Synthetic spirituality: AI is reshaping religion

Abstract

This Comment examines how recent advances in large language models (LLMs) are transforming contemporary engagements with sacred texts, devotional practices, and mystical traditions across multiple religious contexts. As LLMs increasingly mediate spiritual inquiry—by providing instant scriptural explanations, personalised guidance, and simulated access to prophetic or mystical figures—their integration raises urgent questions for scholars of religion, anthropology, and digital humanities regarding authority, interpretation, and religious agency. In this Comment, I propose the framework of synthetic spirituality to describe the forms of religious meaning and experience that emerge through dialogical interaction between human users and LLM systems, in which machine-generated responses become woven into spiritual reflection, practice, and self-understanding. Drawing on examples from world religions, the article outlines the emerging implications. LLMs reshape textual interpretation, pastoral and prophetic roles, and the perceived immediacy of mystical encounter, while also emphasising their limitations—including hallucination, bias, and the gap between increased access to esoteric material and the fidelity of interpretation. Situating the discussion within broader scholarship on digital religion and technological mediation, the Comment argues that synthetic spirituality offers a necessary conceptual framework. Synthetic spirituality illuminates how human–AI interaction is reconfiguring both the experience and study of religion. This underscores the need for critically grounded, cross-cultural research on how authenticity, authority, and meaning are negotiated as spiritual life becomes increasingly entangled with computational systems.