Generative AI Cannot Replace a Spiritual Companion or Spiritual Advisor

Numerous generative AI spiritual advisor platforms are freely available, with some thinkers aspiring to create an artificial spiritual companion. While not ruling out that a future technology might serve here, the paper argues that generative AI is simply not the right tool for this job. The paper describes spiritual companionship and advice-giving as a relational gold standard. This is contrasted with the operations and limitations of generative AI (specifically, large language models) in order to highlight unsurmountable obstacles, meaning that generative AI cannot substitute for spiritual companionship or advice. The paper follows three central lines: first, a spiritual companionship requires a relation between two bodied beings (for various reasons explored in this paper); second, spiritual companionship is more than propositional exchange (of text inputs and outputs), a limitation which threatens to reduce spiritual advice to a narrow problem-solving rubric; and third, the paper explores the question of what happens to spiritual advice, given that “spiritual” chatbots are already a disruptor and a very impoverished product. It is argued that the described failings of generative AI as spiritual companion are baked-in, intrinsic to how it works.