Justin Lane has a response to the podcast on the religious studies project page about the attempt to analyze and in some sense resurrect a Danish theologian Grundtvig through A.I. Lane argues that perhaps what A.I. could really resurrect is Religious Studies in general, noting the discrepancy between interest in A.I. and Religious Studies as charted on Google N-grams. Certainly, we applaud this impulse, and the Grundtvig project represents an interesting approach. In 2018 I watched Mark Graves demonstrate a chatbot trained on the writings of Thomas Aquinas (in translation) that could reproduce Aquinas-like language. Though at that point the chatbot quickly degenerated into Aquinas-sounding nonsense. Still, with the immense progress made by GPT-2, it is only a matter of time until we see more credible versions of these sorts of chatbots.
AAR Artificial Intelligence and Religion Research Seminar
Research Seminar at the American Academy of Religion