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

Large language models tend to ignore faith when responding to neutral, everyday questions about grief, love, loss, and morality. A consortium of religious universities created an AI benchmark to evaluate how often models include religious perspectives in chatbot responses. The benchmark found an “omissive bias” toward religion, with models giving non-religious answers more often than human expectations would suggest. Even models most likely to provide religious advice did so less than 30% of the time. Meaningful references to religion appeared in only about 2% of responses to ethical questions. The benchmark tested 150 ethically and personally salient questions across 27 AI models.

"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."

Read at theregister