Harris Wiseman, writing for CPOSAT, argues that AI chatbots can never serve as spiritual advisors—at least not with current generative AI technology.
True spiritual companionship, he says, requires an embodied, human relationship, not just text exchanges.
The paper follows three central lines: first, a spiritual companionship requires a relation between two bodied beings (for various reasons explored in this paper); second, spiritual companionship is more than propositional exchange (of text inputs and outputs), a limitation which threatens to reduce spiritual advice to a narrow problem-solving rubric; and third, the paper explores the question of what happens to spiritual advice, given that “spiritual” chatbots are already a disruptor and a very impoverished product.
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