A Church of England bishop has warned that clergy should not use artificial intelligence to write sermons because it “cannot convey the faith or sincerity of the preacher”.
Archbishop Martin Seely, bishop of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich, said he recently attended a conference on preaching and found many people “very positive about the benefits of preaching”.
“All the AI app does is take other people's writings (from countless sources it has access to) and mold them into sermons according to the preacher's instructions,” one person argued.
But Bishop Seely stressed the dangers of excluding personal opinion from the process, saying “preachers should have faith and integrity and that needs to come through when they preach.”
“How can we convey the faith or sincerity of a preacher in an electronically composed sermon where the preacher has simply told an AI device what to write?”
“After all, in preaching, the preacher himself is an important part of the message.”
He added: “With technological innovation moving so quickly, I think it can be hard to remember what it means to be human in the midst of it all.”
“We have been tempted to treat technology as a substitute for humans, rather than as a medium for human connection…
“Chat GPTs may produce well-crafted sermons, but the best communicators are those who connect with their congregations on a deeper, human level.”
Bishop Seeley said some people would argue that AI was “just an extension of the current way preachers read books and other people's sermons before formulating their sermons”.
But, he continued, “AI-delivered sermons are no substitute for sermons delivered directly from the heart.”
“It may speed up the process of writing sermons, essays, etc., but as the name suggests, it will always be 'artificial.'”
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Nicholas Cardwell, a professor of information systems engineering at Suffolk University, had similar concerns, saying AI-generated sermons are “simply nice words that you tell a machine to produce.”
The AI is “a text generator on steroids,” he added, comparing it to predictive text, which doesn't require the author to type in words.
“When he preaches it will be from a position of faith. The AI will preach based on the information it is given and we should expect the information it is given to be accurate,” Prof Cardwell said.
He also supported Bishop Seeley's concern that advances in AI, and electronic communications in general, are contributing to a loss of “human connection”.
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AI has been hailed for a range of benefits, from being able to detect prostate cancer better than hospital doctors to recreating the voices of deceased stars to narrate audiobooks.
Former Prime Minister Sir Tony Blair warned yesterday that ministers must embrace the use of AI in the public sector to generate savings of £10 billion a year by the end of this Parliament and £35 billion within 10 years.
But school and university leaders worry that students are using the technology to take quick shortcuts when writing essays, while some, including Elon Musk, have predicted a “jobs apocalypse” with mass worker replacement.
Two months ago, the head of Tesla and SpaceX predicted that AI will soon surpass human intelligence and become so pervasive that “biological intelligence will be less than 1%.”
