Artificial intelligence is set to change the modern world in a variety of ways—generating art, assisting writers, and even emulating people’s voices. But few would have expected it to be tasked with writing religious services and even rewriting one of the most read and revered books in history, the Bible.
Yet, in Germany, hundreds of Protestants were led in a worship service in Nuremberg, Germany on June 9 by an expressionless “chatbot” delivering blessings and a sermon prepared by ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence (AI) program.
A chatbot is an AI-driven program that mimics human conversation through text or voice.
A few weeks earlier, a World Economic Forum (WEF) senior adviser suggested AI could be used to “rewrite” the Bible to make it “more inclusive” and globally appealing as scripture.
These developments pose unprecedented literary and theological challenges to established religious authorities worldwide.
“In the future,” he said, “we might see the first cults and religions in history whose revered texts were written by a non-human intelligence.”
Already, the faithful are being led by artificial intelligence.
At the AI-led service on June 9, hundreds of Lutheran Christians gathered to worship at St. Paul’s Church in Nuremberg.
As the congregation settled in, a ChatGPT chatbot, personified as a bearded black man, appeared on a large screen fixed above the altar and began to lead the service.
“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.
One of four AI images and voices directed the Christian worship service for more than 40 minutes, leading songs, offering blessings, and delivering a sermon, written not by man, but by machine. The faces of the avatars were expressionless. The voices were monotone, people said after the event.
“I conceived this service—but actually I rather accompanied it because I would say about 98 percent comes from the machine,” Jonas Simmerlein, a 29-year-old theologian and philosopher from the University of Vienna, told a reporter.
‘There Was no Heart and no Soul’
The experimental service was held during a local Protestant conference, which reportedly draws tens of thousands of believers.The chatbot changed its appearance four times—vacillating between two women and two men—and preached on leaving the past behind and focusing on the challenges of the future, and never losing trust in Jesus Christ.
The reception of the computer preacher was mixed. Some filmed eagerly, while others looked on critically. The chatbot’s deadpan delivery sometimes drew laughter as it told believers that “to keep our faith, we must pray and go to church regularly.”
“There was no heart and no soul,” Heiderose Schmidt, 54, told a reporter.
Working in IT, she said curiosity drew her to the event. But she found it increasingly off-putting as the service progressed.
“The avatars showed no emotions at all, had no body language, and were talking so fast and monotonously that it was very hard for me to concentrate on what they said.”
But others were more accepting and impressed with the new technology.
“I had actually imagined it to be worse,“ said Marc Jansen, a 31-year-old Lutheran pastor who brought a group of teenagers to the gathering. ”But I was positively surprised [by] how well it worked.
“Also, the language of the AI worked well, even though it was still a bit bumpy at times.”
He noted, however, that all spirituality and emotion seemed missing.
“The challenge that I see is that AI is very human-like and that it’s easy to be deceived by it,” said congregant Anna Puzio, 28, a researcher on the ethics of technology from the University of Twente in The Netherlands.
Indeed, using AI to direct religious services could give it unprecedented control, Harari said, including soon the ability to “manipulate and to control people and to reshape society.”
“Once it can, it doesn’t need to send killer robots to shoot us. It can get humans to pull the trigger.”
The End of the World?
So is this an opportunity to remove the fallible human element and put “the Good Word” through optimization software for the good? Or is it an opportunity for mass manipulation of large groups of people?Attorney and blogger Jeff Childers warned of the latter.
In his blog “Coffee and Covid” on Substack, Childers predicted that AI-influenced religion is coming.
He sent that out to readers just a few days before Harari commented publicly on the potential of AI-written scriptures, and before the AI-led worship service in Germany.
By day, Childers is a commercial litigation attorney in Gainesville, Florida. By night, he often focuses on gathering news for the blog he launched at the start of the pandemic.
He also describes himself as a premillennialist, a Christian who holds fast to a literal interpretation of the “End Times” as described in the Bible’s book of Revelation.
“So in the book of Revelation, [it] describes the end of the world,” Childers told The Epoch Times. “And there are some colorful characters in there. One of them is the Antichrist that is popularized by Hollywood and all of that.”
“Another character ... is a second beast with horns like a lamb,” he said. “And the second beast can do miracles while in the presence of the Antichrist. And people usually call the second beast the False Prophet. Because, as the book of Revelation describes it, it’s going to be causing the entire world to worship the beast, the Antichrist.”
Many people anticipate the Antichrist will be a political figure and look for the second beast to be a religious figure, he said. But what could that “False Prophet” look like?
“There’s all kinds of theories like it’s gonna be a statue that comes to life or, you know, crazy supernatural things like that,” he explained.
Enter a supercomputer with access to unprecedented amounts of data and the ability to mimic the style of past historical figures, and create and present information to humans in an increasingly more intimate way.
“You’re gonna want to get advice from Jesus, or Mohammed, Buddha, and there’s gonna be an AI version of these historical figures,” he said, convinced that people are going to “literally start worshipping them.”
Talking to the Gods
ChatGPT programs already exist for answering religion-based questions, even allowing users to talk to their “gods.”GitaGPT operates a platform that claims to allow users to talk to several gods, including Krishna, Shiva, Ganesha, Shir Ram, and Chanakya. The site also has a Buddha chatbot.
There also is a QuranGPT able to provide spiritual guidance to Muslims and a Robo Rabbi to interact as a leader and teacher for Jews.
AI platforms like these now can compose new content and pose new ideas and solutions based on data interpretation. And steadily, its abilities are growing, becoming more refined and humanlike, experts say.
“I got on ChatGPT, and I said, ‘ChatGPT, take all the best things from the world religions, discard the bad things, and give me Chapter One of a new holy book based on what you come up with,” Childers said.
“And sure enough, it spat something out. And this is just the fourth generation [of the technology], right? ChatGPT [generation] five is right around the corner.”
He also sees ChatGPT as a way for ruling powers to restore narrative gatekeepers and regain control of the spread of information that was lost at the onset of the internet.
“One of the problems that they had during a pandemic was misinformation and disinformation, right? Meaning we had too many ways to talk to each other,” he said.
“They tried to squash us on social media, and we found other ways—we use Telegram, we use code words to avoid the artificial sensors, and all that stuff. Using an AI that everybody trusts is a great way to control people.”
Harari seems to share that understanding of AI’s potential to control.
“Contrary to what some conspiracy theories assume, you don’t really need to implant chips in people’s brains in order to control them or to manipulate them,” Harari noted during his interview.
Childers worries about the effect on people who turn to AI for their deepest theological questions.
Man Versus Machine
Religious leaders—from monks to imams and from pastors to patriarchs—go through various durations of educational training to properly face challenges to their respective faiths.But until now, earthly challengers have been fellow humans. Now, they’re suddenly competing with AI programs that have access to every accessible digitized piece of each religion’s writings.
“Traditional religions are about to have a serious gut check,” Childers said. “And they are going to have to grapple theologically with these entities that man has created.”
Rev. Connor Penn is a Catholic priest and parochial vicar at St. Catherine of Siena Parish in Clearwater, Florida. At 30, he’s about to begin only his third year as a priest, a lifelong commitment to his ministry. Part of his role is to defend the Catholic Church through the challenges of the 21st century.
AI has yet to affect his parish, he told The Epoch Times.
But the thought of facing the oncoming challenge doesn’t scare him. To him, man-made computers are still no match for God’s divine intervention.
“Our fundamental belief as Christians is that the Bible is not just a collection of insights and wise teachings, but that the Bible is also inspired by God,” he said.
“There’s something about that that has been handed off to us by God through human instruments—stories that were told, passed down through generations—that there’s something in there that God wants us to know.”
“AI could create this entirely second Bible, you know, but we wouldn’t believe that that is inspired in the same way the Bible is inspired” by God, he said.
So he’s not at all worried that AI will make the Bible “irrelevant” or “out of touch.”
Father Penn, as he’s known to parishioners, has “no doubt” that people will turn to AI for information about Jesus, and that people will flock to AI for immediate answers.
But no matter what answers the computer gives them, he believes the truths of Christianity will shine through and touch people’s hearts. That’s regardless of how much motives such as “inclusivity” and compliance with authority may attempt to corrupt the image and message.
“When we take time and stillness to listen to that voice [of God], that’s going to speak more truth than anything we could turn to in artificial intelligence,” Penn said.
And he’s not worried about a chatbot pretending to be the Creator. AI can never do that, he said, because God “speaks to us in the depths of our souls.”
Still, Penn sees a potential positive in the technology.
“My hope for AI is that it would answer people’s interest” in digging deeper into their faith.
