(RNS) — As Saahera Ashraf scrolled through Instagram, she stopped on an elderly East Asian monk in a saffron robe. Yang Mun sat before the camera with a shaved head and a gentle expression, offering his followers a lesson on forgiveness.

They needed to forgive four groups of people, he told them: their parents, former partners, people who had hurt them and, finally, themselves. Ashraf listened. Hundreds of videos like it were posted on Mun’s page, offering advice about relationships, anxiety, eating habits and quieting an overactive mind, often from a softly lit temple or beside statues of the Buddha.

To Ashraf, 32, who lives in Toronto, Mun looked like what he claimed to be: an elderly teacher passing along lessons learned over a lifetime. “I have a couple of his posts saved,” she said.

Mun has more than 2.5 million followers on Instagram, where his videos draw millions of views and comments from people thanking him for his advice. His website describes him as a teacher of traditional Eastern wisdom.

But the monk does not exist. Mun was generated using artificial intelligence. No lifetime spent studying Buddhism is behind the elderly face on the screen, even as his website and social media accounts sell books and a guided healing program built around his teachings.

Yang Mun is not alone. Rabbi Goldman, an AI-generated Orthodox rabbi who dabbled in conspiracy theories, amassed more than 1.5 million Instagram followers before his account was removed. Father Justin, created as an AI Catholic priest, answered questions about faith, while Vedguru and Shaykh AI offer religious guidance to Hindus and Muslims, respectively. Some openly identify themselves as artificial intelligence, while others are harder to distinguish from the religious figures they imitate. But together, they are pushing AI into religious practices defined by human relationships and experiences and replacing them with missions that include selling products, promoting conspiracies and sharing spiritual lessons without a real spiritual leader behind them. 

“I feel a visceral ouch of almost duping people, thinking that they’re receiving teachings from a human being,” said Nikki Mirghafori, a Buddhist teacher and AI scientist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. As she moved through Mun’s Instagram page during an interview, she couldn’t find where the account told its millions of followers that the monk was artificial.

Then, she opened a video. Mun was telling followers with back and hip pain to mix coconut water, olive oil and lime juice and drink it for three days. “Oh my God,” she said. “This is not Buddhist at all.”

The saffron robes bothered her as much as the advice. People associate monks with “truthfulness and kindness and wisdom and love,” she said, and Mun was borrowing that trust while directing followers toward products. “He’s basically selling snake oil,” she said. “You can’t just put on a robe and start teaching.”

Rabbi Mois Navon, an Orthodox rabbi and engineer based in Israel, saw a different problem in Rabbi Goldman, an AI-generated character who appeared online with a long gray beard, black hat and coat. In videos watched by millions, Goldman posed as a rabbi while promising to explain why Jews are rich or what Jews supposedly know about money that others do not — repackaging a centuries-old antisemitic stereotype linking Jews with money and financial power, and using the appearance of an Orthodox rabbi to deliver it, Navon said. 

The controversial AI Rabbi Goldman account was removed from Meta platforms.

“Rabbi Goldman was a deep fake for antisemitism,” Navon said. “It’s manipulative and deceptive, and it’s very bad.”

The character amassed more than 1.5 million Instagram followers before the platform removed his account. His videos also directed viewers to a $9 guide titled, “How to Make and Invest Money Like the Jews.”

Navon said he did not object to the idea of AI teachings on Judaism altogether. An openly identified tool trained on Jewish texts could help people understand Jewish law or find religious material, he said. But what mattered was the viewer knowing that the authority on the other side of the screen was artificial, he said.

Swami Sarvapriyananda, a Hindu monk and resident minister of the Vedanta Society of New York in Manhattan, had a different, yet related, experience: About two years ago, he met an AI version of himself. A computer science project at the University of Texas had trained a system on more than 1,000 hours of his recorded classes and lectures. Researchers invited him to test it.

“I must admit, the AI performed very well,” Sarvapriyananda said. The system could even direct him to a video and timestamp where he had previously said something it attributed to him. “Very difficult to dispute that,” he added. 

Sarvapriyananda uses AI himself and believes it can help scholars search enormous collections of religious texts. But when he learned that platforms were marketing “AI gurus,” he hesitated. “The teacher embodies the teaching,” Sarvapriyananda said. A guru, he explained, is not simply someone who can retrieve the right passage or provide the right answer. The teacher is expected to have lived the spiritual and moral teachings being passed on.

Not every artificial religious guide hides what it is. Shaykh AI, a chatbot based on the teachings of Vancouver-based Sufi Muslim teacher Shaykh Nurjan Mirahmadi, identifies itself immediately. Asked who it was and who operated it, the chatbot described itself as a “compassionate Sufi guide,” before adding: “I am not a human being or a spiritual authority myself.” It said its responses draw solely from Mirahmadi’s approved teachings and official resources.

Christians have also seen how quickly boundaries can blur. In April 2024, the website Catholic Answers introduced Father Justin, a 3D AI character designed to look and speak like a Catholic priest. In at least one interaction, the chatbot heard a user’s confession and responded with what sounded like sacramental absolution — the forgiveness of sins that, in Catholic teaching, can only be administered by a priest.

After criticism over presenting the AI as a priest, Catholic Answers dropped the “Father” title. The organization acknowledged it had not anticipated users seeking sacramental absolution from a chatbot.

Kushal Pereira, a pastor and vice president of Prophet Jerome Fernando Ministries based in Sri Lanka, said such episodes show the danger of giving a machine the appearance of religious authority. “It’s a very dangerous thing because you can seem real and give wrong information,” Pereira said. Someone could hear something “totally outside the Bible,” he said, “and people might still believe it.”

Pereira uses AI to find Bible verses but said pastoring involves relationships built through marriages, deaths, family problems and crises of faith. “A relationship always thrives with a soul,” he said. AI can imitate parts of that relationship, “but it’s not real.”

None of the religious leaders interviewed rejected AI outright: Navon saw a use for it in navigating Jewish law; Pereira uses it to find Scripture; and Sarvapriyananda willingly watched an AI trained on his own teachings reproduce his answers with surprising accuracy. For Sarvapriyananda, however, an AI knowing the teachings and being a spiritual teacher remain two different things.

He described the difference with the analogy of a diya, a small oil lamp used in Hindu traditions. One lit diya can light another, he said, just as a teacher passes something on to a student.

“AI can help maybe with information and training and insight,” Sarvapriyananda said, “but it can’t actually transmit spirituality.”