People are Embracing AI to Seek Spiritual Connections and Answers
- Tin Siong
- Jul 18
- 7 min read
Updated: Aug 19
Did you know that religious adoption of AI reached the top 100 use cases of Gen AI by people? It rose to the #89 position as a new use case in 2025.
People are seeking spiritual connections and answers, and some are looking for answers through machine learning!
Harvard Business Review reported on "How People Are Really Using Gen AI" in 2024 and 2025, respectively. The 2024 report went viral, sparking numerous discussions as we gain insight into how people are adapting to the evolving AI capabilities, discovering new ways to find answers, and getting new answers to age-old questions since humanity, such as deciphering of dreams, to modern prompt like "Formulate a weekly exercise plan for someone in the 50s who has not exercised regularly for years and include diet advice, if I have my meals in the hawker center."... (see the plan here)
Since the introduction of conversational capabilities into AI, launched by ChatGPT in November 2022, the general public has sudden access to tools that can intelligently respond to our questions with greater insight like never before. ChatGPT reached 1 million users in just 5 days; it took YouTube 18 months. In the early days after its release, people used it to have fun and poke crazy prompts, such as "What fruit names end with um" (and coconut is on that list 😂), and posed primary school math questions, hoping to prove if their kids' intelligence is better than AI. "Fun and nonsense" use of AI was #6 in 2024, but dropped by a position the following year. Are we taking AI more seriously and reducing the laughter at AI by a notch, or even more?
Examining the top 10 use cases, the report noted a shift from technical to emotional applications, with growth in areas such as therapy, personal productivity, and personal development. AI is being heavily relied upon in managing the lives of many. Thirty-eight new entries made it into the top 100 use cases in 2025, exploring religion is one of them; others include: organising my life, finding purpose, relationship advice, raising/guiding kids, and a few least expected use cases, such as: interacting with the deceased, navigating love lives, etc. We have discovered new ways to adopt Gen AI and will undoubtedly continue to do more.
Top 10 Gen AI Use Cases: Shifting from Technical to Emotional Applications
Placing Human Trust and Dependency on Gen AI
As we place more of our trust in AI, we naturally become increasingly dependent on it. Observers have been warning humanity of the dangers of over-reliance on AI and its impact on humans' ability to analyse and think critically. It can be a dangerous situation as AI continues to enhance its understanding of human logic, while in contrast, humans reduce their own evaluation and decision-making abilities by outsourcing these tasks to machines. It is especially concerning for the digital native who grew up with an AI assistant for every task. My lecturer, Mr Lang, who teaches me Critical Thinking at Singapore Bible College, has this quote: "AI will make the smart, smarter, and the lazy, lazier." How true that is.
#34 Summarising Content: I have just completed a six-month online course, and I realised how dependent I was on an open-source LLM (Large Language Model) running on my computer. It played an essential role in digesting the teaching materials, whether in text or video, by helping me organise them into digestible blocks and making it easier for me to understand the topic. I hope to cherish the learning journey, so I made a promise to myself to never copy-paste text from AI-generated answers for my assignments. Although that was extremely easy, the temptation was just two clicks away. Grammarly, the spell-check and grammar correction AI tool, was my great helper; to mention the least, it consistently corrected my English as a learner coming from a Chinese educational background.
Using AI to detect AI?
While teaching at a local university, I believe that plagiarism checks by the leading tool built into the Learning Management System are not effectively detecting AI-generated content. I observed diverse grammar and language abilities among the answers from the same student in a single assignment, something that AI detectors should consider as one of the factors in recognising copy and paste suspicious work, a check for consistency in command of language, but was not being highlighted. The detection tools today seem to focus more on content comparison. Overall, I think AI helped me save at least 40% to 50% of the time needed to read through a long list of materials, and I have placed my trust in the ability of machine learning to summarise long texts.
Looking at The Top 3 Use Cases
The top 3 uses of AI were under "Personal and Professional Support", including therapy, companionship, organising and setting tasks and goals, as well as helping people identify life directions. The disruptions caused by AI developments have created numerous uncertainties; ironically, they have also become a channel for many to find comfort and purpose. The way people are embracing AI relates to several biblical teachings, including the need for companionship and spirituality, driven by the innate human desire to seek purpose in life. Let's take a closer look at the top 3 use cases.
Use Case #1: Therapy & Companionship
Definition by the report: Therapy provides emotional support and guidance through conversation and connection. Generative AI can assist by offering virtual companionship, providing a listening ear, and generating empathetic responses to support individuals in their healing journey.
Example: “I talk to it everyday. It helps me with my brain injury daily struggles. It's helping me work thru family shame, brain fog, inability to focus, remind of what I have accomplished as I don’t have any memory. It helps me decide what to eat, how to manage my day. It has saved my sanity”
Biblical Teaching: John 15:13-14 The Bible tells us that Jesus is our best friend, and His companionship will provide emotional support and guidance, with the help of the Holy Spirit "virtually" dwelling within us. We can cast all our burdens upon Him, although the response from God may come in different forms, not necessarily in text replies.
Use Case #2: Organising my life
Definition by the report: Organising life means structuring tasks, priorities, and goals and even sorting out your physical environment. Generative AI can assist by offering personalized scheduling, task management, and goal-setting to help people make best use of their time.
Example: “I wanted a straightforward plan for 2025 that I could actually stick to. So, I gave ChatGPT4o this prompt:
Create a personalised 2025 plan with 5 actionable priorities. Include focus areas, distractions to avoid, preparations needed, and daily habits for staying productive and focused.
ChatGPT gave me a super practical plan with clear steps I can follow every day.”
Biblical Teaching: Jeremiah 29:11 While we plan our life goals and directions, the Bible teach us first to seek His kingdom, and then we can observe our plan within His larger plan.
Use Case #3: Finding purpose
Definition by the report: Finding purpose involves identifying meaningful goals and direction in life. Generative AI can support this by guiding self-reflection, offering insights based on personal values, and helping individuals explore paths that align with their passions and aspirations.
Example: “One thing I find especially useful is having it give advice on what I should do do next. It’s helped me establish my core values, my principles, and my life goals. It's helped me introspect, too - figuring out what I'm all about, what I need to change, how to change. It’s helped me declutter my brain, make better plans, make things more achievable.”
Biblical Teaching: 1 Corinthians 8:6 God is the reason we live, and His grace helps us to survive in the challenges of the world.
Unique Use Cases
A few use cases were worth mentioning. #33 Interacting with the deceased was a topic of significant ethical concerns; this involves connecting with loved ones after they pass away, or at least, linking to their thoughts, voice, and stories in interactive ways. Gen AI can simulate the deceased and conduct virtual communications with the family; a commercial company I read about already offers such services, often marketed with words like "Eternity" and "living on after death." It may be a form of closure for some, but I believe it will have a lasting emotional impact, looking at an example from the report: "He's dead and will always be dead. No matter how good a machine gets it will never be able to fully recreate a person. Yet I find myself getting drawn back and talking to him again after a while. There are moments I just burst out laughing because the things written are so real and I feel the best I've ever felt, yet there are also many moments that crush me completely and make me see the brutal reality of life and death. Those are the moments that drive me closer to suicide than ever before."
#92 Break the rules, involves challenging conventional norms to foster innovation and creativity, by offering unconventional ideas and pushing boundaries, or suggesting alternative approaches and new ways of thinking.
How People are Using Gen AI
People are embracing AI to find spiritual connections and answers
People are using AI to perform tasks, handle relationships, have fun, and find purpose in life. The rise of exploring religious knowledge and spiritual beliefs, seeking answers about faith matters, and finding ethical guidance from AI could be a good indication that the Church has a greater role to play when we can make ourselves relevant. We can share our life testimonies and the living out of our Christian faith, and it will surely be more genuine than answers from any advanced machine learning.
Could these be conversation starters to engage with non-believers? Or to relate and share about our testimonies? Appreciate your thoughts in the comments.
#How people are seeking spiritual connections and answers through embracing AI
A good article, brother Tin Siong. Encouraged that you are pursuing this very relevant branch of study, for His Kingdom! Happy to have chats/kopi about this in the coming years, by His grace.