Robots, artificial intelligence and spirituality/religiosity: a critical literacy perspective on human development

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence, a natural language processing tool, connects human learning and interpretation to algorithms whose source code is hidden to us and uses linguistic modeling, a primarily statistical method, for analyzing and predicting character collocation patterns (Peters et al, 2023, p. 14). Humans willingly have given in to the charms of a “superior” technological cognition that is incapable, in fact, of thinking critically. In this article we aim at presenting the introduction of the use of AI in spiritual/religious spaces from the perspective of critical literacy (Freire, 1974, 1989, 2005, 2015). Thinking in terms of critical literacy allows for a flexibility of the emergence of meanings from diverse loci of enunciation and it enhances social justice. Drawing on a qualitative and interpretive methodology, this study embraces a sample of illustrations of the uses of AI in different contexts of faith, and one particular experience in a Candomblé house, while the authors analyse them from critical perspectives. The results unsettle modernist conceptions regarding meaning and sense making and move towards more pluriversal and situated relationality regarding AI and faith. We conclude that AI helps to expand inter-religious dialogues, spiritual engagement and accessibility may also be fostered outside institutional frameworks through AI. Despite such advantages, profit-driven algorithms can shape spiritual/religious experience, replicate universalized ethics and onto-epistemologies, spread fake news and distort sources of information, while strengthening capitalism, surveillance, racism, not to mention unsustainability.