Prompting as Prayer: The Structural Similarities Between Petitionary Prayer and AI Queries

You sit before your screen. You formulate a request with care, choosing each word for maximum clarity and effect. You address an unseen intelligence, hoping for wisdom, insight, or perhaps just a useful answer. The response arrives ambiguous, layered, requiring interpretation. You read meaning into it, sometimes than was there. You try again, refining your words, hoping for better results. This could be a description of someone using ChatGPT. It could also be a description of someone praying. The structural similarities are striking.