“Specialists without Spirit”: GenAI Professors, Epistemic Networks, and Religious Education

Through anthropological and historical lenses, this article introduces three “GenAI professors”: fictional academics created via generative AI (GenAI) that have been shared online by people exploring exponential and eschatological interpretations of Large Language Models (LLMs). These GenAI Professors offer academic analysis of religious materials and ideas created through the same GenAI means as they were. In this article, these GenAI professors serve as a starting point for considering the questions and concerns raised by the growth of machine written material in our epistemic networks, which include, but are not limited to, sites and authorities in religious education. Explaining such GenAI professors within their own cultural context and history and locating them within a broader history of fake professors, this article considers the larger ideological aims behind such performance and whether they constitute provocative pranks, misleading hoaxes, or fraudulent confidence tricks. Further, this article explores what such GenAI professors tell us about our own conception of the ‘ideal professor’ when they see+m to fall short to the standards of the fields of religious studies and theology, or professional academic positionality and neutrality. Finally, warnings about GenAI, ‘AI slop’, and the death of the epistemic network are discussed.