Theology in the Age of AI

An accessible introduction to the state of artificial intelligence for theologians and scholars of religion, written in the wake of ChatGPT’s debut. The essay traces the history of AI from the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Project through successive ‘AI winters’ to the breakthrough of transformer-based large language models, explaining in lay terms how these models work, their proclivity to ‘hallucinate,’ and emerging remedies such as knowledge-augmented deep learning and reinforcement learning from human feedback. Turning to theology, the essay asks what LLMs portend for religious scholarship: their latent spaces encode centuries of theological texts along with the biases of their training data, and diffusion models like Midjourney offer a window into the popular religious imagination, while debates over machine consciousness—from Turing’s 1950 paper to the LaMDA affair—raise perennial questions about the soul. The essay closes with the ethical and environmental costs of AI and with CTI’s own contributions to the interdisciplinary conversation, including the Spiritual Loop Project on machine intelligence and pastoral care.

Fresh Thinking: Magazine of the Center of Theological Inquiry(10)