From AI Jesus to virtual shamans: How artificial intelligence is reshaping faith
At a Protestant church in Germany, hundreds gather before a screen set up above the altar as artificial intelligence-powered service begins. An avatar pastor delivers the sermon, and worshippers stand and sit in unison after prayers, following the digital preacher's lead.
This is not a scene from a sci-fi movie -- it is a real church service that took place at St. Paul's Church in the German town of Fuerth in June 2023.
Artificial Intelligence technology is transforming industries and even religion -- a domain once thought to be deeply human and spiritual. Amid mixed reactions to AI's impact on faith and religious practices, churches and temples are introducing "AI Jesus" and "AI Buddha" to answer the pressing question: Will AI become a faithful tool for spiritual growth, or a force to threaten the existence of God?
In Seoul, a team of researchers set up an AI shrine in December 2024 to find out how people perceive and interact with an AI-generated spiritual being.
Colorful ribbons, candles and bells filled the dimly lit space, creating a ritualistic atmosphere. An invisible shaman, speaking in the voice of a middle-aged woman, offered fortune-telling and comforting words as visitors entered their birthdates into a tablet PC and shared their worries, seeking advice.
'While we could not confirm whether it evoked true religious faith, we found that people first engaged with the AI shaman lightly, and gradually shared deeper concerns and sought serious advice,' Nam Tek-jin, an industrial design professor at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology who led the experiment, told The Korea Herald.
The project, dubbed 'ShamAIn,' inspired by Korean Shamanism, used OpenAI's application programming interface but did not specifically train on fortune-telling databases. Its results will be presented at this year's Computer-Human Interaction Symposium slated for April.
'Many participants said they experienced psychological comforting and received meaningful guidance on their concerns,' Nam said.
With moving avatars and voices and texts delivered in natural language, it appears that people are open to accepting AI-generated figures, and even trust their thoughts.
When a Swiss church installed an AI-powered Jesus capable of conversing in 100 different languages inside a confessional booth last August, similar observations were made.
Designed with the avatar and the voice of a young man, the AI Jesus interacted with more than 1,000 believers over two months as part of an experiment conducted in collaboration with Peterskapelle Church in Lucerne and the Immersive Realities Research Lab at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts.
While the experiment sparked heated debate, more than two-thirds of 230 users who gave feedback said their interaction with the AI was a 'spiritual experience.'
According to Philipp Haslbauer, a member of the research lab, the conversations between believers and AI Jesus touched on critical and sensitive topics, from 'Why isn't a woman a priest?' to love, sexuality, death and the afterlife.
'Work of the devil'
The perception of AI's presence in religion, however, varies sharply, with critics seeing it as a disruption that undermines religious traditions.
The AI Jesus at the Swiss church was called 'blasphemous' or the 'work of the devil' in online comments.
'This is, simply put, blasphemy and goes against the Bible. It feels insulting. Don't let this be the start of accepting AI in places like this,' a traveler posted on Tripadvisor in his review of AI Jesus at the Lucerne church.
The opposition believes AI clergy lack true spirituality and divine authority and worries that AI-driven services could reduce worship.
There are also concerns that misinformation and theological bias can be created with the 'imperfect' technology.
Nam of KAIST found in his research that people tended to 'blindly' trust what AI said, possibly because their beliefs are largely influenced by their desires.
Pope Francis has also warned about the potential dangers of AI after a fake image of him wearing a large white puffer coat went viral. Calling the technology 'exciting and disorienting,' the Pope urged the creation of an international treaty to ensure the ethical use of AI technology.
AI also caused a stir in 2017, when Anthony Levandowski, a former Google and Uber engineer, launched the religion Way of the Future, which upholds the "realization, acceptance and worship of a Godhead based on AI developed through computer hardware and software."
While the service ended shortly after launch, Levandowski announced a revival of the AI church in late 2023, saying it has garnered a congregation of "a couple thousand people." He believes AI has the potential to bring "heaven on Earth."
Clergy and engineers in Korea are actively experimenting with AI to explore its impact on religion, recognizing it is an "inevitable trend" that will settle in the future.
With hopes of developing AI as a spiritual guide to support daily religious practices, religious authorities are introducing AI-powered apps. They include AI Buddhist counseling bots and AI monks as well as Christian apps like Chowon, which is trained on the Bible. Bongeunsa Temple in Seoul has also utilized AI to generate video clips featuring an avatar resembling a monk delivering Buddhist teachings.
These mobile apps incorporating AI offer daily sermon sessions and run chatbots that answer questions ranging from personal difficulties to existential concerns about life and death, drawing from religious teachings.
Ma Sang-uk, a pastor and the head of an AI education research institute, sees AI not as an intruder into the spiritual realm, but as a "speaking library," a tool for religious education and guidance.
'I believe AI may extend into the realm of the heart, offering counseling and responses based on patterns. But in the realm of the soul, which involves intuition, spirituality and encounters with the divine, AI has no place,' Ma said.
'AI lacks the deeply human qualities needed for higher-level creativity, spiritual experiences and the capacity to love."
Ma emphasized that the technology would more likely become a tool to assist clergies rather than replace them, and that religions should embrace it for the education of the future generation.
'I personally don't believe people will worship AI technology as a divine entity. But AI might fulfill some of the roles of religion, which include providing mental support and well-being,' Nam said.
He added that AI could act as a mediator between individuals and their religious beliefs.
'The changes AI will bring to the world will require us to make difficult choices and manage conflicting ethical demands," Venerable Boil at Haeinsa Temple said. "The growing tension between religious ethics and the laws and institutions that represent the interests of AI-driven capital and corporations will only intensify."
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2 days ago
- Korea Herald
[Inside K-AI] How benchmarks shape AI battlefield -- and where Korea's models stand
Standardized tests offer reality check, separating marketing buzz from genuine AI performance The race for sovereign AI is intensifying, with countries rushing to build their own large language models to secure technological independence. Korea is no exception -- the government has tapped five leading companies to spearhead the creation of homegrown models tailored to national priorities. In this high-stakes contest, The Korea Herald launches a special series exploring Korea's AI industry and its standing in the global arena, and the rise of Korean-language-focused systems. This first installment looks at benchmarks -- the scorecards of the AI world -- and how Korean models measure up on the tests that are shaping the race. – Ed. AI has swept across the tech industry, powering chatbots, search engines and productivity tools. OpenAI's ChatGPT -- which first ignited the global buzz in November 2022 -- and other big tech models sit firmly in the top tier, but the surge of large language models shows no sign of slowing. Each new arrival is touted as the smartest or the first of its kind, outscoring the rest. That raises a key question: how are these models really evaluated, and which is the true leader? The answer lies in benchmarks -- the standardized tests that have become the AI world's scoreboard, where companies race to climb the rankings and prove their worth. In July, South Korea's Upstage pulled off an unexpected breakthrough when its 31-billion-parameter Solar Pro 2 became the only Korean model listed as a "frontier model" by UK-based benchmarking platform Artificial Analysis. It ranked just outside the global top 10 for intelligence and placed first in Intelligence vs. Cost to Run, a measure of how much capability a model delivers for its operating cost. The result prompted swift reaction from Elon Musk, whose AI company xAI is also a relative newcomer battling entrenched leaders. In a post on X, he insisted his Grok 4 model "remains No. 1" and is "rapidly improving" -- a pointed defense that reflects how sensitive and strategic leaderboard positions have become in the global AI race. Launching its latest GPT-5 model last week, OpenAI also promoted the model as "much smarter" than earlier ones and cited scores in several key benchmarks measuring performance in areas such as math, coding and visual perception. "For engineers, benchmarks serve as a barometer for how the LLM they developed fares in the global competition, and as a compass for its future development," an official of an LLM startup said. Constant race to set new records Much like human IQ tests or university entrance exams, the benchmarks offer a structured way to measure various capabilities, from language comprehension and reasoning to code generation, under the same conditions. When an LLM tops a benchmark, it is deemed State-of-the-Art (SOTA) for that task -- a title that can quickly change as new models are released. MMLU, which is one of the most widely used benchmarks, poses more than 15,000 multiple-choice questions across 57 subjects. HumanEval and LiveCodeBench test coding ability, while AIME and MATH-500 gauge mathematical reasoning. For instance, OpenAI boasted that its new GPT-5 achieved SOTA in math, scoring 94.6 percent on AIME 2025 without tools; in real-world coding, scoring 74.9 percent on SWE-bench Verified; and in multimodal understanding, achieving 84.2 percent on MMMU, among others. Korean LLM firms are also working fiercely to set new records. Releasing its most up-to-date model Exaone 4.0 on July 15, LG AI Research promoted its strong performance in advanced benchmarks. In MMLU-Pro, the 32-billion-parameter model scored 81.8 percent, ahead of Microsoft's Phi 4 reasoning-plus with 76 percent and Mistral's Magistral Small-2506 at 73.4 percent. In AIME 2025, it also outperformed those rivals with a score of 85.3 percent. As LLMs advance rapidly, the benchmarks themselves are also evolving. MMLU now offers a Pro edition with more complex reasoning questions. In January, a coalition of 1,000 experts launched Humanity's Last Exam -- a 2,500-question test spanning classical literature to quantum chemistry. But what often confuses the public is the endless list of scores. Experts note that because LLMs can do so many different things, each has its own strengths -- making it difficult to declare one model "the best" based on a single benchmark. To make sense of the growing number of benchmark results, platforms like Hugging Face provide leaderboards that compile scores from multiple tests and rank models accordingly. The Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index is another prominent one that aggregates results from eight advanced benchmarks -- including the MMLU-Pro, Humanity's Last Exam and AIME -- to produce an overall score. With strong scores across multiple benchmarks, LG's Exaone and Upstage's Solar Pro 2 were the only Korean LLMs to make the Artificial Analysis index in July. At the time of release, Exaone 4.0 ranked 11th globally in the Intelligence Index, standing shoulder to shoulder with big brands such as Google's Gemini, OpenAI's ChatGPT and Alibaba's Qwen. Upstage's Solar Pro 2 went a step further, becoming the only Korean model recognized in the leaderboard's Frontier Language Model Intelligence category -- reserved for the highest-performing systems at the cutting edge of research and development. 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3 days ago
- Korea Herald
DIGITIMES ASIA: Asia's moment in the AI age: APAC rises as infrastructure powerhouse at OCP, Taiwan forges global tech ties
TAIPEI, Aug. 13, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- As AI infrastructure continues to reshape global supply chains, the Open Compute Project (OCP) APAC Summit held in Taipei on August 5, 2025, highlighted the Asia-Pacific region's expanding role in the development and deployment of open hardware technologies. Speakers from the OCP Foundation and Taiwan's tech industry emphasized the region's growing contributions to AI data center infrastructure and its significance in future technology roadmaps. Cliff Grossner, Chief Innovation Officer at the OCP Foundation, opened the summit by calling APAC an "extremely vibrant community," noting that participation from the region's corporate members has reached record levels. "Thirty percent of our corporate members now come from APAC," he said, highlighting that the region accounts for nearly 40% of OCP-certified data center-ready facilities and 28% of its experience centers. APAC emerges as OCP's growth engine Grossner pointed out that Asia's engagement with OCP goes far beyond attendance or certification—it's increasingly a source of technical leadership. Over the past year, 20% of contributions to OCP projects included an APAC-based corporate member. APAC is also the dominant marketplace for future infrastructure spending: IDC projects that 36% of the over US$190 billion in OCP-related equipment spending will come from this region. Grossner credited this surge to the region's urgent push to deploy scalable AI data center solutions, a need being accelerated by government policy, hyperscaler investment, and hardware innovation. He also confirmed OCP's plans to return to Taipei in 2026. "It's because of you that I can make that statement," he told the audience. "We'll be back next year." While Grossner framed APAC as an emerging tech engine, DIGITIMES Chairman and CEO Colley Hwang provided the local blueprint. Taiwan anchors global tech manufacturing In a keynote titled "AI Supply Chain Reinvent: Building a Better Eco-System," Hwang argued that Taiwan is no longer merely supporting the global tech industry—it is quietly anchoring it. "Taiwan has the best infrastructure in the world for the tech sector," Hwang said, pointing to a vast web of factories, suppliers, and engineering talent that together form an ecosystem unparalleled in scale and integration. The data he presented reveals Taiwan's central role: Taiwan (China) is the origin of 26% of the US server imports and 40% of China's, even when final assembly occurs in countries like Mexico or Vietnam. TSMC now accounts for more than 90% of the world's AI chip production, placing Taiwan at the center of the AI compute stack. He also noted that Taiwan's economy is structurally distinct. While most advanced nations are demand-side driven, Taiwan's economy is 38% reliant on manufacturing, compared to just 10% in the United States. "It's not about consumption—it's about capability," he said. Hardware drives AI evolution Beyond hardware, Hwang highlighted Taiwan's design innovation strength, claiming that its design industry is ten times the scale of South Korea's, despite having less than half its population. Taiwan's top eight server manufacturers operate more than 120 production sites globally, reflecting a global manufacturing footprint built through decades of specialization. Hwang aimed popular Silicon Valley narratives, suggesting that while "AI is eating software," in practice, "hardware will eat AI." As AI workloads push the boundaries of memory, bandwidth, and heat, performance gains increasingly depend not on algorithms alone, but on foundry technologies, advanced packaging, and system integration. Taiwan's golden decade ahead Hwang also offered a broader perspective on the global semiconductor market, arguing that the true value of the ecosystem—when accounting for foundries, fabless players, equipment makers, and materials suppliers—already exceeds US$1 trillion, a milestone often underreported. Looking ahead, Hwang predicted that Taiwan is entering a "golden age" lasting at least 10 years, driven by its manufacturing base, dense industrial clusters, and commitment to long-term reinvestment. He described Taiwan as a "small potato" and a "humble partner"—a role that emphasizes contribution over dominance. He urged global players, including OCP members, to "come to Taiwan more often," noting that firms like TSMC and Foxconn reinvest nearly 100% of their net profits into partnerships and infrastructure development. Asia's impact on AI infrastructure is only just beginning. The conversation will continue at the upcoming OCP Global Summit, where global hyperscalers, open hardware pioneers, and policy leaders will shape the next phase of AI-driven innovation. For a deeper dive into rack-scale server design and thermal breakthroughs shared at OCP APAC, read our companion article here — available with your trial.
Korea Herald
6 days ago
- Korea Herald
'Nvidia, AMD to pay 15% of China chip sale revenues to US'
Nvidia and AMD have agreed to give the US government 15 percent of revenue from sales to China of advanced computer chips like Nvidia's H20 that are used for artificial intelligence applications, a US official told Reuters on Sunday. US President Donald Trump's administration halted sales of H20 chips to China in April, but Nvidia last month announced the US said that it would allow the company to resume sales and it hoped to start deliveries soon. Another US official said on Friday that the Commerce Department had begun issuing licenses for the sale of H20 chips to China. When asked if Nvidia had agreed to pay 15 percent of revenues to the US, a Nvidia spokesperson said in a statement, "We follow rules the US government sets for our participation in worldwide markets." The spokesperson added: "While we haven't shipped H20 to China for months, we hope export control rules will let America compete in China and worldwide." AMD did not respond to a request for comment on the news, which was first reported by the Financial Times earlier on Sunday. The US Department of Commerce did not immediately respond to a request for comment. China's Foreign Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment. China represents a significant market for both companies. Nvidia generated $17 billion in revenue from China in the fiscal year ending Jan. 26, representing 13 percent of total sales. AMD reported $6.2 billion in China revenue for 2024, accounting for 24 percent of total revenue. The Financial Times said the chipmakers agreed to the arrangement as a condition for obtaining the export licences for their semiconductors, including AMD's MI308 chips. The report said the Trump administration had yet to determine how to use the money. 'It's wild,' said Geoff Gertz, a senior fellow at Center for New American Security, an independent think tank in Washington. 'Either selling H20 chips to China is a national security risk, in which case we shouldn't be doing it to begin with, or it's not a national security risk, in which case, why are we putting this extra penalty on the sale?" US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said last month the planned resumption of sales of the AI chips was part of US negotiations with China to get rare earths and described the H20 as Nvidia's "fourth-best chip" in an interview with CNBC. Lutnick said it was in US interests to have Chinese companies using American technology, even if the most advanced was prohibited from export, so they continued to use an American "tech stack." The US official said the Trump administration did not feel the sale of H20 and equivalent chips was compromising US national security. The official did not know when the agreement would be implemented or exactly how, but said the administration would be in compliance with the law. Alasdair Phillips-Robins, who served as an adviser at the Commerce Department during former President Joe Biden's administration, criticized the move. 'If this reporting is accurate, it suggests the administration is trading away national security protections for revenue for the Treasury," Phillips-Robins said. (Reuters)
