Chatbot Jesus: Churches tap AI to save souls – and time (www.axios.com)

Churches and faith-based apps are increasingly deploying AI to reach congregations: from chatbots that let users “text with Jesus” or converse with Biblical figures to tools that generate personalized prayers, offer confessional interfaces, and help pastors research or schedule sermons. Proponents say these tools help overstretched churches stay relevant, expand outreach and streamline operations, while consultants market “ethical” AI to faith organizations as a way to evangelize and coordinate missions. But the trend raises technical and theological red flags. Many of the highest-profile apps create the impression of communicating with a deity or clergy while offering little provenance about source texts, translations, or doctrinal slant; researchers say early-stage systems likely rely on scraped public materials and fast-to-market fine-tuning, which increases risks of bias, hallucination and misrepresentation. Beyond accuracy, critics worry about outsourcing moral authority and accountability: AI can amplify particular interpretations, hide training data choices, and produce persuasive yet unverified responses. For the AI/ML community this is a call to prioritize transparency, dataset auditing, provenance, and guardrails when models engage with sacred content and vulnerable users.