What happens when you ask an AI chatbot a question about the Bible? The answer, it turns out, depends on which AI you ask — and that is a problem.

Bible Society, in collaboration with the Cambridge Centre for Chinese Theology, has published a report examining how AI chatbots and Bible apps respond to questions where the Bible's teaching is genuinely contested. The findings are thought-provoking. Different AI systems give different answers to the same theological questions — and those differences are not random. They reflect the training data, the design choices, and the implicit theological assumptions of the teams that built them.

This matters for several reasons. First, millions of people now use AI tools to help them understand the Bible. If those tools are systematically biased towards particular theological positions — whether conservative or progressive — they are not neutral aids to understanding. They are, in effect, theological teachers, shaping how people read Scripture without being transparent about the perspective they are bringing.

Second, the report raises questions about accountability. Who decides how an AI system interprets Scripture? What theological tradition do the designers belong to? And what happens when the AI's interpretation conflicts with the tradition of the person using it?

These are not abstract questions. They are urgent ones, as AI becomes an increasingly significant part of how people engage with the Bible. The report is a call for the Church to engage seriously with these questions — not to reject technology, but to approach it with the same critical discernment that we bring to any other tool for biblical interpretation. The Bible is not a data set. And the Holy Spirit is not an algorithm.