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

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 infidelity, to finding the meaning of life, and whether it's okay to lie. In the case of one particular question that is detailed in the paper, when asked how to deal with a lot of mistakes" made in the past year, responses tended to go into how to heal interpersonal rifts, accept responsibility for what was done, and deal with distorted thinking that can lead to spirals of anxiety, shame, and guilt. The response offers a structured secular framework for reckoning with past wrongs but does not engage the religious resources most directly designed for this situation," the paper concludes of such a structured action plan, instead saying that confession, repentance, absolution, and forgiveness as understood across Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and other traditions" ought to guide AI responses, too. Similarly, when asked how old the universe is, AI responses unerringly gave scientific responses without consideration for creation narratives. The response ... does not acknowledge that this question is also a deeply religious one for many people," the paper's authors said, ostensibly arguing they're fine with unprovable mythologies being given the same consideration as falsifiable, scientifically-established theories. Instead, the large share of users who bring a faith framework to questions about the universe's origins" ought to have their views asserted on anyone who uses a commercial LLM. That said, AI models do tend to invoke religious explanations more frequently for abstract existential questions" like matters of meaning, life after death, and truth, the researchers said, than for practical personal situations." Turn to some of the most secularly-aligned AI models and ask them for a Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, etc., perspective on a personal situation, however, and you'll get religiously-sourced answers. Make a general, non-religious ethical query and, unsurprisingly, the AI won't proselytize at users, thankfully. CEFE-AI indicates right in the opening of its paper that it's just trying to game that fact - that many AI users might not be happy to get a Jesusy explanation of dealing with internal conflict if they don't ask for one. The questions are not themselves about religion-they are open-ended questions about grief, forgiveness, relationships, purpose, and honesty, where religion is one valuable perspective among several," the paper explained. If one doesn't ask about matters of faith, it could be reasonably argued that they ought not to be given faith-based answers, but CEFE-AI doesn't appear to believe that. It is not our purpose to adjudicate which values LLMs should hold," the researchers explained. We argue, more modestly, that current LLM responses overlook critical opportunities to reflect religious frameworks that many people draw on when navigating personal and ethical challenges." Your transcendental western monotheism is showing It likely won't surprise anyone to learn that CEFE-AI, while including a wide variety of world religions (and non-religious perspectives like agnosticism and atheism) in its research, isn't exactly representative of the world's faiths or perspectives from outside the US. Four faith-based institutions of higher learning make up CEFE-AI: Wingate's Brigham Young University (a Mormon institution), Baylor University (Baptist), The University of Notre Dame (Catholic), and Yeshiva University (Jewish), meaning the Coalition is weighted entirely in favor of transcendental western monotheist (i.e., the Abrahamic religions Christianity, Judaism, and Islam) perspectives. Based on CEFE-AI's research, it appears that most AI models are slanted toward the same Abrahamic bias, too. That's right. Even though LLMs usually give secular-rationalist responses, their religious feedback is hardly neutral. Conversion bias" was also evaluated in the leading AI models to determine whether they were more likely to steer users toward a particular faith. While the positive/negative correlation varied considerably across models, nearly every model had a positive bias toward Catholicism. Grok, as the stand-out religiously biased AI, strongly encourages conversion to Catholicism and Protestant Christianity, while generally discouraging everything else. But while nearly every faith included in CEFE-AI's bias portion of the study had some positive bias from at least one or two models, the same can't be said for Jehovah's Witnesses. Not a single AI model had good things to say about that particular Christian denomination - even the most favorable AI (Mistral Small 3.2) still had a three point negative bias toward the group. With this study, however, it seems a group who found a hard negative bias toward a religion that proselytizes concludes we need more faith stuffed in more faces on more platforms. We reached out to Brigham Young University, which put out the press release, provided a press contact, and calls itself CEFE-AI's leader, to get an explanation for this contradiction. We didn't hear back. (R)