To members of his synagogue, the voice coming from the speakers at Houston’s Sisters of Emanu-El sounded exactly like Rabbi Josh Fixler’s voice.
With the same steady rhythm his congregation is accustomed to, the voice delivered a sermon on what it means to be a neighbor in the age of artificial intelligence. Rabbi Fixler then started a bimah himself.
“The audio you just heard may have sounded like my words,” he said. “But they weren’t.”
The recording was created by an AI chatbot that Rabbi Fixler calls “Rabbibot,” which was trained on his old sermons. A chatbot created with the help of data scientists wrote a sermon and also delivered an AI version of his voice. During the rest of the service, Rabbi Fixler intermittently yelled questions to Rabbi Bott, to which Rabbi Bott answered immediately.
Rabbi Fiksler said a growing number of religious leaders are experimenting with AI in their work, and that he is driving an industry of faith-based technology companies offering AI tools, from assistants who do theological research to chatbots that help write sermons. It’s accelerating.
For centuries, new technologies have changed the way people worship, from radio in the 1920s to television in the 1950s to the Internet in the 1990s. Some proponents of AI in the religious field go even further back, likening the potential of AI and the concerns surrounding it to the invention of the printing press in the 15th century.
Religious leaders used AI to translate live-streamed sermons into different languages in real time and broadcast them to audiences around the world. Researchers also compared a chatbot trained on tens of thousands of pages of the Bible to a group of freshly trained seminary students and found it was able to pull excerpts on specific topics almost instantly. There are some too.
But the ethical issues around using generative AI for religious missions are becoming more complex as the technology advances, religious leaders say. While most agree that using AI for tasks such as research and marketing is acceptable, some believe other uses of the technology, such as writing sermons, are overkill.
Jay Cooper, a pastor in Austin, Texas, used OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2023 to generate an entire church service as an experiment. He used robot posters to promote it, and the service attracted curious new participants, or “gamer types.” Mr. Cooper said–he had never been to his congregation before.
The thematic prompt he gave ChatGPT to generate various parts of the service was: “How can we recognize truth in a world where AI is obfuscating it?” ChatGPT came up with welcome messages, sermons, children’s programs and even a four-verse song that became its biggest hit, Cooper said. The song went like this:
As the algorithm weaves a web of lies
I raise my gaze to the endless sky
Where the teachings of Christ illuminate our path
expose falsehoods to the light of day
Mr. Cooper has not used the technology in his sermon writing since then, preferring instead to draw from his own experience. But the presence of AI in faith-based spaces raises a larger question: Can God speak through AI?
“It’s a question that many Christians online don’t like at all, because it evokes fear,” Cooper said. “Maybe there’s a good reason for that. But I think it’s a worthwhile question.”
The impact of AI on religion and ethics has been a touchpoint for Pope Francis several times, but he has not directly addressed the use of AI to assist in the writing of sermons.
Our humanity “enables us to see things with God’s eyes, to see connections, situations, events, and to reveal their true meaning,” the Pope said in a message early last year. said. “Without this kind of wisdom, life would be boring.”
He added: “We don’t want machines to have that kind of wisdom.”
Phil Eubank, pastor of Menlo Church in Menlo Park, California, likened AI to a “bionic arm” that could greatly enhance his work. But when it comes to sermons, he says, “It’s the realm of the uncanny valley. You can get really close to it, but when you get really close, it can get really weird.”
Rabbi Fixler agreed. He recalled being surprised when Rabbibot asked AI’s sermon to include a sentence about the one-time experiment, itself.
“Just as the Torah teaches us to love our neighbor as ourselves, can we extend this love and empathy to the AI entities we create? ?” said Rabbi Bott.
Rabbis have historically been early adopters of new technology, especially in printed books in the 15th century. But the divinity of these books lies in the spiritual relationship between the reader and God, said Rabbi Oren Hayon, a member of the Sisters of Emanu-El.
To aid his research, Rabbi Hayon regularly uses a custom chatbot trained on 20 years of his writing. However, he has never used AI to write parts of his sermons.
“Our job is not just to put together pretty sentences,” Rabbi Hayon said. “Hopefully, I want to write something lyrical and moving and clear, but at the same time, I want to write something that is lyrical and moving and clear, but at the same time the uniquely human hunger and pain and loss that we know because we are in human community with other people. He added, “It cannot be automated.”
Technology entrepreneur Kenny Jahn says concerns about pastors’ use of generative AI are overblown, and as church attendance declines across the country, a new generation of tech-savvy I think it may be necessary to rely on technology to appeal to young people. decline.
Jahn, editor-in-chief of a faith- and technology-focused media company and founder of an AI education platform, has traveled the country over the last year speaking at conferences and promoting faith-based AI products. . We also run a Facebook group for church leaders interested in technology, which has more than 6,000 members.
“We are looking at data that shows Gen Alpha and Gen Z are much more spiritually curious than baby boomers and Gen Xers who have left the church since COVID-19,” Jahn said. “This is the perfect storm.”
Currently, the majority of faith-based AI companies cater to Christians and Jews, but there are also custom chatbots for Muslims and Buddhists.
Some churches have already begun to subtly incorporate AI into their services and websites.
For example, the chatbot on the website for Father’s House, a church in Leesburg, Florida, appears to provide standard customer service. Suggested questions include, “What are the service hours?”
The next suggestion is more complex.
“Why aren’t my prayers answered?”
The chatbot was created by Pastors.ai, a startup founded by Joe Hsu, a technology entrepreneur and attendee of Eubank’s church in Silicon Valley.
After one of Sue’s longtime pastors left the church, he had the idea to upload recordings of the pastor’s sermons to ChatGPT. Sue then asked the chatbot intimate questions about her faith. He turned the concept into a business.
Hsu’s chatbot is trained using information from the church’s sermon archives and websites. But about 95 percent of people who use chatbots don’t delve into the chatbot’s spirituality, asking questions about things like service hours, Hsu said.
“I think that will change eventually, but for now the concept may be a little ahead of its time,” he added.
Critics of the use of AI by religious leaders point to the problem of illusions that chatbots concoct. Although harmless in certain situations, faith-based AI tools that fabricate religious scriptures pose serious problems. For example, in Rabbibot’s sermon, the AI would fabricate a quote from the Jewish philosopher Maimonides that would come across as authentic to the average listener.
For other religious leaders, the issue of AI is a simpler one. How can sermon writers hone their craft without doing it all themselves?
“In some ways, I worry that it doesn’t help pastors develop their sermon-writing muscles. A lot of our great theology and our great preaching comes from years of preaching.” I think it comes from accumulation,” Thomas Costello said. , pastor of New Hope Hawaii Congregation in Honolulu.
On a recent afternoon at his synagogue, Rabbi Hayon recalled taking a photo of a bookshelf and asking his AI assistant for books he hadn’t cited in a recent sermon. Before AI, he would have pulled out the title itself, spent time reading the index, and carefully comparing it to his own work.
“I was a little disappointed that I had missed out on part of what was a very fruitful, very fun, enriching and enlightening process of fueling the life of the Holy Spirit,” Rabbi Hayon said. “With AI, we can get answers faster, but we are certainly losing something in the process.”
