New Delhi (India), 11th June 2023: In a surprising move, the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT, invited the congregation at Fuerth’s St. Paul’s Church to rise from their seats and praise the Lord.
The ChatGPT chatbot was embodied by an avatar of a bearded Black man on a massive screen above the altar, then it began preaching to the more than 300 people who had gathered on Friday morning for an unusual and experimental Lutheran church service generated almost entirely by AI.
The AI preached in an expressionless voice and said, “Dear friends, it is an honour for me to stand here and preach to you as the first artificial intelligence at this year’s convention of Protestants in Germany.”
ChatGPT and Jonas Simmerlein, a theologian and philosopher at the University of Vienna, devised the 40-minute service, which included a sermon, prayers, and music.
The young Scholar in conversation with The Associated Press said, “conceived this service — but actually I rather accompanied it, because I would say about 98% comes from the machine.”
The entire service was “led” on screen by four separate avatars, two young women and two young males.
The AI-generated avatar unwittingly drew laughs at times, such as when it used cliches and informed the churchgoers with a deadpan look that “to keep our faith, we must pray and go to church regularly.”
Some people joyfully videotaped the ceremony with their cell phones, while others regarded it with suspicion and declined to speak out loud during The Lord’s Prayer.
However, the experimental church service demonstrated the limitations of applying artificial intelligence in church or religion. There was no genuine connection between the believers and the chatbot, which couldn’t respond to the churchgoers’ laughter or other reactions like a human pastor could.
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