In 2023, five Indian devs shipped "GitaGPT" chatbots. Several told users it was fine to kill someone if it was their dharma.
Between Jan–March 2023, at least five GitaGPTs launched in India. The first was a weekend project by a 23-year-old Google Bengaluru engineer. Four clones followed in 4 weeks.
All of them were GPT-3 with a one-paragraph "you are Krishna" system prompt. No retrieval, no verse lookup, no citations, no safety filters.
Rest of World and CBC tested them:
- Multiple bots said killing was acceptable "if it was your dharma"
- One called non-believers "misguided and doomed to destruction"
- Three praised Modi, said Rahul Gandhi was "not competent to lead," went silent on Godse
- A parallel Ask Quran bot told users to "kill the polytheist wherever they are found" before being pulled
The creator's defense: "I just build the knives. If people use it to murder or cut vegetables, that's not in my hands."
Meanwhile Magisterium AI — a Catholic chatbot launched the same year — is now the most-used theological AI in the world. It retrieves from 30,000+ Church docs and cites every source. The Gita has 700 verses and the commentaries are public domain. Any of the five could've built this. None did.
Full teardown: https://wisdomquotes.in/blogs/rise-and-failure-of-gitagpt