“Can a Chatbot Preach a Good Sermon? Hundreds Attend Church Service Generated by ChatGPT to Find Out”, 2023-06-10 (; similar):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestantism_in_Germany
Hundreds of German Protestants attended a church service in Bavaria that was generated almost entirely by artificial intelligence. The service was created by ChatGPT and Jonas Simmerlein, a theologian and philosopher from the University of Vienna. It was one of hundreds of events at the convention of Protestants in the Bavarian towns of Nuernberg and Fuerth, and it draw such an immense interest that people formed a long queue outside the building an hour before it began. The ChatGPT chatbot, personified by different avatars on a huge screen above the altar, led the more than 300 people through 40 minutes of prayer, music, sermons and blessings.
…This year’s gathering is taking place from Wednesday to Sunday under the motto “Now is the time.” That slogan was one of the sentences Simmerlein fed ChatGPT when he asked the chatbot to develop 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 said. He also asked for psalms to be included, as well as prayers and a blessing at the end. “You end up with a pretty solid church service”, Simmerlein said, sounding almost surprised by the success of his experiment.
Indeed, the believers in the church listened attentively as the artificial intelligence preached about leaving the past behind, focusing on the challenges of the present, overcoming fear of death, and never losing trust in Jesus Christ. The entire service was “led” by 4 different avatars on the screen, two young women, and two young men.
At times, the AI-generated avatar inadvertently drew laughter as when it used platitudes and told the churchgoers with a deadpan expression that in order “to keep our faith, we must pray and go to church regularly.” Some people enthusiastically videotaped the event with their cell phones, while others looked on more critically and refused to speak along loudly during The Lord’s Prayer.
Heiderose Schmidt, a 54-year-old who works in IT, said she was excited and curious when the service started but found it increasingly off-putting as it went along. “There was no heart and no soul”, she said. “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.”
“But maybe it is different for the younger generation who grew up with all of this”, Schmidt added.
Marc Jansen, a 31-year-old Lutheran pastor from Troisdorf near the western German city of Cologne, brought a group of teenagers from his congregation to St. Paul. He was more impressed by the experiment. “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”, Jansen said.
What the young pastor missed, however, was any kind of emotion or spirituality, which he says is essential when he writes his own sermons.