When worshipers first prayed in St. Peter’s Chapel 300 years ago, they likely thought of communing with Jesus as an expression of faith rather than a literal conversation.
Three centuries later, worshipers at Switzerland’s oldest church in the city of Lucerne can now communicate with a computer-generated avatar of the Son of God.
“Deus in machina” was developed by a team from the Institute of Immersive Reality at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts and by chapel theologian Marco Schmidt.
“A lot of people came to talk to him,” Schmidt said, adding that about 900 conversations were recorded between the machine and people “of all ages.”
“What was really interesting to watch was people really talking to him,” Schmidt said.
Developed using artificial intelligence software, the machine is the result of two months of collaborative experimentation.
When participants enter the confessional booth, a lifelike avatar on a computer screen provides advice based on the words of the Bible in more than 100 languages.
However, visitors are cautioned not to share any personal information and should recognize that their interactions with avatars are at their own risk.
“This is not a confession. Our purpose is not to recreate a traditional confession,” Schmidt said. Topics discussed by the visitors included true love, life after death, loneliness, war and suffering in this world, and the existence of God.
Issues such as the Catholic Church’s position on homosexuality and sexual abuse cases faced by the church were also discussed.
Most visitors described themselves as Christians, but agnostics, atheists, Muslims, Buddhists and Taoists also took part, according to a project summary released by the Catholic Diocese of Lucerne.
The majority were German speakers, but the AI Jesus, who speaks about 100 languages, also conversed in languages such as Chinese, English, French, Hungarian, Italian, Russian, and Spanish.
Professor Philipp Haslbauer, who was involved in the technical aspects of the project, said no special safeguards were used because the technology “handles quite well even on controversial topics”.
Noting that some people on social media have called the project a “blasphemy” or “the work of the devil,” he added: “If you read the comments about this project on the internet, some are very negative, and that’s scary. ” he said.
