A couple of months ago, at the end of a long day, I opened my phone to a video of a monk sitting with his legs crossed. “Everything will begin to gently turn in your favour the moment you realise that, right here, right now, you already have everything you need,” he said. It wasn’t necessarily bad advice, but something about the video felt off. When I clicked through to Yang Mun’s Instagram profile, which has over one million followers, I realised why – this wasn’t some Buddhist monk making enlightening and educational videos from a temple in a far-off location. This was AI. 

Shalev H, the creator of Yang Mun, has revealed on X that building a digital guru earned him half a million dollars in just six months. “No real face. No studio. No team. Just a generated character that talks about health, mindset, and life advice,” he wrote. Mun’s advice is fairly generic: the fake influencer spews out general wellness catchphrases, like “some growth happens in silence” or “what you feed the mind becomes the world you walk in”, while presenting them as Buddhist teachings. As large language models bring us the “lessons” of everyone from Deepak Chopra and yassified Jesus to a made-up monk, Catholic priest and rabbi, can our most burning spiritual questions be answered by artificial spiritual influencers? 

Estrella Lo, a 24-year-old based in Toronto, grew up in a Catholic household, but stopped going to church by the time she was 18. She started collecting crystals and watching tarot card readings instead. “I was just desperate to believe in something… anything,” she says. “These days, I mostly believe in the power of manifestation: that if I put out positive energy, I will receive positive things in return.” This year, she started seeing AI spiritual creators on her TikTok. They were tarot readers with oddly smooth skin who “barely blinked”. The videos usually had captions encouraging people to interact by commenting “claim” – a digital affirmation used to signify that you want to bring the energy from the video into your life.

Over time, Lo noticed that a lot of the spiritual influencers showing up on her For You page (real or AI) were promoting an app called Starcrossed, which offers to tell you the exact month and year you will meet your soulmate (and what they look like) based on your personal astrology. “The influencers claim that through the app, you can receive a drawing of your soulmate from a real astrologer,” she says. “As an artist myself, I can easily tell the pencil drawings are not real. The texture looks digitally manipulated.” 

Where Lo saw a cheap digital fabrication, others see a source of ultimate truth. One 2023 study found that just thinking about God made people more inclined to accept AI recommendations. The automation bias at play here means that people are often more likely to trust AIs over human creators, which allows some digital gurus to position themselves as infallible spiritual authorities. This only adds to today’s culture of algorithmic conspirituality [a portmanteau describing the overlap between conspiracy theories and New Age spiritualism], and with it the growing belief that algorithms can deliver meaningful, personalised revelations. This is the idea behind the common catchphrase in spiritual corners of the internet: “If you are seeing this, I have a message for you”. This popular phrase insinuates that AI is a spiritual force, bringing messages to you at exactly the right moment of your spiritual journey, rather than recommending a video based on your interests and past engagement habits.

“As long as we are trapped within that comfort zone, which we generally are with social media and AI, we’re not growing. Growth takes outside influences, like nature or other people”

“I think of coming across a video about spirituality, the same as catching 11:11 on the clock,” says Lo. “I just take it as a good omen, but it becomes dangerous when people believe in every single video they come across.” For Dr Noreen Herzfeld, a professor at St John’s School of Theology and Seminary, the primary concern is that if people treat AI like a religious idol, they're more likely to fall for inaccuracies and hallucinations. She’s tracked the rise of AI spiritual advisors from impersonal robots – like BlessU-2, a robot priest that delivers blessings in five languages and beams light from its hands – to the modern LLMs, which are sycophantic by design. “As a counsellor, most of the time it's going to give back to you what it thinks you want to hear, and that is not good counsel,” she says. 

Most of the most popular human creators (the ones that AI spiritual guides are being built to replicate) follow an algorithmically rewarded formula: delivering one-minute-long messages which are removed from any cultural or religious context and inviting viewers to “claim” them in the comments. There’s a reason why Shalev H, who is Israeli, knew that a monk would appeal to an American audience: Western spiritual trends have appropriated and commodified Eastern practices like yoga, astrology and Ayurvedic or Chinese medicine for decades (if not, in some cases, centuries).

There are plenty of people in the Christian church (and other Abrahamic religions) who are comparing using AI to devil-worshipping. (Pope Leo has called for AI to be “disarmed”, although largely for secular reasons, such as the threat it poses to workers’ rights and the danger of autonomous weapons). AI as a “sin” is not the conversation I’m trying to have here: whether or not your belief system includes AI is entirely up to you. There is a valid argument, however, in exploring how the use of AI for spiritual guidance individualises faith to a potentially detrimental point, breaking down the essential community aspect of spirituality. Dr Herzfeld says this has the potential to impact our personal growth. “As long as we are trapped within that comfort zone, which we generally are with social media and AI, we’re not growing,” she says. “Growth takes outside influences, like nature or other people."

But people are turning to digital gurus for a reason: young people, increasingly disillusioned with organised religion, are moving away from institutions that don’t align with their political and individual values. Many of these people are finding spiritual community online, with AI becoming part of that process. “I think AI broadens access to spirituality, and offers reduced hesitation, shame, or confusion around participating in the space more directly,” says Zara*, a 29-year-old in New York. “It is a low-lift way for people to try things out, and it's really fast. I’d be surprised if it didn't eventually lead to them seeking out a real person, though.” AI chatbots are also accessible 24/7, available to you at 3am to guide you through long, dark nights of the soul without judgment.

Zara uses AI for spiritual information, but not “meaning-making”. She’s seen AI hallucinate something while using it for astrology, and while she has interacted with AI spiritual influencers, they usually can't hold her attention. “It feels impersonal,” she says. And that’s because it is. Digital gurus are unlikely to be the catalyst for any real spiritual transformation because they are, first and foremost, businesses seeking to profit from our search for meaning. Faith is deeply human, and the best teachings are acquired over time. As Lo puts it: “AI will never be able to provide wisdom based on lived experiences, so it’s completely ironic to use something that lacks consciousness for something as meaningful as spirituality.”

* Name has been changed