Sikhi and AI: Authority, Form, and Digital Custodianship

This paper interrogates how religious authority can be preserved when generative AI optimises for fluency, virality and visual impact rather than provenance. Taking recent Sikh controversies as a focal lens I argue that the most consequential harms are not only factual but form‑level including depiction violations, lineage invisibility, and blended or hallucinated lines presented as canonical. Bridging digital religion and media studies. I trace how these form‑level harms arise from platform logics that reward speed and spectacle, and I outline a lineage‑first design vocabulary, drawn from Sikh custodianship, that treats provenance as a visible, verifiable precondition for interpretation.