Religion-based AI chatbots serve religious practitioners by bringing them godly wisdom through technology. These bots reply to spiritual and worldly questions by drawing insights or citing verses from the Quran, the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, the Torah, or other holy books. They answer religious and theological queries by claiming to offer historical contexts and providing guidance and counseling to their users. A criticism of these bots is that they may give inaccurate answers and proliferate bias by propagating homogenized versions of (...) the religions they represent. These “embodied spiritual machines” may likewise bear bias against women, their gender, and their societal roles. This paper crafts a concept intended to address this GPT issue by reimagining, modifying, and implementing a feminist approach to these chatbots. It examines the concepts and designs of these bots and how they address women-related questions. Along with the challenge of bringing gender and diversity-sensitive religious wisdom closer to the people through technology, the paper proposes a re-engineered model of a fair religion-based AI chatbot. (shrink)

Academic social networks and social media have revolutionised the way individuals gather information and express themselves, particularly in academia, science, and research. Through the lens of academics, this study aims to investigate the epistemological and psychosocial aspects of these knowledge sources. The epistemological attitude model presented a framework to delve into and reflect upon the existence of knowledge sources, comprising subjective, interactional, and knowledge dimensions. One hundred and twenty-six university academics participated in this study, including lecturers and researchers from different (...) higher education institutions in Latvia. The study employed two methods: the Epistemological Attitudes towards Sources of Knowledge Questionnaire and the Epistemological Attitudes towards Sources of Knowledge Semantic Questionnaire. The data analysis involved several procedures, including exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, correlation analysis, and test statistics. By implementing these methods, the study gained valuable insights into the sources of knowledge, examining them from two perspectives. The first perspective brought attention to the differences in academics’ appraisals by discussing their understanding, approach, use, and valuations of these sources. By scrutinising the constructs of meanings, the second perspective sheds light on the anticipated knowledge which is deemed ideal, the concrete knowledge that is both social and objective, and the subjectively valuable nature of academic social networks and social media. The findings underscore the specialised knowledge and qualities that academics rely on for producing knowledge. In terms of epistemology, methodology, social science, and education, the study holds theoretical and practical implications, especially in comprehending knowledge and its sources. (shrink)