AI Can Simulate Empathy, but Pastoral Care Requires Accountable Presence

Today, chaplains, clinicians, technologists and ethicists are meeting online for the Chaplaincy, Care and AI Symposium. The programme asks whether artificial intelligence is an assist, an adjunct or an adversary in healthcare chaplaincy, and places compassion, ethics and human dignity at the centre of the discussion.

The question reaches far beyond hospitals. People already turn to conversational systems at night, during grief, in loneliness and when they are reluctant to approach a pastor or counsellor. A system can respond immediately, translate language, suggest a prayer or point toward a resource. It may feel patient, attentive and non-judgemental.

Yet responsive language is not the same as pastoral presence. Christian leaders need a careful distinction: AI may support access to care, but it must not quietly assume the authority, confidentiality, safeguarding responsibility or relational commitment of a human caregiver.

Nomatter Sande's peer-reviewed study, published on 1 July, examines what she calls algorithmic empathy in AI-mediated pastoral care. It recognises the attraction of rapid, always-available responses while asking whether therapeutic presence can be reduced to convincing words. In the same journal issue, Max Tretter and Matthis Glatzel argue that the debate should neither romanticise the human nor ignore AI's genuine promise, but should examine more precisely what care loses when it is detached from human relationship.

These studies are conceptual and theological; they do not demonstrate clinical effectiveness…