As Muslims, we’ve needed to talk about the internet for a long time. It’s a conversation that is grossly overdue. We joke about ‘Sheikh Google’ but seldom interrogate our relationship and dependence on the search engine. Often when we inquire about the downside of our relationship with the internet it’s limited to social media –perhaps because the negative outcomes like increased gossip, blurred gender lines, and poor adab are more easily felt. But beside the glitter of social media is the more seemingly neural but no less problematic search engine –and now AI chatbots like ChatGPT.
Islam is a religion dependent on ‘isnad’ which means that we rely on securely passing down knowledge –one righteous soul to another, and relying on that information to inform our belief system and acts of worship. Much of this knowledge has been codified by scholarship and solidified within ‘schools of thought’ leaving only new issues and individual circumstances reliant on current scholarship/individual scholars. Thus looking in a Fiqh book, for example, and retrieving knowledge therein can guarantee that that knowledge has been verified and accepted by numerous scholars with ‘isnad’ –direct chains, back to the prophet, peace to him.
Googling upends that entire trusted system. This is not to say that Googling an Islamic inquiry will necessarily produce the wrong answer but that the process does not guarantee the same safety net as the established process of seeking knowledge for the past 1400+ years.
Nevertheless, Google will increasingly be the least of our issues, especially since –to Google’s credit, it cites its sources. You can Google an Islamic inquiry, click on the given result, and ensure to the best of your abilities that the information comes from a reliable source. ChatGPT is like Google without citations –though far more capable beyond its search engine capacities.
We should have been more vigilant when we started utilizing ‘Sheikh Google’ but ChatGPT is far more dangerous and antithetical to the Islamic process of acquiring knowledge. It doesn’t matter whether it sometimes gets answers right or sometimes ‘hallucinates‘ what matters is that it cannot be deemed a trustworthy source because its creators chose for the nameless faceless bots not to cite the human sources it feeds off of.
Unlike Google, there is no wiggle room for ChatGPT and the likes of it to be utilized as a source of knowledge –unless one were to fact-check every result, which would of course defeat the purpose. The prophet, peace to him, told us that a time would come when holding onto religion would be like holding on to hot coal (1). We live in an age where much of our life decisions are dictated by convenience. While we may not yet, by the grace of God, be living in the times the prophet described will come, we do find it difficult as Muslims –like all other modern people, to resist convenience. But we must, we have to insist on the small ‘inconvenience’ of in-person knowledge seeking, studying classical texts, or even careful use of search engines. The convenience of utilizing a technology like ChatGPT is not worth the price of misguidance.
And Allah knows best.
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Sidenote: I have an upcoming post on the problem with utilizing Google for Islamic inquiries so I won’t go into alternatives/solutions in this post. Please look out for that, thanks and bitTawfiq.
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Related:
- Space and Technology, https://bythefigandtheolive.com/spacetechnology/
- Instagram and Marriage Stability https://bythefigandtheolive.com/marriagestability/
- What is a scholar? https://bythefigandtheolive.com/whatisascholar
Further Reading/Sources:
1. حَدَّثَنَا إِسْمَاعِيلُ بْنُ مُوسَى الْفَزَارِيُّ ابْنُ بِنْتِ السُّدِّيِّ الْكُوفِيِّ، حَدَّثَنَا عُمَرُ بْنُ شَاكِرٍ، عَنْ أَنَسِ بْنِ مَالِكٍ، قَالَ قَالَ رَسُولُ اللَّهِ صلى الله عليه وسلم “ يَأْتِي عَلَى النَّاسِ زَمَانٌ الصَّابِرُ فِيهِمْ عَلَى دِينِهِ كَالْقَابِضِ عَلَى الْجَمْرِ ” . قَالَ أَبُو عِيسَى هَذَا حَدِيثٌ غَرِيبٌ مِنْ هَذَا الْوَجْهِ . وَعُمَرُ بْنُ شَاكِرٍ شَيْخٌ بَصْرِيٌّ قَدْ رَوَى عَنْهُ غَيْرُ وَاحِدٍ مِنْ أَهْلِ الْعِلْمِ .
Anas bin Malik narrated that the Messenger of Allah(s.a.w) said: “There shall come upon the people a time in which the one who is patient upon his religion will be like the one holding onto a burning ember.” Jami` at-Tirmidhi 2260, https://sunnah.com/tirmidhi:2260
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