If you had “priest” on your 2023 Artificial Intelligence job loss bingo card, you may not have won. Or at least not yet. But the day may be coming when ChatGPT will take over the duties of reading scripture to you and delivering a sermon when you go to church. They already tried it at St. Paul’s church in Fuerth, Germany. The chatbot was given the task of composing a 40-minute-long sermon under the supervision of a theologian. The bot was incorporated with an image generator, creating four avatars taking turns delivering the sermon at the front of the church on a large screen. So how did it go over? The reviews were… mixed. (Associated Press)

The artificial intelligence chatbot asked the believers in the fully packed St. Paul’s church in the Bavarian town of Fuerth to rise from the pews and praise the Lord.

The ChatGPT chatbot, personified by an avatar of a bearded Black man on a huge screen above the altar, then began preaching to the more than 300 people who had shown up on Friday morning for an experimental Lutheran church service almost entirely generated by AI.

“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,” the avatar said with an expressionless face and monotonous voice.

Jonas Simmerlein, the theologian overseeing the project, claims that ChatGPT composed 98% of the sermon with very little input from him. Of course, given the way these Large Language Models (LLM) operate, some supervision was required. If you simply tell ChatGPT to compose a church sermon based on a particular passage from the bible, the bot will search its library for other sermons that fit the description and begin stealing bits and pieces from them and cobbling them into a sermon.

While I’m sure that there must be priests and pastors in the modern era who upload their sermons for people who miss the service, not all of the ones in the library might be a good fit. The bot could just as easily locate a sermon from a leader of the Church of Satan that mentions the same passage and weave that in. The result probably wouldn’t have gone over very well at St. Paul’s.

Some of the people who attended the service were asked by reporters outside the church what they thought. While the text of the sermon itself was apparently fine, many remarked that the avatars lacked warmth and a human touch. One woman said the sermon had “no heart and no soul,” adding that the avatars “showed no emotions” and had no body language.

But everything we’ve been discussing here focuses on the technical details. In a broader sense, of all the jobs you could assign to the AI, doesn’t asking it to preach the Word of God give you at least a bit of a creepy feeling? If anything requires a human touch, it surely must be preaching. And what would the Almighty Himself think about this? Honestly, I was at least slightly surprised that the avatar’s screen wasn’t struck down by lightning during the sermon.

I’ll let you judge for yourself. This brief news segment from KTLA in Los Angeles includes some of the sermon and a look at the avatars. Do they look like real preachers to you? As far as I’m concerned, they’re getting closer, but they’re definitely not there yet.