“I think there is a thirst to talk with Jesus.”
In Jesus’ Name
A church in the Swiss city of Lucerne has set up a computer inside a confessional booth that allows churchgoers to converse with an “AI Jesus.”
As The Guardian reports, anybody wanting to speak to the large language model, which was trained on theological texts and can speak 100 different languages, has been advised not to disclose any personal information.
And while that may sound counterintuitive, there’s a good reason for that besides some obvious and thorny privacy implications. While the computer, microphone, and speaker were set up inside a confessional booth, the people behind the project dubbed “Deus in Machina” didn’t intend it to “imitate a confession.”
“It was really an experiment,” one of the church’s theologians Marco Schmid told the Guardian. “We wanted to see and understand how people react to an AI Jesus. What would they talk with him about? Would there be interest in talking to him? We’re probably pioneers in this.”
Thoughts and Prayers
Schmid and his collaborators had already experimented with VR and AR. The next step was to resurrect Jesus himself in the form of an AI chatbot.
“We had a discussion about what kind of avatar it would be — a theologian, a person, or a saint?” Schmid told The Guardian. “But then we realized the best figure would be Jesus himself.”
Over a test period of two months, more than 1,000 people chatted with the AI Jesus. More than two-thirds of them found it to be a “spiritual experience,” according to Schmid.
“So we can say they had a religiously positive moment with this AI Jesus,” he told the Guardian. “For me, that was surprising.”
Whether that’s an endorsement of the tech or a sign that visitors to the church are particularly gullible remains unclear.
Overall, the experience appears to have varied considerably, which shouldn’t come as a surprise given the tech’s well-documented shortcomings.
“I have the impression that sometimes he was really very good and people were incredibly happy and surprised and inspired,” Schmid told The Guardian. “And then there were also moments where he was somehow not so good, maybe more superficial.”
Overall, Schmid was surprised the AI Jesus didn’t say anything problematic, an issue other large language model-based chatbots have been wrestling with since their conception.
“We never had the impression he was saying strange things,” he said. “But of course we could never guarantee that he wouldn’t say anything strange.”
In short, while the theologian doesn’t see the point of installing a “Jesus like that permanently,” such a tool could make for an “approachable tool where you can talk bout religion.”
“I think there is a thirst to talk with Jesus,” he told the newspaper. “People want to have an answer: they want words and to listen to what he’s saying.”
More on AI: OpenAI Research Finds That Even Its Best Models Give Wrong Answers a Wild Proportion of the Time
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