God from the machine: artificial intelligence organized and held a service for parishioners in a German church

Are priests no longer needed?

In the Lutheran Church of St. Paul in the German city of Furth, the ChatGPT artificial intelligence neural network easily replaced the preacher and held a service for 300 parishioners.

The author of the experiment with a virtual preacher was Jonas Zimmerlein, a professor of philosophy and theology at the University of Vienna. According to his text requests, the neural network generated a 40-minute speech by the priest, voiced the speech, created several avatars of preachers, as well as musical accompaniment to the event and collective prayer.

I came up with all this, but rather accompanied, since 98% came from the machine

Such a church service - a congress of Protestants with hymns and prayers - takes place every two years. But this time, significantly more people came to the convention, everyone wanted to attend the service organized by newfangled technologies.


It is noteworthy that the chatbot also generated a "speaking" sermon motto - "Now is the time."

According to German publications, people reacted differently to the sermon of a black preacher generated by AI. Some enthusiastically accepted the speech of the machine, while others even refused to pronounce the word "amen" in the proper places, since there was "neither heart nor soul" in the sermon.

Perhaps that is the way it is. The chatbot also has limitations - AI is not yet able to interact with people and respond to laughter or other human emotions that a "live" pastor would pay attention to. However, it is a matter of time.