Deus Ex Machina: Church In Germany Conducts AI Created Mass To Mixed Reviews

Culture

from the holy-shit dept

To say that developments in the realm of artificial intelligence are coming fast at this point is a wild understatement. There’s a ton going on in the space, some of it showcasing amazing things we can now do using AI, some of it showing where humans are still very much needed, and much of the rest watching governments trying to figure out how to best screw it all up for everyone else.

But in all of these cases, we’re talking about the laws and circumstances of men and women. Not satisfied with AI rendering unto Caesar that which are Caesar’s, one church in Germany decided to turn AI loose on its congregation, hosting what appears to be the first AI-driven mass.

On Friday, over 300 people attended an experimental ChatGPT-powered church service at St. Paul’s church in the Bavarian town of Fürth, Germany, reports the Associated Press. The 40-minute sermon included text generated by OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot and delivered by avatars on a television screen above the altar.

The chatbot, initially personified as a bearded man with a fixed expression and monotone voice, addressed the audience by proclaiming, “Dear friends, it is an honor for me to stand here and preach to you as the first artificial intelligence at this year’s convention of Protestants in Germany.”

I will admit it’s always refreshing to a religion-skeptic like myself to see members of the faith community and leadership actually embrace more technology, rather than rail against it. So in that view, this is pretty cool. It also appears to not have gone absolutely terribly. Jonas Simmerlein, a professor at the University of Vienna and the man behind the production of these proceedings, commented that nearly all the content of the mass was AI-generated, save a couple of percentage points where humans got involved. Humans had to query and guide the construction of the mass, but ChatGPT built nearly all of the content and AI avatars delivered the sermon.

“I told the artificial intelligence, ‘We are at the church congress, you are a preacher … what would a church service look like?’” Simmerlein told the AP. In his ChatGPT prompt, he asked for the inclusion of psalms, prayers, and a blessing at the end. “You end up with a pretty solid church service,” Simmerlein said.

Solid, yes, but not without its detractors. Apparently some in the congregation took issue with the lack of emotion in the avatars, or their speech patterns. In other words, the delivery lacked humanity, which is certainly important when delivering a religious proceeding. It’s also worth noting that the congregation was informed that of the AI-drive nature of the mass, which could certainly color some of their judgements.

Still, others that attended were pleasantly surprised.

Others, like Marc Jansen, a 31-year-old Lutheran pastor, had a more positive outlook. “I had actually imagined it to be worse. But I was positively surprised how well it worked. Also, the language of the AI worked well, even though it was still a bit bumpy at times,” said Jansen.

Simmerlein told the AP that his intention wasn’t to replace religious leaders but to utilize AI as a tool that could assist them. For instance, AI could provide ideas for upcoming sermons, or it could expedite the sermon-writing process, freeing up pastors to devote more time to individual spiritual guidance.

And this is the point we’ve been making against some of the doom-sayers out there that are predicting that AI will result in the end of much of the middle class being employed. There’s just not a great deal of evidence that this is true. Humans are still needed, either in the querying process for AI, or to take what AI can build and inject the humanity into it that in so many cases is absolutely critical to the total output.

If there is one area of concern, it might just be AI leading a congregation down dangerous paths as it attempts to interpret something as inherently flawed as human-driven religion.

If, in the future, pastors begin to rely on LLMs for guidance while writing sermons, parishioners might end up hearing unintentionally novel interpretations of religious doctrine due to how this technology can easily make things up. To that end, Verge Senior Editor James Vincent quipped on Twitter, “Looking forward to future schisms caused by language model hallucinations—the equivalent of mistranslations between Aramaic and ancient Greek.”

Deus ex machina come to life, as it were. Just so long as we aren’t turning our AI tools into zealots.

Filed Under: ai, furth, germany, mass