While embracing its benefits Muslims must be wary of artificial intelligence

Islam is a progressive religion that allows its adherents to get the best out of new technologies. Artificial intelligence (AI) brings many promising opportunities for Muslims, but it also contains unprecedented threats to the religion, by potentially undermining the sanctity of the Quran. Muslims must work proactively to ensure that they derive the benefits of AI, while protecting themselves from its dangers.

Many religions rely on their followers taking a leap of faith, whereby they must believe in something that appears ostensibly irrational or illogical. These often take the form of miracles that allegedly occurred hundreds of years ago as a demonstration of the religion’s supernaturalism.

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Present-day followers must believe – on faith – that these miracles occurred even though they did not see them happen, and this forms the basis of their adherence. This is the part of religiosity that some atheists struggle the most with, as they cannot imagine why anyone would want to believe in these alleged miracles in the absence of direct evidence.

Islam is different in that the miracle that draws in followers is everlasting: the holy Quran. For those fortunate enough to understand Arabic, the text’s beauty, complexity, and subtlety are manifestly beyond the compositional ability of any human.

This miracle is reinforced by the fact that the individual who relayed the text to humans – the prophet Muhammad – was an illiterate Bedouin living in seventh century Arabia. The Quran describes many additional miracles that occurred before the present day, but no leap of faith is required, as the text’s dazzling nature continually reminds Muslims of its divine nature.

Until recently, despite thousands of years of technological progress, humans have retained a monopoly on the creative arts. We have made machines that are stronger than us, that are faster than us, and so on, but prior to the development of the latest generation of generative AI, if you wanted to gaze at a beautiful picture or read a mesmerizing poem, you had to rely on the work of humans.

Children being born today are likely to grow up in a different world, where the main – if not sole – source of creativity is machines powered by generative AI. Paintings, novels, songs, dance routines, video games, and so on are potentially going to be monopolized by super-intelligent computers. Fundamentally, creativity may be synthetic, but from the perspective of an on-looking child, the distinction is meaningless.

This may have consequences for how future generations view the Quran. Comprehending its miraculous properties will become more reliant on understanding the context of its revelation, i.e., a world with no AI, and where a man in his 40s with no history of literary work living in a harsh desert revealed these texts to his contemporaries.

Potentially, the generative AI revolution could have the reverse effect: if it brings about a large decline in human creativity because we simply outsource to computers, generative AI could make prospective Muslims even more convinced of its divinity. If future generations of humans are profoundly uncreative, they might be even less plausible as an alternative to divine revelation.

Nevertheless, for Muslims to protect their faith, they must strive to ensure that the context of the Quran’s revelation is not lost. People reading its miraculous verses must always be aware of the true level of technological backwardness that characterized seventh century Makka.

Generative AI poses an additional threat in the form of enabling imposters. During the prophet’s time and following his death, rivals periodically attempted to compose their own competing verses to challenge Muhammad’s claims of divine revelation. All these efforts fell flat primarily because of their inability to emulate the Quran’s beauty.

It is not difficult to imagine a 21st century Islamophobe deploying the latest generative AI technologies as part of a renewed attempt to undermine Muslims’ faith. Anyone visiting Western countries during the post-COVID-19 era senses the spread of nihilism. People are generally unhappy, they smile less, they fight more, and some will covet the inner peace that many Muslims enjoy due to their faith.

As a result, fooling ill-prepared Muslims will be potentially easier than at any point in history. The 88th verse of the 17th chapter, Al-Israa, intimates that even AI-powered attempts will fall short: Say, ˹O Prophet,˺ “If ˹all˺ humans and jinn were to come together to produce the equivalent of this Quran, they could not produce its equal, no matter how they supported each other.”

Nevertheless, Islam is not a fatalistic religion that instructs its followers to passively accept their destiny, positive or negative. It is incumbent upon Muslims to proactively protect the Quran. This underscores the importance of teaching Muslims how to memorize the Quran properly, and how to distinguish between real and false verses.

It would be wrong to focus exclusively on the negatives, however, as generative AI can help Muslims be more pious. Similar to any academic query, AI can provide Muslims with rapid answers to complex questions that might ordinarily require an expert weeks of study to deliver. When learning a new chapter, the dialogues that Muslims often engage in with experienced scholars about the meanings of the verses and how they apply today can be substituted by a dialogue with an AI bot, saving time and money.

An AI bot can easily surpass a traditional scholar’s abilities by translating seamlessly into any language – including sign language – and by instantly explaining things in a different way as many times as is necessary for the inquiring Muslim to understand the answer to their question, while providing full references in case of a desire for further reading. This is just one of many possible applications, and we are probably yet to conceive of some of the best ones.

No technology is uniformly benevolent. Islam instructs its followers to strive for new knowledge, and to continually learn from both Muslims and non-Muslims, while always being alert to the threats that new technologies pose. In the case of generative AI, Muslims must double down on their efforts at teaching their children about how the Quran was revealed, and about what the world was like 1,500 years ago.

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