“WI rite a sermon in the voice of a rabbi of about 1,000 words that relates the Torah portion Vayigash to intimacy and vulnerability. Cite Brené Brown’s scholarship on vulnerability. That was the suggestion that Rabbi Joshua Franklin put into ChatGPT, the results of which he used to give a sermon to parishioners of the Hamptons Jewish Center in December 2022.
The sermon the chatbot came up with talked about Joseph, the son of Jacob and a prophet in the Abrahamic religions. He cited a book by Brown, a professor who specializes in intimacy issues, to define vulnerability as “the willingness to appear and be seen when we have no control over the outcome.” Being vulnerable could mean that “we can form deeper and more meaningful bonds with those around us,” the chatbot wrote.
It wasn’t the best sermon, Franklin thought, but it was passable. And that was his point. The irony of AI’s written discourse on vulnerability and human connection was that it lacked exactly what he preached: human vulnerability and emotion.
“Actually, it had quite a bit of content,” he said. “And the congregation thought it was written by other famous rabbis. But if I’m going to preach about vulnerability and intimacy, I’d share something about myself as a vulnerability model. And that is something that artificial intelligence and ChatGPT cannot do.”
The widespread adoption of generative AI and extensive language models in the form of chatbots like ChatGPT has left few spaces untouched, including religious communities.
In addition to widespread chatbots, which can provide conversational answers to theological questions or suggestions using information gleaned from the Internet, more specialized religious chatbots have emerged. One of them, HadithGPT, gives advice based on Islamic texts.
Together, the phenomenon is one religious leaders like Franklin have felt compelled to consider the potential usefulness of, as well as the possible ramifications of.
“It’s a huge breakthrough,” Franklin said. “This would be like me commenting on how the Internet is going to change the face of Judaism.”
Other religious leaders The Guardian spoke to may not yet be writing their sermons using chatbots, but they have similarly weighed the impacts of the rapid adoption of using AI chatbots to answer questions about religion. The resounding sentiment is that this is not exactly a novel circumstance.
Call him “Rabbi Google,” as Franklin referred to him, or “Sheikh Google,” as he was referred to by Jihad Turk, the founding president of the Bayan Islamic Graduate School, an institution of higher education in Islamic studies, but the People have turned to the Internet for a long time. to get answers about the intricacies and intricacies of religion.
“To some degree, this is just another iteration of how people might consider which view to follow,” Turk said.
“As someone who served as a community imam for a long time, I would often receive phone calls from community members who had a question related to Islam’s position on X, Y or Z after having done some of their own research. , which could include Googling it, talking to friends and other academics,” Turk said. “So there are a lot of judgments that are being made by individuals anyway.”
But ChatGPT and chatbots that use large language models can have problems with accuracy because they prioritize responses that have a conversational flow over those that are accurate, according to Beth Singler, an assistant professor of digital religions at the University of Zurich. That could pose a particular problem for religions like Judaism and Islam that have a strong commitment to textual sources.
“That is a concern in itself that there is going to be a reformation of theological knowledge that has been shared with such precision and patience for hundreds of years, because ChatGPT is kind of mind-blowing answers,” he said. “It’s a correlation machine. It is not a knowledge finding machine. What it does is predict the probability of the next word.”
HadithGPT, for example, uses hadith, or the narrations of the sayings and life of the Prophet Muhammad, to answer questions about Islam. His answers come with a disclaimer: The answers are AI-generated and may not be accurate, he says. “Islam is transmitted from heart to heart and it is important to learn and consult real Islamic scholars for more accurate information.”
Even with this disclaimer, the average person may not have access to a real scholar to consult, making it easy to rely exclusively on Sheikh Google or services like HadithGPT, Turk says. The source material also lacks much of the context that is normally considered when answering Islamic questions, he added. That includes the human layer of hadith analysis and consideration of other texts such as the Qur’an, as well as scholarly opinions and Islamic jurisprudence. Different schools of thought also give weight to different customs and traditions, he said.
“The hadiths are silent on many questions that are more contemporary in nature,” Turk said. “It is much more complicated than what the black and white hadith says.”
Other religions, such as Buddhism, are less textual and more practice-focused, making the religion “in a unique position to ignore” the proliferation of chatbots, according to the Rev. Angel Kyodo Williams, a Zen Buddhist priest in California.
“There is a centricity in practice that takes all the text and puts it aside and says, it doesn’t matter how much you read, it doesn’t matter what you get from a chatbot,” Williams said. “That is not the answer. The answer is in your life: do you feel the truth of those words that you speak? And if it doesn’t, that’s really the only measure.”
Concerns about an overreliance on increasingly sophisticated AI have sparked fears of job losses across industries, including among top technology and AI executives. But there is some optimism among religious leaders like Williams. While chat bots can free people to do more “functionally human things” because they don’t spend time digging for information from multiple sources, Williams believes they will continue to yearn for human connection.
“Nothing is going to replace the deep sense of this longing to be connected and how it feels in a true teacher,” he said.
Franklin, who thinks you could use ChatGPT as a tool to help you write sermons, agrees. “People will realize that humans are no longer the best providers of information,” he said. “But what they can do that makes them clearly human are those things that are precisely in the realm of religion and spirituality.”
