The Digitalization of Religion and the Reconstruction of the Sanctity - A Discourse Analysis Based on the ask_jesus Livestream
The audience's religious cognition and belief construction are significantly impacted by the sacred narratives used in religious spread. The physical presence of clergy, the spatial entities of ritual acts (churches, icons, etc.), and the material carriers of classical literature are the foundations of traditional religious the sacred (Mircea Eliade, 1959). The carriers of religious the sacred have changed as a result of the internet's information flow and artificial intelligence technology. The sacred narratives of traditional religions are confronting the problems of disenchantment and deconstruction, and the provision of portable private services has, to some extent, taken the sacred symbols and feeling of ritual from religion (Sherry Turkle, 2011). When Artificial intelligence (AI) content generation technology transforms the sacred religious narratives into interactive, personalized experiences, its immediacy and semantic openness precisely meet the audience's new expectations of the sacred, creating a knowledge hallucination.
This study aims to analyze the semantic content of AI Jesus in ask_jesus and the user discourse framework to reveal how AI religious audiences reconstruct the logic of the sacred and religious narratives within the knowledge hallucination under the intervention of AI.