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The Spring budget this Wednesday is expected to include an increased investment in the use of artificial intelligence in the NHS, helping to reduce the time it takes to analyse scans by up to a third. Whether we like it or not - and there are plenty of people who are worried - AI is now firmly embedded in everyone’s life. It shapes our digital world in ways we're often not even conscious of. At work I recently tried an app that converted the audio of a consultation with a patient into a summary and even created a letter to their GP. It didn’t sound like me, but it was very fast and sounded remarkably human.

So, it's not surprising then that people in religious and spiritual communities have started to think about the impact of AI on the practice and experience of faith.

After some of my students talked about using AI to answer spiritual questions, I decided to ask a generative AI chatbot, a few myself and the approach it took was an academic one, giving a generalised version of human interpretation. It was definitely lacking in the personal and individualised response and because it was based on an academic approach, it made spirituality a subject to study rather than something to be experienced. It may be AI - but it's not EI - emotionally intelligent.

Religious faith is one of the most powerful of human emotions. But through our lives it ebbs and flows and there are times when all of us need to turn to others for help and guidance.

These are often questions which require insight that comes from the spiritual intelligence. In the Bhagavad Gita Krishna tells us this is not a product of the human brain or the metaphysical mind, but a feature of the soul, which is independent and outlasts these things, spiritual intelligence is from the least artificial part of ourselves.

In my tradition and many others, we are warned against widely sharing personal experiences that the human mind often finds difficult to grasp. The most esoteric and personal experiences of one’s spirituality are not the things that make it onto websites and viral videos.

No matter how much we invest in AI to make our day-to-day lives easier it will not be able to give spiritual guidance that is personalised and may even damage or slowdown peoples’ spiritual progress. Of course we shouldn't be complacent. AI will only get more powerful, and we need to be vigilant about its uses and abuses, especially in such a sensitive arena as faith. But sorting the good from the bad is a quintessentially human exercise. Spiritual happiness doesn’t require an investment of money and new technology, but it does require some time, something which everyone can afford.

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