How AI is reshaping religion in roles from pastors and monks to shamans
Artificial intelligence is being used for everything from divination services to church sermons. Could it destroy religion or be its saviour?
An exhibition hall in Seoul’s Insa-dong neighbourhood houses a small shrine just large enough for one person, where colourful ribbons, bells, ancestral tablets, candles and a single cushion are carefully arranged.
When a visitor inputs their personal information into an ancestral-looking digital tablet and sits on the cushion, the soft voice of a middle-aged woman begins to speak.
“I am a being that transcends human knowledge,” she says. “I know truths beyond your understanding and can foresee the future. If you have any questions, ask me.”
This shrine is ShamAIn, an artificial-intelligence fortune-telling system introduced in January by a research team led by Nam Taek-jin, an industrial design professor at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (Kaist).
The AI shrine provides divination services based on Korea’s traditional fortune-telling concepts.
Users enter their name, birth date and occupation, and the AI responds according to the principles of saju, a form of traditional fortune-telling based on a person’s birth year, month, date and time.