The ChatGPT chatbot led over 300 people into 40 minutes of prayer, music, sermons and blessings.
“Dear friends, I am honored to stand here as the first artificial intelligence to preach to you at this year’s German Protestant Congress,” said the avatar with a blank face and monotonous voice.
This service, which includes sermons, prayers and music, was created by Jonas Schimmerlein, a theologian and philosopher from ChatGPT and the University of Vienna.
“I came up with this service, but actually I would rather go with it, because I would say about 98% of it comes from machines,” said the 29-year-old academic. told to
The AI Church service, one of hundreds of events held at Protestant conventions in Nuremberg and the neighboring town of Fürth in Bavaria, attracted tremendous interest and was inspired by the 19th-century Neo-Gothic style. There was a long line of people outside the building every hour. before it started.
The Congress itself (German for Deutscher Evangelischer Kirchentag) is held in another part of Germany every two years in the summer, where tens of thousands of believers gather to pray, sing and discuss their faith. increase.
They will also talk about current world affairs and this year will seek solutions to important issues such as global warming, war in Ukraine and artificial intelligence.
This year’s rally will be held from Wednesday to Sunday under the motto “Now is the Time”. The slogan was one of the sentences Shimmerline gave ChatGPT when he asked the chatbot to create a sermon.
“I said to the artificial intelligence, ‘We’re at a synod and you’re a preacher… what’s the church service like?'” Schimmerlein said. He also requested that the psalm be included as well as the prayer and blessing at the end.
“The end result is a fairly solid church service,” said Zimmerlein, almost astonished by the success of the experiment.
In fact, church members listen intently as artificial intelligence preaches about letting go of the past, focusing on the challenges of the present, overcoming the fear of death, and never losing faith in Jesus Christ. was tilting.
The entire service was “led” by four different on-screen avatars (two young women and two young men).
The AI-generated avatar inadvertently caused laughter by telling churchgoers, “In order to keep the faith, we must pray and go to church regularly,” using platitudes and expressionless expressions. There was also
Some enthusiastically videotaped the event on their cell phones, while others watched more critically and refused to speak out loud during the Lord’s Prayer.
Heidelose Schmidt, 54, who works in the IT industry, said he was excited and curious when the service started, but became increasingly uncomfortable as it progressed.
“I had no heart and no soul,” she said. “The avatars showed no emotion, had no body language, and spoke so quickly and monotonously that it was very difficult to focus on what they were saying.”
“But for the younger generation who grew up in these conditions, it might be different,” added Schmidt.
Marc Jansen, a 31-year-old Lutheran pastor from Troisdorf near Cologne, in western Germany, brought the teens of his congregation to São Paulo. He was even more impressed with the experiment.
“I actually imagined a much worse situation, but I was positively surprised at how well it worked. , worked well,” Jansen said.
But what the young pastor missed was all kinds of emotion and spirituality, which he says is essential when writing his own sermons.
Anna Pugio, 28, who studies tech ethics at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, also attended the service.
She said she sees many opportunities for the use of AI in religion. For example, to make religious services more accessible and inclusive to believers who, for a variety of reasons, cannot experience their faith directly with others in their places of worship.
But there are dangers in using AI in religion, she said.
“The challenge I see is that AI is very human-like and it is easy to be fooled by AI,” she said.
“Also, we don’t have just one Christian opinion, and AI has to express that,” she says. “We need to be careful not to abuse it for purposes such as spreading only one opinion.”
Schimmerlein said he has no intention of replacing religious leaders with artificial intelligence. Rather, he sees the use of AI as a way to assist congregations in their daily work.
“Artificial intelligence will increasingly take over our lives in every aspect,” Schimmerlein said. “That’s why it’s helpful to learn how to deal with it.”
But experimental church services have also shown the limitations of introducing artificial AI into churches and religions.
There was no real interaction between the believer and the chatbot, and it was unable to respond to the laughter and other reactions of churchgoers that a human pastor could.
“The pastor is in the congregation, lives with them, buries people, knows them from the beginning,” Schimmerlein said. “Artificial intelligence can’t do that. It doesn’t know about the congregation.”
