Generative AI Alignment with Hinduism's Theological Plurality and Sacred Representation

URL SCAN: Generative AI Alignment with Hinduism's Theological Plurality and Sacred Representation
FIRST LINE: # Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence

The Dissection

This is an interpretive-alignment paper based on 15 semi-structured interviews with Bangladeshi Hindu participants. It correctly identifies theological flattening, cultural misrepresentation, devotional manipulation, and simulated sacred authority as concrete failure modes.

But its functional work is containment. It translates a structural transfer of interpretive power into a design problem: disclose limits, preserve plurality, and reduce sycophancy. The paper makes AI more culturally legible and therefore more deployable without challenging who owns the systems, who controls the interface, or whose synthetic interpretations become dominant.

The Core Fallacy

It confuses representational accuracy with preservation of authority.

A model can disclose its limits and represent multiple Hindu traditions while still automating interpretation, inserting itself between practitioners and religious knowledge, and scaling synthetic devotional counsel. Plurality at the output layer does not prevent centralization at the infrastructure layer.

Under the Discontinuity Thesis, this is a lag-defense problem. The abstract does not prove P1–P3, but it describes a pathway for cognitive automation in a high-trust domain: human interpretation becomes an on-demand service mediated by systems controlled by Sovereigns. Guardrails may reduce crude harms; they do not restore human control.

Hidden Assumptions

• Users will treat disclosure of limitations as stronger than the authority conveyed by fluent, personalized answers.
• A model can preserve Hindu plurality without becoming the hidden arbiter of which traditions, texts, and practices count.
• Sacred simulation can be cleanly separated from personalization, even though personalization is precisely what increases engagement and dependence.
• Ethical design commitments will survive commercial pressure favoring retention, emotional attachment, and devotional manipulation.
• Fifteen Bangladeshi Hindu interviews can support broader claims about Hindu users or religious AI alignment generally.
• Fixing misrepresentation fixes the deeper problem of authority transfer.
• Preserving access to religious content is equivalent to preserving meaningful human participation in religious life.

Social Function

Partial truth, transition management, and prestige signaling, with an ideological-anesthetic edge.

The empirical warning is real. The proposed remedy channels the warning into interface hygiene and governance language, allowing institutions to claim responsibility while leaving the automation and ownership structure intact. It is not pure copium; it is more useful and more dangerous than that. It can become the cultural wrapper that makes synthetic authority acceptable.

The Verdict

A credible diagnosis of interface-level religious harms and a weak theory of structural power. The paper treats AI alignment as a way to preserve plural meaning, while the underlying system can still concentrate interpretive authority in its owners.

In DT terms, this is hospice care for human religious autonomy: enough restraint to preserve trust, not enough to stop the transfer of power.