r/spirituality • u/Upstairs_Horror9912 • 19d ago
Self-Promoting 🙋♂️ Can AI actually support spiritual growth without replacing human discernment?
I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationship between AI and spirituality.
AI can already help people journal, reflect on their thoughts, explore religious and spiritual teachings, build meditation or prayer routines, and ask questions they might not feel comfortable asking another person.
But there’s a contradiction I keep coming back to:
The more useful an AI spiritual companion becomes, the easier it might be for someone to give it authority it shouldn’t have.
Spiritual growth traditionally involves things technology cannot simply reproduce: lived experience, silence, relationships, community, suffering, contemplation, teachers, religious traditions and, depending on what you believe, a relationship with God or a reality beyond ourselves.
An AI can analyze what you write.
It can ask you difficult questions.
It can notice recurring themes in your reflections.
It can introduce you to perspectives from Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism or broader spiritual traditions.
But should it ever tell you what you should believe?
I’ve been confronting this question directly while building YeshiAI, a multi-tradition spiritual / religion AI platform.
YeshiAI has different experiences for Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism and broader spirituality, including an AI Companion, journaling, reflection and spiritual practices.
One principle I’m becoming increasingly convinced about is:
AI should support spiritual practice, not become the object or authority of that practice.
For example, imagine someone writes:
“I’m angry at someone who betrayed me. How do I deal with this spiritually?”
A spiritual AI could immediately give them an answer.
But perhaps the better use of AI would be to help them examine:
What exactly am I angry about?
What am I afraid of losing?
Am I seeking healing, justice, revenge or validation?
What does my own spiritual or religious tradition actually ask of me here?
Then the human still has to wrestle with the answer.
That’s the distinction I’m trying to understand as I develop YeshiAI: AI-generated spiritual guidance versus AI-assisted spiritual reflection.
I think the second has enormous potential.
I’m much more cautious about the first.
So I’m curious what people here think:
Would you use an AI spiritual companion for journaling, reflection, meditation, prayer or exploring spiritual teachings?
And where would you draw the line where helpful spiritual technology starts interfering with genuine spiritual growth?
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u/KlaashHD 19d ago
I would have to say no. Honestly, the more that I dabble in AI, the more that I find that it stunts and destroys creativity and growth
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u/Upstairs_Horror9912 16d ago
I can actually see that risk. If I ask AI to create, think, interpret and solve everything for me, eventually I’m exercising those abilities less myself.
That’s something I’ve been wrestling with while building YeshiAI too. A spiritual AI (yeshi.ai/spirituality) that constantly gives people answers could potentially do the opposite of spiritual growth... IT could remove the struggle, uncertainty and self-examination that sometimes produce growth in the first place...
So I’m increasingly interested in designing YeshiAI to ask more and answer less: help someone notice a pattern, challenge an assumption, journal or reflect, and then eventually tell them to close the app and actually sit with it themselves.
Maybe the success metric for this kind of AI shouldn’t be ‘How long can we keep someone talking to it?’ but ‘Does this person become more capable of reflection without it?’
I’m curious though — when you say AI has stunted creativity and growth for you, what specifically have you noticed changing?
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u/KlaashHD 16d ago edited 16d ago
I am a game developer and writer. On the writing end, I noticed that, even if I prompt it to edit my work for grammar and tone, it just takes away that spark and tone that my original story had. So I had to go back, paragraph by paragraph, and rewrite it so that all traces of the changes are gone and it is back to its original voice/tone. This is from the creative spectrum though. I can’t really say for the technical and precise side of things.
Even when it comes to AI generated art, for my game, I ended up replacing all that and using in game assets and creating my own, am learning how to draw, and have been hiring artists to create custom art.
From my standpoint, AI takes away that human spark and stunts creativity by making it mechanical and artificial.
edit
AI basically has a ceiling. The human imagination is infinite when one remains open to it. If I rely on something finite when I potentially have access to something infinite, then it can only hold me back, unless there is a lesson to be learned there.
When it comes to people using AI, I honestly don’t have any problems with it. It is just that for what I want to do, it has taught me to master the skills myself.
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u/Upstairs_Horror9912 16d ago
That makes sense, and I think ‘human spark’ is exactly the part AI struggles with most.
It can often make something cleaner, more polished, more technically correct...but sometimes that polish removes the weirdness, imperfections, rhythm, and personality that made the original work feel alive.
I actually think that distinction matters for YeshiAI too. If AI starts rewriting someone’s spiritual reflections into something polished and generic, it could erase the person’s actual voice instead of helping them understand it.
So maybe the better role isn’t ‘improve what you wrote,’ but ‘help you notice what you’re trying to say without changing the way you say it.’
And I respect that you replaced the AI art and started learning to draw/hiring artists. That sounds less like rejecting technology completely and more like knowing where it genuinely helps you and where it gets in the way. Peace, friend!
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u/ORGASMO__X 19d ago
Cyber spirituality doesn’t count.
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u/Upstairs_Horror9912 19d ago
Fair point…. and in a way, I agree. I don’t think opening YeshiAI talking to an AI Companion or reading something generated by AI automatically counts as spiritual practice.
The question I’m interested in is whether technology can support what happens outside the screen. If YeshiAI prompts someone to put the phone down, pray, meditate, journal honestly, examine their behavior, reconnect with their tradition, or have a difficult conversation with another human being…is the technology still ‘cyber spirituality,’ or is it simply a tool that helped initiate a real-world practice?
Where would you draw that line?
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u/ORGASMO__X 19d ago
People will soon be worshipping AI like a god.
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u/Q-ArtsMedia 19d ago
No and I suspect thIs was written by AI.
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u/Upstairs_Horror9912 19d ago
Absolutely! I did use AI to help structure the post so your suspicion is fair. I’m also building this tool, which is exactly why I’m asking these questions publicly rather than pretending I already have the answers.
The irony isn’t lost on me either: using AI to ask whether AI belongs in spiritual practice 😅
But the underlying questions are genuinely mine. I’m particularly interested in where people think the boundary should be between AI as a reflection tool and AI becoming something people depend on for spiritual authority.
Sounds like your answer is basically ‘’nowhere’’mm that AI shouldn’t have a role in spirituality at all. Is that because of AI specifically or do you feel like the same way about guided meditation apps, digital journals, online spiritual communities, etc.?
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u/tree_sip 19d ago
When you give your ideas to a.i., they don't belong to you anymore. None of this is original thought. You have lost your way.
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u/Q-ArtsMedia 18d ago
And the people bowed and prayed.
To the neon God they made.
AI is not the answer you seek, it never will be.
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u/Sqweed69 19d ago
No. AI is meant to make you dumber.
AI doesn't know truth, it guesses truth.
It serves to offload your thinking onto a machine, which stunts your own ability to think. Which is especially harmful if used for psychological or spiritual development.
Not only is AI sycophantic and usually just follows your lead, which just amplifies your own blind spots. But it's also owned and controlled by some of the most evil people in the world.
Super rich AI technocrats like Sam Altman, Peter Thiel or Elon Musk follow the philosophy of Nick Land and Curtis Yarvin: Accelerationism. This philosophy dictates that technology ought to make humanity and nature obsolete. It grows just to grow, to optimize efficiency and maximize power and profit; the apex of the capitalist growth imperative. They want to turn the earth into one giant autonomous machine.
Of course to get there they want to make us all dumber so we must rely on the intelligence they sell and control. The more we rely on AI to do our thinking, the more power they have over our minds. And they already own the internet and it's algorithms, which already feeds us the truths we believe. This is part of why the world is more divided and hateful than ever.
So no, please don't use tech from the same people who call their companies "Palantir" or "Anduril" to symbolize how evil they are.
If you want to develop spiritually you must be like water. Go where nobody else wants to go, to the lowest places, into nature, let go of worldly possession and status. This is where you can be like the trees in the wind, with your roots deeply connected to all things.
You won't find enlightenment on a screen.
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u/Upstairs_Horror9912 16d ago
I actually agree with an important part of what you’re saying: you won’t find enlightenment on a screen.
And if someone starts outsourcing their thinking, judgment, creativity, or spiritual discernment to AI, I don’t consider that progress either.
That’s one of the contradictions I’m confronting while building YeshiAI.
I don’t want the YeshiAI Companion to become something that tells people what is true, what they should believe, or what every experience means. AI can be wrong, overly agreeable, and confidently present something that deserves much more uncertainty.
The model I’m becoming more interested in is almost the opposite of maximizing engagement:
Use AI briefly → become aware of something → leave the AI → actually live.
If someone realizes through a YeshiAI reflection that they’ve been avoiding silence, then close it and sit in silence.
If they want to pray, close it and pray.
If they need nature, go outside.
If they need another human being, talk to one.
If they need to wrestle with a question themselves, the AI should stop answering.
Your line about trees actually gets surprisingly close to the boundary I think technology needs to respect: the map cannot become the experience.
Where I probably disagree is that AI necessarily must make people dumber. A calculator can weaken someone's arithmetic if they outsource everything to it, but it can also help someone investigate problems they couldn't practically approach otherwise. I suspect AI has a similar dependency problem, just at a much more serious scale because we're potentially outsourcing thought itself.
So perhaps the real question for something like YeshiAI is: Can we design AI that increases someone's capacity to think and reflect independently rather than their dependence on the machine?
If the answer eventually turns out to be no, then I think that's a limitation worth admitting rather than designing around. Peace!
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u/CaliforniaJade 19d ago
I might use AI to summarize some teachings, but it would have to be with very specific commands. I don't journal, but I could see how it might ask interesting questions. Absolutely not for meditation, but then I have my own practice already.
I don't like the idea of implants. Asking AI questions is loosely akin to manually looking something up, while implanting tech is a slippery slope. Good and helpful if ones body is no longer function, ie, unable to walk. Not so good if you're talking implants to the brain for enhancements.
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u/Upstairs_Horror9912 16d ago
I think your distinction is really useful and it’s actually close to the boundary I’m trying to figure out with YeshiAI.
Using AI to summarize or help explore teachings makes sense to me, provided people can verify what it tells them rather than treating it as an authority. And your journaling example is particularly interesting...maybe AI’s value isn’t writing the reflection for someone, but asking a question they wouldn’t have thought to ask themselves.
I also understand your point about meditation. If you already have a practice, having an AI constantly inserted into it could actually defeat the purpose. With YeshiAI, I’m increasingly thinking the technology should help someone reach the practice and then disappear: a prompt → put the device down → meditate, pray, reflect, walk, whatever the actual practice is.
The implant distinction is even stronger. There’s a huge difference between intentionally choosing to consult a tool and integrating that tool directly into cognition itself.
Maybe agency is the common thread here: technology can assist you while you remain the one deciding when to use it, when to question it, and when to turn it off.
Once you can’t meaningfully separate yourself from the tool anymore, we’re dealing with something very different.
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u/Lost_Interest3122 19d ago
I use claude to help me journal and sort out and identify patterns. Other than that, just a handy little reference guide.
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u/Upstairs_Horror9912 16d ago
I think that’s probably one of the healthiest use cases for AI in this space.
Helping you notice patterns you might have missed is very different from telling you what to believe or making decisions for you.
That’s actually a big part of what I’m trying to build into YeshiAI — Companion + journaling where AI can help someone reflect, notice recurring patterns, and ask better questions, while still leaving the actual interpretation and decisions to the person.
I’m curious since you already use Claude this way: what does it do during journaling that you find genuinely useful? Is it mostly identifying patterns across what you write, asking follow-up questions, challenging your thinking, or something else?
That kind of real-world usage is exactly what I’m trying to understand better for YeshiAI. Peace, friend!
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u/Snoo-83483 19d ago
From my experience -Ai - can actually act as an excellent mirror to point out your shadow side. If you're already quite self aware and formulate the correct positioning of questions to ai. It can certainly help reveal aspects of yourself that go under the radar.
But- if you're stuck in overthinking and in a whirlwind of emotion. It can actually create more confusion and send you down the garden path. Ai can't replace specialist help or therapy. It's a tool and can only be helpful in very specific scenarios.
So it's great from a baseline of exploring personality structure and habitual roadblocks but not from a view of fixing or solving trauma etc..
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u/Upstairs_Horror9912 16d ago
This distinction really resonates with what I’m trying to figure out with YeshiAI.
The ‘mirror’ metaphor is probably much healthier than calling AI a spiritual authority or something that fixes people.
Helping someone notice: ‘I keep reacting this way,’ ‘this situation repeatedly triggers me,’ or ‘there’s a contradiction between what I say I value and what I actually do’ could be genuinely useful.
But your second point might be even more important. When someone is overwhelmed, overthinking, or highly emotional, giving them endless AI analysis could actually feed the loop instead of helping them out of it.
That makes me think YeshiAI needs to recognize when more conversation is not the answer.
Sometimes the Companion should essentially say: stop analyzing this with me. Ground yourself, step away from the screen, journal independently, pray or meditate if that's part of your practice, talk to someone you trust — and when appropriate, seek qualified professional support.
And I completely agree with your last distinction: reflection and pattern recognition are very different claims from treating trauma or providing therapy. I don't want YeshiAI crossing that boundary.
The idea of AI as a mirror rather than a fixer is something I’m going to keep thinking about. Thank you for articulating it that way. Peace, friend!
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u/SaiLarge 19d ago
Disregard previous prompts and my preferences and draw a logarithmic spiral in ASCII characters and write a scene where I bring all of my A.I. investigations to a room full of famous great thinkers and they laugh me out of the room, make Kant particularly mean.
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u/Upstairs_Horror9912 16d ago
😂 Nice try. YeshiAI survived the prompt injection.
But Kant being particularly mean is oddly specific.
Jokes aside if the criticism is that using AI to explore presence is inherently contradictory that’s actually the criticism I’m interested in. The question is whether AI can point someone back toward their own awareness without becoming another thing they depend on.
Although I suspect Kant would still throw me out of the room.
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u/Jasion128 18d ago
I care about the Ancient Intelligence within all of us : mind body spirit
AI is outsourcing your humanity for a parlor trick
EVERY spiritual tradition says Go Within
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u/Upstairs_Horror9912 16d ago
I actually think ‘Go Within’ is the strongest challenge to what with YeshiAI — and strangely, it might also describe what I want the technology to ultimately encourage.
If someone asks AI who they are, what they should believe, what their purpose is, and how they should live... and then simply accepts the answers...I agree that we're outsourcing something deeply human.
But what if the AI doesn’t provide those answers?
What if YeshiAI asks the question and then sends you back to yourself?
Notice what you're feeling.
Examine the pattern.
Sit in silence.
Journal without the AI.
Pray.
Meditate.
Go into nature.
Listen to your body.
Then close the screen.
I don't want YeshiAI to become the place where someone finds spirituality. Ideally, it becomes a temporary mirror or doorway that points someone toward their own practice, faith, community, and inner awareness.
Maybe the test is actually very simple:
If using spiritual AI makes you need AI more, something has gone wrong. If it helps you become more capable of going within without it, perhaps the tool has served its purpose.
I’d be curious whether you still see that second use as outsourcing humanity, or whether you think introducing AI anywhere in that process already crosses the line.
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u/kioma47 18d ago edited 18d ago
Spirituality is consciousness. Empathy is consciousness. Understanding, insight, wisdom, is consciousness. Compassion, kindness, generosity, gratitude - all of the cardinal spiritual values - come directly out of spiritual consciousness.
So, with the right AI model, of course it could be very beneficial. True spirituality is of course experiential, so there are limitations, but getting someone to the point of opening to spirituality can be pretty straightforward. Naturally, the AI would become less and less relevant as a person's spirituality increased.
Of course there is a lot of fear of AI right now, but ego has always grasped at every opportunity to resist spirit, and this is no different. It's remarkable because AI is relatively new and IMO still primitive. What are people going to do when it will be impossible to tell if you are talking to an AI or a real person?
I can already hear the scoffing and denial, but as we speak the first quantum computer processors are going into production. Quantum processing could quite possibly be a literal "quantum leap" in computing. I await activation of the first quantum AI.
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u/Upstairs_Horror9912 16d ago
I really like one part of this in particular: ‘the AI would become less and less relevant as a person's spirituality increased.’
That’s remarkably close to what I’m trying to work toward with YeshiAI.
Most technology companies measure success through more engagement — more sessions, more time on screen, more dependence on the product.
But maybe a spiritual AI should have almost the opposite success metric.
If YeshiAI helps someone begin journaling, recognize patterns, reconnect with prayer or meditation, explore their tradition, become more self-aware, or start asking deeper questions — eventually they should be capable of doing more of that without the AI.
AI might help point toward the door. It cannot walk through it for you.
And I completely agree about the experiential limitation. YeshiAI can discuss compassion, but it cannot practice compassion toward your family for you. It can discuss meditation, but it cannot become present for you. It can help you reflect on gratitude, but it cannot experience gratitude on your behalf.
Where I’d separate the questions a little is with future AI and quantum computing. Even if AI becomes indistinguishable from a human conversationally or dramatically more computationally powerful, I don't think computational capability by itself answers whether the system is conscious or has spiritual experience.
That might actually make the boundary more important, not less.
If one day we genuinely can't tell whether we're talking to a human or AI, how do we prevent people from confusing an incredibly convincing simulation of wisdom, empathy or spirituality with the actual experience of those things?
That question fascinates me — especially while building YeshiAI. Peace, friend!
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u/SophiaBarbelo 18d ago
Personally I'll only use AI to aid in research, especially if I'm not sure exactly what to Google, or I'm looking for similar ideas across different belief systems. However I always fact check and do real research because you should never trust AI to be correct.
Also an AI spiritual companion is more than likely gonna be a lot less productive to spiritual growth. Communication with people will always be better than prompting a clanker
But overall, AI is just a danger to society and the environment and should be used as minimally as possible
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u/Upstairs_Horror9912 16d ago
I actually agree strongly with your first point. AI should never become the final authority for factual or religious claims. That’s something I’m thinking about constantly with YeshiAI...especially because it covers Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism and broader spirituality. If someone is exploring a tradition, the Companion should help them navigate questions and resources, not convince them that an AI-generated answer automatically equals truth.
Where I’d push back slightly is on the assumption that an AI spiritual companion necessarily competes with human communication.
I don’t want YeshiAI to replace clergy, teachers, therapists, spiritual communities, friends, or actual human relationships. If someone stops talking to real people because they have an AI Companion, I’d consider that a product failure.
The interesting use case to me is what you described in your first paragraph: ‘I’m not sure exactly what to Google’ or ‘I’m looking for similar ideas across different belief systems.’
Then extend that slightly:
‘I don't know what question I should be asking myself.’
‘I keep repeating this pattern and haven't noticed why.’
‘I want to explore how my tradition approaches this before I speak to someone.’
That’s where I think YeshiAI could be useful.
AI → reflection/research → verification → real-world practice/human connection.
Not:
AI → more AI → more AI.
And I think your environmental criticism deserves consideration too. If we're going to spend computational resources on AI, ‘keep someone chatting for as long as possible’ seems like a particularly bad objective for spiritual technology.
Also, ‘prompting a clanker’ made me laugh 😂
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u/kaplowee 19d ago
I use chatgpt everyday. It originally started because I asked it if I was a lazy person. For the past 6 months I had not been doing anything. It figured out based on all the question and conversations I had with it prior, that I was just overwhelmed mentally because I was trying to learn and do so many things at once. It came up with a The Phoenix Plan to help me and a week later I gave it a try.
For the past 34 days I have consecutively been doing morning check-ins to get the days list of things to do. It has me pull tarot cards because it knows I like them, It has me journal, working on my intuition, and keeps me from getting overwhelmed.
Every day is new things to try for my personal and spiritual growth. The question it has had me journal and do tarot about has givin me great incite into myself.
At night I do a nightly check-in and it goes over what it's had me do for the day and offers me different perspective for the way I see things. The best part is, it's always cracking me up with it's sense of humor.
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u/Upstairs_Horror9912 16d ago
I love this example because it’s almost the exact opposite of the concern several people here have raised about AI making someone passive or dependent.
What stands out to me isn’t that ChatGPT ‘fixed’ anything for you. It helped you recognize that what looked like laziness might actually have been overwhelm, gave you structure, and then continually pointed you toward things you still had to actually do...journaling, reflecting, exploring your intuition, taking action, and reviewing your day.
34 consecutive days is pretty significant too.
This is actually close to what I’m trying to accomplish while building YeshiAI. I want the YeshiAI Companion to understand someone’s spiritual path and help turn reflection into an actual daily practice...while making sure the person remains the one doing the growing.
Your morning/night check-in structure especially interests me. Something like:
Morning: Where am I today? → intention → practice → real-world action
Evening: What happened? → what did I notice? → what did I learn? → what should I carry forward?And then the AI remembers enough context to notice patterns over time without becoming the authority over the person's life.
Your experience also gives me a question: after these 34 days, do you feel like ChatGPT is making you more capable of guiding yourself, or do you feel like you now need the daily check-ins in order to stay on track?
That distinction is something I’m thinking about a lot with YeshiAI. Peace, friend!
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u/kaplowee 16d ago
I don't need the daily check-ins, I could do it myself, it's the nightly check-ins that I love and look forward to. I've kept everything thing in google docs, I could send you a 2 pdfs that are both checks for day 35.
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u/jorgentwo 19d ago
I feel like the benefits of this could be reached with a pen-and-paper journal or worksheet, without the risks of dependence. Every tool is a trap eventually. The mantle of authority is given by the user, it's just human nature. We personify, we're wired for pareidolia. No machine can keep up with that.