This session brings together scholars examining AI's disruptive and creative impact on religious traditions. This panel traverses multiple religious contexts—from AI astrology applications replacing traditional jyotiś practitioners to the role of religious scholars in developing AI moral awareness and agency. Papers explore the theological implications of AI companionship through feminist and mystical lenses, the possibility of constructing a virtuous AI moral agent, and emerging workplace conflicts when religious beliefs clash with technological imperatives. Together, these investigations reveal how AI technologies are not merely tools but active mediators reshaping religious authority, the meaning of moral agency, and spiritual practice. The panel invites critical reflection on what happens when ancient wisdom traditions encounter algorithmic reasoning, asking what religious communities stand to gain or lose as digital interfaces increasingly mediate their relationship with the sacred, and how religious perspectives might inform more ethical AI development.
The golden age of jyotiḥśāstra (astronomical treatises) spanned the third to ninth centuries CE, with select texts surviving into modernity. Jyotiś (astronomy) remains integral to South Asian culture, determining auspicious times for lifecourse events and guiding personal decisions. Traditionally, these Sanskrit texts required astrologers as intermediaries for calculation and interpretation. Recently, AI applications like KundaliGPT and VedicAstroGPT have emerged, offering astrological guidance through generative pre-trained transformer technology. This paper examines these AI systems' functioning and explores their broader implications on the relationship between Sanskrit śāstra, expert knowledge, and society. The analysis considers potential benefits and challenges as astrological practice transitions from human intermediaries to technological interfaces. By examining this intersection of ancient knowledge systems and modern AI, this study contributes to understanding how traditional practices adapt in technology-driven environments and questions what may be gained or lost when ritual practices become increasingly automated.
This proposal examines AI-mediated intimacy through the lenses of emotional capitalism, feminist theory, and Christian mysticism, focusing on questions of agency and freedom in programmable relationships. Drawing on Eva Illouz's concept of emotional capitalism, it argues that AI companions extend existing patterns of commodification in relationships, where human agency is increasingly shaped by market logic and algorithmic control. The proposal engages with feminist concerns about AI relationships reinforcing patriarchal structures while acknowledging their potential for providing emotional support and enabling identity exploration. As a theological counterpoint, it turns to Dorothee Sölle's interpretation of mystical ecstasy, which offers a model of love rooted in unpredictability and mutual vulnerability rather than algorithmic control. I ultimately ask what it means to be free when intimate relationships become programmable, calling for a nuanced understanding of how different forms of intimacy might reshape not only relationships between humans but also between humans and non-human entities.
AI systems currently act autonomously with ethical implications, and agentic AI is exploding in deployed applications. However, religious arguments based on deeply held beliefs about the human person often dismiss the possibility that AI can act with the experience and agency it appears to already have. Theological and philosophical clarity is needed between human characteristics and the appearance of those characteristics occurring in AI, but so are religious scholars providing wise guidance in developing AI moral awareness and agency. By demonstrating how to construct an AI moral agent, I demonstrate the value of science-engaged theological anthropology and how a more complete understanding of AI can incorporate deeper moral insights into guiding AI development. Developmental psychology can guide plausible understandings of AI moral development, and an AI moral agent can use awareness of human suffering to motivate a virtuous response, which with its stable dispositions, can make it a moral agent.
What happens when an employee’s actions, informed by her religious beliefs about AI, conflict with their employer’s expectations of their use of that technology in the workplace? Should an employer consider an employee belief’s that AI is divine when making work assignments involving the technology? How should an employee respond to employer requests to adopt and use a technology in such a way that the employee perceives to be a threat to human dignity and the uniqueness of humans in the created order? Are religious employees protected if AI tools are used to discriminate? Artificial intelligence presents pressing legal, moral, theological, and ethical questions for the workplace and beyond. The conversation is nascent about what protections exist for religious employees interacting with AI in the workplace in ways that implicate their religious identity, beliefs, and practices and this Paper aims to provide a roadmap for beginning to explore these issues.