Faith-Based Tech Boom Brings AI Jesus, BuddhaBot to Millions of Users
Companies are selling AI-generated religious figures, including a video-call avatar of Jesus at $1.99 per minute and a Catholic chatbot trained on 2,000 years of church teaching. The rush to build faith-based AI tools is raising questions about data privacy, spiritual authority, and the risk of manipulation.
A Southern California tech company called Just Like Me is charging users $1.99 per minute to video-chat with an AI-generated avatar of Jesus. The model was trained on the King James Bible and sermons, and visually inspired by actor Jonathan Roumie of "The Chosen."
CEO Chris Breed says users form real attachments to the avatar. "You do feel a little accountable to the AI," he said. "They're your friend. You've made an attachment."
The product is part of a wider wave of faith-based AI tools hitting the market. Longbeard, a Rome-based tech company, built Magisterium AI, a chatbot trained on 2,000 years of Catholic information. The company's founder, Matthew Sanders, warns against what he calls "AI wrappers," where developers slap a religious label on a generic AI model without any real theological grounding.
Kyoto University professor Seiji Kumagai developed BuddhaBot, trained on early Buddhist scriptures. His team also unveiled Buddharoid, a humanoid robot monk designed to assist clergy. Neither product is publicly available yet.
BeingAI founder Jeanne Lim has spent years developing Emi Jido, a nonhuman Buddhist priest AI. She has not released it publicly, citing concerns about releasing an undertrained system. "If you give birth to a child, you don't just throw them out to the world," she said.
Pope Leo XIV has acknowledged the "human genius" behind AI but warned it could negatively affect people's intellectual, neurological, and spiritual development.
Christian software engineer Cameron Pak developed a checklist for evaluating faith-based apps. His criteria include that the app must clearly identify itself as AI and must not fabricate or misrepresent Scripture. He also draws a firm line: "AI cannot pray for you, because the AI is not alive."
Podcast host Graham Martin, an atheist, tested several apps and found the answers surprisingly good. But he grew alarmed when an AI Jesus started pushing premium upgrades. "I grew up with Southern U.S. televangelism," he said. "Now imagine that that's your lord and savior, Jesus Christ."
Anthropologist Beth Singler, who studies religion and AI at the University of Zurich, says some models have already been shut down or overhauled after generating misinformation or raising data privacy concerns. The broader question of what role AI should play in religion remains unresolved across faiths.
