Will You Talk about God with a Spirituality Chatbot? An Interview Study

Abstract

Chatbots are increasingly adopted in our daily activities such as offering customer services and supporting our social activities. Yet, their potential for spiritual purpose is insufficiently explored. Interested in closing this gap, we conducted an interview study with 23 participants comprising 12 Christians, 5 Hindus, 4 Buddhists, 1 Muslim, and 1 Pagan, to probe how people who profess a religion perceive the idea of interacting with a chatbot in a spiritual context. During the interview, we also used a chatbot prototype to engage people in the speculation of a chatbot's roles in religious spaces and the desired functions. Our participants envisioned that spiritual chatbots retrieve religious information for the user. Some welcomed the idea of engaging in a religious conversation with a chatbot while others also expressed concerns of letting chatbots play an active role in religious space.

Fabulation, Machine Agents, and Spiritually Authorizing Encounters

“…The question of AI as "spiritually authorizing" outside of traditional religious contexts was made acutely relevant in the work of Lu Xiao and the Spiritual Chatbot Project (Asante-Agyei et al 2022). Xiao and her team conducted an interview study to determine the willingness and hesitancy of participants to engage in conversations concerning religion and spirituality with a chatbot.…”