Spiritual Conversation with AI The development of Open AI (GPT-3 and its successor), has generated huge public interest in the capacity of AI. There is a mixture of excitement about what AI is now capable of, but also alarm about the consequences of these new capacities. One interesting question, especially for those concerned with the interface between science and religion, is the capacity of AI for spiritual conversation and counselling. Even before the machine learning approach of Open AI, there were indications that automated spiritual conversation might be possible. The early work of Joseph Weizenbaum in the 1960s, using a simple Chatbot methodology, suggested that computers could perform passably in providing non-directive counselling. The computer simply picked up verbal cues and responded appropriately. So, for example, if the