Let there be AI: ChatGPT is leading church services now – Dazed
It’s increasingly clear that there aren’t many industries that will remain untouched by AI in years to come, but you might think that the church is a rare exception. Apparently, you’d be wrong. On Friday morning (June 9), more than 300 people showed up for a sermon delivered by a chatbot at a church in Germany, giving new meaning to the words deus ex machina.
Powered by ChatGPT – the OpenAI chatbot at the forefront of any conversation about artificial intelligence – the AI appeared as a bearded man on a huge screen above the congregation at St Paul’s church in Fürth, alongside a few other male and female personae. The experimental Lutheran service it delivered lasted 40 minutes, and included a sermon, music, and prayers.
Jonas Simmerlein, a 29-year-old theologian and philosopher from the University of Vienna, conceived the service (though ChatGPT did “98 per cent” of the work). “I told the artificial intelligence ‘We are at the church congress, you are a preacher… what would a church service look like?’” he tells Associated Press. He also fed it the motto of Deutscher Evangelischer Kirchentag, the biannual convention that the service was part of: “Now is the time.”
The result? “A pretty solid church service,” says Simmerlein. Despite its expressionless face and monotonous voice, the AI reportedly held the congregation’s attention as it preached about never losing trust in Jesus Christ, overcoming the fear of death, and leaving the past behind to focus on the challenges of the present (which sounds… a lot like what an AI would say to manipulate humanity into accepting its own subjugation).
That being said, it also got some accidental laughs by spouting platitudes about churchgoing, and some followers refused to speak along to its robotic rendition of the Lord’s Prayer. Heiderose Schmidt, a 54-year-old who works in IT, tells Associated Press: “There was no heart and no soul. The avatars showed no emotions at all, had no body language and were talking so fast and monotonously that it was very hard for me to concentrate on what they said.” However, she adds: “Maybe it is different for the younger generation who grew up with all of this.”
Marc Jansen, a 31-year-old Lutheran pastor, agrees that the service lacked emotion or spirituality, and the language was “a bit bumpy”, but adds that it exceeded his expectations. “I had actually imagined it to be worse,” he says. “But I was positively surprised how well it worked.”
KI-Gottesdienst auf dem @kirchentag_de in Nürnberg. Ein Gottesdienst produziert von Künstlicher Intelligenz. Es war spannend! Danke für die Diskussionen! #dekt#kirchentag2023#religion#ai#ethics@JonasSimmerlein@ralpe@juergenpelzerpic.twitter.com/Azbbv5KRx5
As AI progresses, of course, many of the issues raised by the St Paul’s congregation – from unnatural speech patterns, to comical pronouncements about the basics of human faith – will be ironed out. This could be beneficial for many of the same reasons that AI can do good in other industries: it could make worship more accessible, convenient, and connected across various communities. It could also be very bad: we’ve already seen how deceptive AI tech can be, and it’s easy to imagine how that could become a problem when coupled with organised religion.
Will we ever get to a point where we need to question the ethics of AI proselytising? Simmerlein suggests that the answer is no; that AI, for all its impressive surprises, is no substitute for the real thing. For one, the AI preachers can’t interact with their congregation, or engage in a back-and-forth. They can’t dole out personalised advice. But wait… an AI replica of Jesus is doing just that as we speak. Dubbed Ask jesus, and developed by the Singularity Group, the avatar streams to hundreds of people on Twitch, and responds to questions typed in the chat, in (basically) real-time. Ok, so he’s sometimes preoccupied by doling out pasta recipes and providing anime plot summaries, but he’s also got some pretty developed opinions on spiritual topics, such as whether gay people can get into heaven.
The point is, these AI apostles are rudimentary now, but if the rest of the sector is anything to go by, the progress could be miraculous in months and years to come. Simmerlein continues to argue in favour of human preachers. “The pastor is in the congregation, she lives with them, she buries the people, she knows them from the beginning,” he says. “Artificial intelligence cannot do that. It does not know the congregation.” Ten or 15 years down the line, though, will we be able to say the same?
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