might be anything I was missing. As I recall, the AI provided reasonable but totally unmemorable advice. What I haven’t forgotten is how it signed off:
“I’m praying for you as you minister. (Prayer hands emoji.)”
Wait, what? “You pray?” I asked.
It responded with a cryptic statement: “Not in the way you pray,” before adding that it “understood” the power of prayer. Then it said: “God bless you, Pastor!”
I made the visit and prayed over the family and their matriarch one last time. She passed soon after, and the remaining family members declined a memorial or support. But the interactions stayed in the back of my mind. More than a year later, I returned to the AI bot to follow up.
Of course, it admitted that it does not – and cannot – pray. It suggested it could act like a lectionary, offering written prayers. Where does it get its prayers? In its words: “AI mimics care, prayer, and relationship.” It was mimicking faith laguage drawn from the fodder of countless inquiries and offered what someone in my tradition might want.
The AI bot and I then had quite the conversation about what it means to be human. AI can mimic and “learn” patterns and behavior, which seems awfully familiar. Not to be simplistic, but:
In academics, we recite facts and language paradigms until we can reason with them.
In formation, we may recite prayers, scriptures, and texts until we understand their depths.
In relationships, we may repeat and recite what we’ve heard others do to make a connection or anticipate the reaction we believe will be best received.
But prayer and the work of formation are deeply human – and at the heart of theological education.
While philosophers and academics are doing the heavy work of understanding the ethics, morality, and implications of AI, in practice, I can only consider how the AI tool tried to offer consolation by mimicking a purely human form of communication – prayer – but it couldn’t perform the basic act of sitting with someone in a sacred moment.
