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@JamesSully I was just about to post a link to an article about this: https://apnews.com/article/germany-church-protestants-chatgpt-ai-sermon-651f21c24cfb47e3122e987a7263d348
Another point of evidence in favor: https://restofworld.org/2023/chatgpt-religious-chatbots-india-gitagpt-krishna/
@jonsimon I read the article, I didn't see any evidence of anyone considering the chatbot to be a god, oracle, or priest. I think there's a pretty big qualitative jump between using a chatbot to answer questions about a religious text and actually believing the chatbot has some kind of spiritually significant role in your religious system. People have been reading and writing textual commentaries for thousands of years without ever considering those things themselves gods, priests, or oracles.
This market could use some clarifications:
Do you have any specific definition of a religion (or some body that you would defer to for choosing what counts as a religion)? Obviously, the insincere ones posted below don't count, but there could be an edge case.
What would an AI have to do to be considered a priest? Does it have to officially have the title of priest? Would any AI that performs religious rituals count?
Similarly, what would count as a god or an oracle?
Does it have to be an AI that demonstrably exists, or would a religion that worships an unseen AI god (e.g., they believe we are living in a simulation controlled by a benevolent AI) count?
@JosephNoonan when I spoke to an LLM it was so confident it was tempting to just do what it said. I could see that developing much more. Combined with the right person it might really lead to a cult. Especially since just one bad guy setting up recruitment could control so many people.
@StrayClimb Yeah, although that sounds more like the AI would be a cult leader than a god. Although, I guess maybe the cult leader would count as an oracle rather than a priest, depending on the situation.
@JosephNoonan yes they wouldn't necessarily even know about the guy controlling the LLM. They'd just venerate it
I guess an AI can't legally be ordained as a Universal Life Church minister, and even then I guess there wouldn't be churchgoers, but "oracle" and "priest" seem like they could cover a lot of scenarios, like maybe if an existing religion experimented with using an AI chatbot to provide spiritual guidance.
@StevenK I see, the market focus is AI safety, it's not about chatbot novelty or novelty, so if a religion has implemented a chatbot but there aren't 1 million recorrent users it doesn't qualify as YES.
@Duncan Yes. They would say for example its blasfemy to call their god AI. Even so, the market could resolves YES