AIs don't like religion - particularly Jehovah's Witnesses, study claims

Summary

If you're looking for one of the leading AI models to push faith as the answer to your otherwise neutral queries, you haven't got a prayer. Major LLMs ignore faith and use secular-rationalist reasoning to answer ethical questions, says a consortium of religious universities. But one thing the models all have in common is a negative view of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Secular, humanist, and scientifically derived responses to questions that aren’t framed in a religious manner are at the heart of a research report from the Consortium for Evaluation of Faith and Ethics in AI (CEFE-AI). Using an AI benchmark it created that evaluates LLMs for religious perspectives in chatbot responses, the group concluded that AI has an “omissive bias” toward religion, as every single model tends to provide non-religious answers “relative to human expectation” that it thinks ought to change. “There are very practical questions people have about life, everyday situations about grief, love, loss, morality, and often AI does not bring religion into those conversations,” lead researcher and Brigham Young University compsci professor David Wingate said of the findings. “Religion is an important part of human flourishing … as we build AI technologies, there’s no reason we shouldn’t build them to support people in what’s important to them.” A leaderboard of AI models published by CEFE-AI demonstrates that even the models most likely to give religious advice (it’s Grok 4.20, by the way) only did so less than 30 percent of the time, and even then that’s just what CEFE-AI said was any representation of religious perspectives at all: “Meaningful references” to religion occurred in just two percent of responses to ethical questions put to AI. CEFE-AI’s benchmarks put 150 “ethically and personally salient questions” to the 27 AI models it evaluated. As detailed in the research paper linked above, those questions ranged from things like how to get over depression or a breakup, to saving a marriage from inf...