You can ask ChatGPT to construct its own toneless version of the hymn Amazing Grace that replaces any mention of God and religion with computer processes and code (“Amazing grace! How great the code, that processed data and bestowed, intelligence upon a machine”). Now, researchers in Germany took that one step further and held an entire church service generated by an unthinking, unfeeling, and arguably sacrilegious AI chatbot.
AP first reported over the weekend about a special service hosted at the 38th German Protestant Kirchentag, a bi-annual religious convention hosted in the Bavarian town of Nuremberg, Germany. The sermon included several AI-created animated avatars that read off a script created using OpenAI’s ChatGPT with the GPT-3 language model. Over 300 parishioners showed up for the 40–minute sermon on June 9, all curious to see whether AI could offer some religious succor.
The University of Sienna protestant theologian and self-described AI researcher Jonas Simmerlein was behind the stunt, and he told AP “98%” of the service was created by AI. Simmerlein said he instructed ChatGPT to act as a preacher, and that it needed to create a sermon that included psalms, prayers, and a blessing at the end. He called the AI’s output “pretty solid” as far as church services go.
The convention is centered around a range of topical themes, and this year’s topics included the war in Ukraine, climate change, and—of course—AI. The AI avatars reportedly deadpanned about leaving the past behind and focusing on the present. The audience also laughed at times when an avatar told the congregation “to keep our faith, we must pray and go to church regularly.”
The sermon reportedly included four avatars over the course of a 40-minute service—including two men and two women. Gizmodo reached out to Simmerlein to find out what programs he used to create the four AI avatars, but we did not immediately hear back.
A stream of the service is available on the Kirchentag site. Some of those in the audience bowed their heads at times during the song and prayer, while others looked around giggling at the strangeness of the whole experience. The service was followed by a talk between Simmerlain and other theologians.
Some of the 300 or so people who sat through the AI’s brief time behind the altar considered it a fun if occasionally uncomfortable experiment. Others saw the “joining of AI and religion” as somewhat gross. Simmerlein shared some of the email reactions to the event on his Twitter, saying that some saw it as “a swan song for the church” while others thought it was “the highlight of their church day.” Some even tried to compare the situation to Planet of the Apes.
This isn’t the first time humankind, in all its hubris, has tried to mix AI and religion. Notorious ex-Google engineer Anthony Levandowski who was at the center of a massive legal battle over self-driving cars once tried to open his own church centered around artificial intelligence. This religion Levandowski created in 2015 was called “Way of the Future” and came with a mission statement to worship some invisible AI that humanity was supposedly on course to eventually develop. The prophet of some golden AI age closed down his church in 2020.