The artificial intelligence chatbot, ChatGPT, delivered a sermon to more than 300 people Friday morning at St. Paul’s Church in Fuerth, Germany, the Associated Press reported.
The 40-minute service, delivered by the avatars of two young men and two young women projected above the altar in the Bavarian church, was the idea of Jonas Simmerlein, a 29-year-old theologian and philosopher from the University of Vienna.
“I conceived this service – but actually I rather accompanied it, because I would say about 98% comes from the machine,” Simmerlein told AP. (RELATED: Lawyer In New York Uses ChatGPT For Court Filing. It Does Not Go Well)
Hundreds attend church service generated by ChatGPT in Germany https://t.co/Oldc8JbcM0
— KRQE News 13 (@krqe) June 11, 2023
The AI service was of great interest to many at the convention of Protestants, who formed a long line outside St. Paul’s before the sermon began. The convention attracts thousands of parishioners who gather to pray and discuss solutions to key issues like global warming, the war in Ukraine and artificial intelligence, AP reported.
During the sermon, the avatars encouraged the attendees “to keep our faith, we must pray and go to church regularly” and to not fear death.
Some people recorded the service with their cell phones but others looked on critically.
“There was no heart and no soul,” 54-year-old Heiderose Schmidt said, adding she was excited at the beginning but eventually found the service bland because the avatars were emotionless and “were talking so fast and monotonously that it was very hard for me to concentrate on what they said.”
On the other hand, Marc Jansen, a 31-year-old Lutheran pastor, said he was impressed by the experiment.
“I had actually imagined it to be worse,” Jansen told AP. “But I was positively surprised how well it worked … even though it was bumpy at times.”
Simmerlein says he sees AI as a way to help pastors manage their time better by providing them with faster ways to write sermons. “Artificial intelligence will increasingly take over our lives, in all its facets,” he said. “And that’s why it’s useful to learn to deal with it.”