Praying with AI

Can a machine mediate my connection with the divine?

Recently I visited my family in Canberra. I’m always impressed at how productive my sister is, and becoming a mother to two small children has only accelerated her ability to get a lot done in a small amount of time. On top of parenting and working four days a week, she and my brother-in-law are also very active at their church. The weekend I visited, he was rostered to MC the service and she was assigned the role of leading intercessory prayer.

So when she told me she was going to drop the prayer points into ChatGPT to script her prayer, I wasn’t surprised about her pragmatism. It was the first (and thus far only) time she’s used AI in that way and it was Saturday night after a long day.

While I couldn’t really blame her for looking for a time saver, my gut reaction was to feel a bit ick about her use of AI.

But then I read the prayer it had generated.

And I prayed along with her and the congregation that Sunday morning.

And I pondered it.

Maybe it’s actually okay to use AI to help us write prayers?

How do you feel about AI?

I’ll start by asserting that AI, like all technology – from the wheel to the internet – is neither good nor evil. It’s about how we choose to use it. Machines and technology are, by definition really, made by humans for humans to use, for a benefit to humans. In that sense, they are far more human than we give them credit for.

I’ve been reading a lot from writers and creators on LinkedIn and Substack, and they generally fall into two camps:

• You’re an solopreneur, teach AI to know you and your voice/brand so you can use it to save time

• You’re a creative, AI can never replace you and your unique humanity (you may have noticed “Made with Human Intelligence” badges cropping up around the internet)

Is there a middle ground?

AI and the sacred

At this point in time, anecdotally most people I know personally, or read on the internet, have some qualms about AI.¹ And I suspect that whether you’re religious or not, AI and spirituality seem to be mutually incompatible, at opposite ends of the spectrum. My natural instinct tells me a machine can’t be sacred, and indeed, a machine seems to violate something sacred by replacing the human effort that would otherwise be invested in a task.

When I think about online church during the pandemic lockdowns, watching a Sunday service on the screen completely flattened the corporate, human experience of church. I didn’t want to sing along with the TV, I couldn’t focus on the sermon at all. To this day, If I miss church on Sunday, I don’t watch the recording. It simply isn’t a spiritual experience for me.

But I don’t have any moral or ethical issues with livestreaming church – it’s a matter of personal preference or taste.

Meanwhile, many of the concerns about AI currently are ethical concerns. Here are just three examples I’ve encountered lately:

• On Reddit, a Catholic shared about asking ChatGPT to write a prayer to overcome laziness and received a mixed response. One particularly judgmental critique on this thread essentially boiled down to this argument: if you use AI for prayer, it means you have a deeper spiritual problem to address in yourself.

• Conservative evangelical hero John Piper read out a ChatGPT prayer of praise at The Gospel Coalition’s National Conference – and tells us it’s not praise because it’s made by a machine. (Interestingly, his argument is that God made humans to feel things, which is not what you’d generally expect from a conservative evangelical).

• Writer Elizabeth Oldfield has recently explained why, as a creative and a humanist, she has avoided using AI altogether.

My sister’s ChatGPT prayer

This is the intercessory prayer my sister led that Sunday, with a couple of paragraphs omitted for confidentiality reasons:

Our Heavenly Father,

What a privilege it is to come before You in prayer. Thank You that we can speak with You freely, honestly, and confidently—not because of anything we’ve done, but because of what Jesus has done for us. We thank You how prayer reminds us that we are not alone, that You are near, and that You delight to hear from Your people. In every joy and every struggle, You invite us to bring it all to You. So together, as Your church, we come now with thankful hearts and open hands.

We start by praising You, God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. In Your great mercy, You’ve given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Thank You for this hope that sustains us, and for the inheritance we have in Christ—an inheritance that can never perish, spoil, or fade. We are so grateful for Your faithfulness and the secure future You promise.

Lord, we bring to You the realities we’re facing in our communities and homes—especially the burden of sickness and viruses. We thank You that You are our Good Shepherd, who draws near in our weakness, comforts those who are ill, and brings strength to the weary. Please pour out Your healing and peace, and give wisdom and patience to those caring for loved ones.

We also think of our friends and family who don’t yet know Jesus. Father, we long for them to know the love and grace that we’ve found in You. Please open their hearts, and use us—and others—to share the good news of Jesus clearly and compassionately. May they come to trust in Him and receive the gift of eternal life.

…

Lord, thank You for hearing us. Keep shaping our hearts to trust You more, and help us live each day for Your glory.

In Jesus’ name,

Amen.

AI prays better than (many of) you

Would you have known it was AI-generated if I hadn’t told you? In many ways, it’s better than a human-generated piece of writing – which, I guess, is one of the reasons students use it to write essays.

I’d say it’s quite a good prayer – superior to what most of us would pray on the fly. I’ve highlighted all the Christianese: phrases drawn directly from the Bible (yes, it’s a biblical prayer!) as well as phrases that I often hear in church prayers, which people would never actually use in normal speech. A lot of these are, for me, just things we say. To be honest, they’ve become a bit hollow to me, like placeholders for important ideas we haven’t bothered to fully think through.

If you’re a churchgoer like I am, I bet you’ve experienced prayer that’s a bit awkward and clunky because the person praying is not very articulate and they’re struggling to find the words. That’s definitely been me on more than one occasion. The truth is, it’s much easier to pray along in my spirit with someone who finds the words easily. It’s hard for me to be aligned and “united in prayer” when every fifth word is an um or another crutch word.

Rhythm and flow matter in corporate prayer – and AI can help with that.

AI lacks A+I: Authenticity+Intimacy

A key objection to using AI for prayer relates to authenticity. Prayer should come from the heart. If we’re talking to God (a standard definition of Christian prayer), we should use our own words.

But is creativity actually an essential component of prayer? What makes praying a ChatGPT-generated set of words different from praying the rosary or a liturgy?

Photo by Grant Whitty on Unsplash

Christians have been copying, borrowing, modifying and synthesising sacred words for years. And we pray other people’s words whether they’re from centuries ago or days ago.

Does our prayer lack authenticity when we pray other people’s prayers or graft them into our own? I don’t think it does.

Writer Sarah Bessey often invites her readers to use the breath prayers and liturgies in her newsletter. Her readers appreciate this because she gives them words – thoughtful, beautiful ones – for what they are feeling and cannot express.

AI, too, can give us words for things we’re not sure how to express ourselves. And it doesn’t randomly string the words together – it too is drawing from countless other prayers that have been written through history (and digitised, enabling the LLM’s learning). I’m a pretty fast writer, but ChatGPT can create rhythm and structure for prayer far more quickly than I can.

In fact, I would argue, even when we craft our own prayers, they’re not truly original. We use turns of phrase in prayer that we would never use in real life – that we’ve borrowed, sometimes from Scripture, but more often from the way we’ve heard others pray. As much as we might tell each other there is no “right” way to pray, we learn the rhythm, sounds and hallmarks of prayer through hearing others pray and praying along with them.

I suspect a second reason for the scepticism stems from the idea that prayer is intimacy with God. And by definition, if it’s mediated in some way it’s not intimate.²

Yet even words are intermediaries. Prayer is more than the words used, just like human-to-human communication can be non-verbal and is actually more non-verbal than verbal, even when words are used. More than words, prayer is about the spirit that utters them, the posture of the heart, the alignment that happens.

And it is, after all, possible to pray without words. Or with words you may not fully understand, because you’re speaking in tongues – or in Christianese.

Words are not essential to prayer. There can be intimacy in wordless prayer. Which means words are not the source of the intimacy in prayer. What does it matter, then, if the words we use are produced by ChatGPT?

Photo by Andreas Fickl on Unsplash

I’m still AI cautious

I’ll confess I am playing devil’s advocate a bit here. I don’t want to write off the use of AI in prayer wholesale and on principle without having interrogated why. I wanted to unpack why using AI in prayer feels wrong and whether there are instances where it’s okay.

My sense is that there are no clear rules for when it’s permissible and when it’s not, just as there are many ways we could use AI as an aide in prayer. It’s worth noting:

• The substance of my sister’s prayer was not generated by machines. It was drafted by humans other than her – she fed the substance to ChatGPT, which simply created the prayer’s form.

• She used AI to write a corporate prayer. The questions and issues are a bit different if we were looking at individual prayer. The Bible talks about both but has notably more guidance around individual prayer than corporate prayer.

There are things that do continue to concern me (a lot) about AI:

• The energy consumption

• Copyright infringement – I didn’t jump on the Ghibli portraits trend for that reason and I’m interested to see what comes of lawsuits by authors against OpenAI/Microsoft, Claude/Anthropic, etc

• Young people using AI for basic social interactions like texting friends or crushes because they don’t trust themselves to know what to say

• Everything about deepfakes, from the US$25 million scam in Hong Kong to celebrity porn

• How wildly wrong AI can get even basic facts, and serve those falsehoods to you with sociopathic assuredness (this example is so wild it’s both hilarious and creepy)

• AI slop bloating our lives with rubbish “content” (and misinformation)

In conclusion

My sister and I are both of the mind that the best approach is to look at how “to integrate it with human input to get better results.” I don’t know that she’ll use ChatGPT for prayer again, and I don’t think I ever will (apparently I’m a writer).

I am experimenting occasionally with AI. I’ve used it to turn lists into tables, create a plant care chart for my garden, brainstorm ideas for my nonprofit marketing work and for my own fiction writing.

Perhaps I should explore how to incorporate it into my spiritual life and practice … but I’m not sure I’m comfortable doing that, yet.

---

AI is very topical and I’m honestly keen to hear (well, read) your considered take on this in the comments.

---

Curated by me

Since we’re talking AI vs human prayer:

💞 Here’s a very human take on what it means to pray for someone.

🤡 And here’s AI confidently giving a human feedback on her writing which it has not read, but pretends to have.

🖼️ I mentioned above that words are not essential to prayer. I found it eye-opening reading about eidetic psychotherapy and eidetic prayer, which is done through the use of mental images. AI can create graphics – but it can’t create pictures in my mind.

😱 Riffing off Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act, this piece is about how taste and curation will be increasingly valuable with the advent of AI. I enjoyed the piece, but the main reason I’m including it here is that there is a super nasty comment on the post which accuses it (and all the author’s posts) of being AI slop. I was mad at the meanness of the comment – and yet. As I ran my eyes through the article again it did feel like ChatGPT could have written it. And then I felt mad that this mean comment had gotten in my head, yet I couldn’t unsee it. It’s a perfect example of how hard it is to know what’s real anymore, especially on the internet.

1. Maybe I’m not friends with enough tech bros.

2. As I write this, I’m thinking of Ryan Gosling’s character in Blade Runner 2049 using a sex worker as a proxy for the AI he’s fallen in love with. Not a fan.

---