To members of his synagogue, the voice coming through the speakers at Congregation Emanu El in Houston sounded exactly like Rabbi Josh Fixler's.
In the same steady rhythm to which his congregation had become accustomed, the voice delivered a sermon on what it meant to be a neighbor in the age of artificial intelligence. Then Rabbi Fixler himself went to the bimah.
“The sound you just heard may have sounded like my words,” he said. “But they weren't.”
The recording was made by what Rabbi Fixler called “Rabbi Bot,” an AI chatbot that trained on his old sermons. The chatbot, created with the help of a data scientist, wrote the sermon and even delivered it in an AI version of its voice. During the remainder of the service, Rabbi Fixler occasionally asked Rabbi Bot questions out loud, which he answered immediately.
Rabbi Fixler is among a growing number of religious leaders who are experimenting with AI in their work, creating an industry of faith-based tech companies that offer AI tools, from assistants who can conduct theological research to chatbots that can help write sermons.
For centuries, new technologies have changed the way people worship, from radio in the 1920s to television sets in the 1950s and the Internet in the 1990s. Some religious proponents of AI have gone back even further, comparing the potential of AI – and the fear of it – to the invention of the printing press in the 15th century.
Religious leaders have used AI to translate their live-streamed sermons into different languages in real time and then distribute them to an international audience. Others have compared chatbots trained on tens of thousands of pages of the Bible to a fleet of newly trained seminary students, able to pull up excerpts on certain topics almost instantly.
But the ethical questions surrounding the use of generative AI for religious tasks have become more complicated as the technology has improved, religious leaders say. While most agree that using AI for tasks like research or marketing is acceptable, other uses of the technology, such as sermon writing, are seen by some as a step too far.
Jay Cooper, a pastor in Austin, Texas, used OpenAI's ChatGPT to experimentally generate an entire service for his church in 2023. He marketed it with posters of robots, and the service attracted a number of curious new visitors – 'gamer types'. said Mr. Cooper – who had never been to his community before.
The thematic brief he gave to ChatGPT to generate different parts of the service was: “How can we recognize the truth in a world where AI blurs the truth?” ChatGPT came with a welcome message, a sermon, a children's program and even a four-verse song, which was the bunch's biggest hit, Mr. Cooper said. The song went:
While algorithms spin a web of lies
We lift our gaze to the endless sky
Where the teachings of Christ light our way
Dispel untruths with the light of day
Mr Cooper has not used the technology to write sermons since, preferring to draw on his own experiences. But the presence of AI in faith-based spaces, he says, raises a bigger question: Can God speak through AI?
“That's a question that a lot of Christians online don't like at all because it creates some fear,” Mr. Cooper said. “It could be for a good reason. But I think it is a fair question.”
The impact of AI on religion and ethics has been a focus for Pope Francis on several occasions, although he has not directly addressed the use of AI in sermon writing.
Our humanity “enables us to look at things with God's eyes, to see connections, situations and events and to discover their real meaning,” the Pope said in a message early last year. “Without this kind of wisdom, life becomes boring.”
He added: “Such wisdom cannot be extracted from machines.”
Phil EuBank, pastor of Menlo Church in Menlo Park, California, likened AI to a “bionic arm” that could boost his work. But when it comes to sermon writing, “there's that Uncanny Valley territory,” he said, “where you might get really close, but really close can be really weird.”
Rabbi Fixler agreed. He recalled being surprised when Rabbi Bot asked him to include a one-time experiment in his AI sermon, a sentence about himself.
“Just as the Torah commands us to love our neighbors as ourselves,” said Rabbi Bot, “can we also extend this love and empathy to the AI entities we create?”
Rabbis have traditionally been early adopters of new technologies, especially for printed books in the 15th century. But the divinity of those books lay in the spiritual relationship their readers had with God, said Rabbi Oren Hayon, who is also part of Congregation Emanu El.
To support his research, Rabbi Hayon regularly uses a custom chatbot trained on twenty years of his own writings. But he never used AI to write portions of sermons.
“Our job is not just to put together beautiful sentences,” Rabbi Hayon said. “It's hopefully writing something that is lyrical, moving and articulate, but also responsive to the uniquely human hunger, pain and losses that we are aware of because we are in human communities with other people.” He added: “It cannot be automated.”
Kenny Jahng, a technology entrepreneur, believes that fears that ministers will adopt generative AI are overblown, and that it may even be necessary to dive into the technology to appeal to a new generation of young, tech-savvy churchgoers when church attendance is declining across the country. reject.
Mr. Jahng, the editor-in-chief of a faith- and technology-focused media company and founder of an AI education platform, has spent the past year traveling the country speaking at conferences and promoting faith-based AI products. He also leads a Facebook group for tech-curious church leaders with more than 6,000 members.
“We look at data that shows the spiritually curious in Gen Alpha and Gen Z far outnumber boomers and Gen Xers who have left the church since Covid,” Mr Jahng said. “It's this perfect storm.”
Currently, most faith-based AI companies target Christians and Jews, but custom chatbots for Muslims and Buddhists also exist.
Some churches have already begun to subtly infuse their services and websites with AI
For example, the chatbot on the website of Father's House, a church in Leesburg, Florida, appears to provide basic customer service. One of the recommended questions is, “What time are your services?”
The next suggestion is more complex.
“Why aren't my prayers answered?”
The chatbot was created by Pastors.ai, a startup founded by Joe Suh, a technology entrepreneur and attendee of Mr.'s church. EuBank in Silicon Valley.
After one of Mr. Suh's old pastors left his church, he came up with the idea to upload recordings of that pastor's sermons to ChatGPT. Mr Suh then asked the chatbot intimate questions about his faith. He turned the concept into a business.
Mr. Suh's chatbots are trained based on a church's sermon archives and information from its website. But about 95 percent of people who use the chatbots ask them questions about things like service times instead of delving deep into their spirituality, Mr. Suh said.
“I think that will eventually change, but for now that concept may be a little ahead of its time,” he added.
Critics of AI use by religious leaders have pointed out the issue of hallucinations – times when chatbots make things up. Although harmless in certain situations, faith-based AI tools that invent religious scriptures pose a serious problem. For example, in Rabbi Bot's sermon, the AI made up a quote from the Jewish philosopher Maimonides that would have been perceived as authentic to the ordinary listener.
For other religious leaders, the question of AI is simpler: How can sermon writers hone their craft without doing it entirely themselves?
“I'm afraid in some ways for preachers that it's not going to help them stretch their sermon writing muscles, and that's where I think so much of our great theology and great sermons come from, years and years of preaching,” Thomas Costello said. , a pastor at New Hope Hawaii Kai in Honolulu.
On a recent afternoon at his synagogue, Rabbi Hayon recalled taking a photo of his bookshelf and asking his AI assistant which of the books he had not cited in his recent sermons. Before AI, he would have extracted the titles himself, taken the time to read through their indexes, and carefully compared them to his own work.
“I was a little sad to miss that part of the process that is so fruitful and so joyful and rich and illuminating, that fuels the life of the Spirit,” Rabbi Hayon said. “By using AI you get to an answer faster, but you have certainly lost something along the way.”
