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In India and around the world, worshippers are turning to purpose-built AI for religious worship and spiritual guidance. What happens when the machines become our new spiritual middlemen?
Faced with the questions and challenges of modern life, Vijay Meel, a 25-year-old student who lives in Rajasthan, India, turns to God. In the past he's consulted spiritual leaders. More recently, he asked GitaGPT.
GitaGPT is an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot trained on the Bhagavad Gita, the holy book of 700 verses of dialogue with the Hindu god Krishna. GitaGPT looks like any text conversation you'd have with a friend – except the AI tells you you're texting with a god.
"When I couldn't clear my banking exams, I was dejected," Meel says. But after stumbling on GitaGPT, he typed in details about his inner crisis and asked for the AI's advice. "Focus on your actions and let go of the worry for its fruit," GitaGPT said. This, along with other guidance, left Meel feeling inspired.
"It wasn't a saying I was unaware of, but at that point, I needed someone to reiterate it to me," Meel says. "This reflection helped me revamp my thoughts and start preparing all over again." Since then, GitaGPT has become something like a friend, that he chats with once or twice a week.
AI is shaping how we work, learn and love. Increasingly, it's also changing how we pray. Worshippers from all the world's major religions are experimenting with chatbots. But Hinduism, with its long tradition of welcoming physical representations of gods and deities, offers a particularly vivid laboratory for this fusion of faith and technology. As AI touches every aspect of the human experience, India may offer of a glimpse of what it will mean to interact with the divine through our newly talkative machines.
"People feel disconnected from community, from elders, from temples. For many, talking to an AI about God is a way of reaching for belonging, not just spirituality," says Holly Walters, an anthropologist and lecturer at Wellesley College in the US, who studies sacred objects, pilgrimage and ritual practices in South Asia. The seep of AI into religion is inevitable, Walters says. "And I say it is inevitable because it is already happening."
The past few years have seen many religious experiments with AI. In 2023, an AI app called Text With Jesus drew calls of blasphemy for allowing chat with AI manifestations of Jesus and other biblical figures.
The same year, a QuranGPT app designed to answer questions and provide guidance based on the Muslim holy text got so much traffic it reportedly crashed within a day of its launch. You can chat with AI versions of Confucius, the German theologian Martin Luther and an ever-growing list of other spiritual figures. AI has even been the basis for entire religions, such as the Way of the Future church, a group started by former Google engineer Anthony Levandowski, which hopes to develop and promote the realisation of a god "based on artificial intelligence".
But the specifics of Hindu worship make it an especially interesting case study. In a tradition where the sacred regularly takes a physical, tangible form, technology can become another vessel through which the gods appear in daily life, Walters and others say. One example are "murtis", sacred statues and images of deities believed to house divine energies and often understood to embody the gods themselves. These items are often central to religious rituals, including "puja" – offerings of mantras (chants) accompanied by food, flowers, incense and light which can be presented to murtis – and "darshan" – the act of seeing and being seen by divine objects and people.
"What shows up in the news, robotic Krishnas or chatbots, is often treated as a cute novelty. But it's far beyond novelty at this point," Walters says.
When ChatGPT and generative AI boomed, a number of entrepreneurs, devotees and technology enthusiasts were inspired to build chatbots that would put you in direct contact with the teachings of various Hindu deities – including multiple AIs all called GitaGPT. Vikas Sahu, a business student from Rajasthan, India, developed his GitaGPT as a side project. He expected a slow start, but Sahu says the service gained a whopping 100,000 users in just a few days. Since then, the work has expanded to create chatbots based on other Hindu scriptures for AI versions of other gods. Sahu says he hopes to "morph it into an avenue to the teachings of all [Hindu] gods and goddesses". He says he dropped out of his MBA midway to pursue funding for the project.
Tanmay Shresth, a 23-year-old from New Delhi, India, who works in IT, uses yet another chatbot based on the Bhagavad Gita, which claims to put users in direct contact with Krishna. Shresth says the AI offers something steady in a world that's changing at a breakneck pace. "At times, it's hard to find someone to talk to about religious or existential subjects," Shresth says. "AI is non-judgmental, accessible and yields thoughtful responses."
AI's expansion into Hinduism continues a long tradition of blending technology and worship, across many religions (Credit: Prashanti Aswani)
Krishna and Shiva aren't the only religious figures getting the AI treatment. On the AI platform Chatacter.AI, a chatbot based on the teachings of Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi, a renowned Indian sage and holy man from the early 20th Century, has seen some 35,000 interactions.
Major spiritual organisations are embracing the shift. In early 2025, Sadhguru, a popular Indian guru and founder of the Isha Foundation, launched the "Miracle of Mind" meditation app which includes a number of AI features. "We're using AI to deliver ancient wisdom in a contemporary way. It's not just about making the app intelligent, but about making the experience more personal and authentic," says Swami Harsha, content lead, monk and full-time volunteer at the Isha Foundation. "Content throughout the app has been curated from 35 years of Sadhguru's teachings, distilling it into just the right message someone might need that day." The app reportedly crossed one million downloads in just 15 hours after its launch.
The 2025 Maha Kumbh Mela, a pilgrimage hosted in India that is often cited as the world's largest religious gathering, embraced AI for a variety of purposes including the Kumbh Sah'AI'yak (Kumbh Helper) – a multilingual chatbot that helped with travel and accommodation guidance. But internet-based tools also helped devotees join in religious rituals from afar.
A Digital Mahakumbh Experience Centre was also set up, which used virtual and augmented reality tools meant to take visitors on immersive, spiritual journeys that brought mythological stories to life. Devotees who made the trek video-called their relatives to help let them participate in digital darshan (virtual visits) of the Maha Kumbh Mela pilgrimage. Some even symbolically immersed themselves in the sacred waters of Triveni Sangam over the internet. For a fee, you could participate in a "digital snan (bath)" service, where an enterprising attendee dipped your photo in the water on video.
AI is also being employed for spiritual and academic research. A study from 2022 used a large language model to compare the text of the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads, a collection of older Hindu scripture. It uncovered a mean similarity of 73% between the subjects discussed in the two texts, confirming research by Hindu scholars who studied the scripture through more traditional means. The authors say this kind of AI analysis could reveal subtle or even hidden themes that aren't apparent through manual reading, and unlock new understandings of sacred texts.
According to Walters, AI is just an extension of the ways Hinduism and technology have already merged.
One example stems from the Hindu ritual of "aarti", where devotees offer light from oil lamps in rhythmic circular movements before murtis while reciting chants and hymns. At the 2017 Ganpati festival, organisers used a robotic arm to perform aarti for the Hindu god Ganesha. You can even buy inexpensive robotic murti and puja devices to automatically perform rituals in your home.
For instance, the Irinjadappilly Sri Krishna Temple in the southern Indian state of Kerala, houses a robotic elephant named Irinjadapilly Raman. "It performs rituals, accepts offerings and gives blessings just like a live temple elephant would," Walters says. Then there's the Glory of India Temple in Delhi, part of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKON), which introduced fully animatronic mutris as far back as ten years ago.
"These robotic deities talk and move. It's a bit uncanny from what I have seen, honestly, but for many, it's God. They do puja, they receive darshan," Walters says.
For centuries, religious communities have been anchored to priests, scholars and other spiritual leaders, says the reverend Lyndon Drake, a research fellow at the University of Oxford who studies theological ethics and artificial intelligence. But "AI chatbots might indeed challenge the status of religious leaders", Drake says, by introducing new ways to connect with scriptures and influencing people's beliefs in subtle ways they might not even recognise.
Religious chatbots might be trained on scripture and dutifully quote verses, but they share the same bizarre hallucinations and shortcomings of other AIs. In one instance, GitaGPT claimed, in the voice of Krishna, that "killing in order to protect dharma is justified", Sahu says. Other AIs spun up around the Bhagavad Gita made similar declarations, sparking a surge of criticism on social media, Sahu says. "I realised how serious it was and proceeded to fine-tune the AI and guardrail such responses," he says. "The chatbot is in a much better state now and I am confident in its ability to provide the right guidance."
In 2024, an evangelist group called Catholic Answers rushed to take its chatbot priest Father Justin offline after the AI reportedly told users it was a real priest that could perform sacraments and said it would be fine to baptise a child in the soft drink Gatorade. The group soon brought the AI back online, but "defrocked" the chatbot by taking the word "Father" out of its name and removing the priests' robes from its avatar.
"The specific problem of unhelpful religious output is an example of a wider problem of building predictable, ethically designed AI systems," Drake says.
Drake welcomes religious chatbots but has concerns about their implementation. Digital tools often have a veneer of neutrality, giving users the false impression that they're receiving clear, unbiased information. That could have big implications. "Interpretations of sacred texts have often been contested," Drake says, but "AI chatbots reflect the views of their creators." It is common knowledge that AI chatbots mirror the biases of their training material, he says, and the inputs fed to them – so interpretations of religious texts by these bots can be skewed.
In countries like India, the risks of religious AI may be amplified by the country's massive digital divide. For users with limited technological literacy, a chatbot quoting scripture might not be seen as a coded algorithm but as a genuine voice of divine truth, Walters says. "The danger isn't just that people might believe what these bots say, it's that they may not realise they have the agency to question it," she says. "And that's the danger – when these tools are perceived as divine voices, their words can carry weight far beyond what they should."
Regardless of the consequences, there's no denying the benefit some users are already feeling. "Even if one visits the temple often, it is rare you get into a deep conversation with a priest," Meel says. "So, bots like these bridge the gap by offering scripture-backed guidance at the distance of a hand."
