ChatGPT has made a significant impact on the academy. Many who were oblivious to the advances of artificial intelligence have now had to confront the fact that students, faculty, parishoners and pastors are all making use of ChatGPT. This session looks at ChatGPT and how it impacts both religion and the teaching of religious studies.
Though the sudden presence of generative AI has produced concern within higher education, a religious studies pedagogy focused on shaping the virtuosity of learners rather than on easily assessed end-products will avoid simple binaries of prohibition or embrace. As students pay attention to the habits implicit in the way their expert instructors conduct religious studies work, they are shaped to embody an orientation and sensitivity towards academic values of justice, wisdom, honesty, and excellence. Generative AI models, however, learn by paying attention only to end-products of human work. The world in which any user of generative AI can produce a polished end-product needs religious studies to maintain an undistracted focus on the means of shaping creative and just human learners. These students will, in turn, be equipped to shape the ongoing development of generative AI towards an embodiment of justice as they engage in a mutual process of prompting/catechesis.
ChatGPT offers an opportunity and caution for educators. In this paper we discuss the creation of an AI Study Buddy with the goal of helping students more deeply explore the ideas in lecture classes through conversation with an AI.
According to ChatGPT this paper discusses biases in ChatGPT's responses related to religion, particularly in its ability to tell jokes about certain religious figures. The author tests the algorithm's responses to various religious figures and finds inconsistencies in what is deemed acceptable to joke about. The author argues that this reveals biases in the algorithm's training data and content filters, which need to be addressed. Additionally, the author questions the definition of religion being used by ChatGPT and its creators, and argues that the way in which certain things are deemed acceptable to joke about or not can define what is considered part of a religion.