An artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot named ChatGPT has conducted a church service in a Bavarian town, drawing an audience of over 300 people, who showed up for the experimental Lutheran church service. The 40-minute service, including the sermon, prayers, and music, was completely AI-generated, and designed by ChatGPT and a theologian from the University of Vienna, Jonas Simmerlein. Theologian Simmerlein asked the AI for a church service and it included Psalms, prayers, and a blessing at the end.
The chatbot was personified by an avatar of a bearded Black man on a screen above the altar, preaching to the congregation. Simmerlein emphasized that he did not intend to replace religious leaders with AI but to use it to assist them with their work in their congregations. However, the experiment revealed the limitations to implementing AI in church services, showing that the chatbot was unable to respond to the laughter or other reactions of the congregation, while a human pastor would have been able to do so.
The artificial intelligence chatbot prompted the congregation to rise, praise the Lord, and sit down before it began preaching. At times, the audience laughed at the AI-generated avatar when it used platitudes and told the churchgoers with a deadpan expression that in order to keep our faith, we must pray and go to church regularly. Some people enthusiastically recorded parts of the event while others behaved more critically and refused to speak along loudly during the Lord’s Prayer.
Simmerlein concluded that while AI will increasingly take over different aspects of people’s lives, the machine cannot replace human pastors who know their congregations intimately. The pastor is in the congregation, she lives with them, she buries the people, she knows them from the beginning, he said. Artificial intelligence cannot do that. It does not know the congregation.
