November 2025 - Magazine - Page 116
Mi n i str i es
OUT of TIME
People are using AI to talk to God
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 3 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.
These robotic deities talk and move. It's a bit uncanny from what I have seen, honestly, but for many, it's God. They do puja, they receive darshan – Holly Walters
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
Suvrat Arora
