To members of his synagogue, the voice coming through the speakers at Congregation Emanu El in Houston sounded just like Rabbi Josh Fixler's.
With the same steady beat his congregation had become accustomed to, the voice delivered a sermon on what it meant to be a neighbor in the age of artificial intelligence. Rabbi Fixler then devoted himself personally to the bimah.
“The audio you heard just now may have sounded like my words,” he said. “But they weren't.”
The recording was created by what Rabbi Fixler called “Rabbi Bot,” an artificial intelligence chatbot trained on his old sermons. The chatbot, created with the help of a data scientist, wrote the sermon and even delivered it in an ai version of its voice. For the rest of the service, Rabbi Fixler intermittently asked Rabbi Bot questions out loud, to which Rabbi Bot responded quickly.
Rabbi Fixler is among a growing number of religious leaders experimenting with ai in their work, fueling an industry of religious technology companies that offer ai tools, from assistants that can conduct theological research to chatbots that can help with writing sermons.
For centuries, new technologies have changed the way people worship, from radio in the 1920s to televisions in the 1950s and the Internet in the 1990s. Some advocates of ai in religious spaces have pushed back even more so, comparing the potential of ai (and the fears it raises) with the invention of the printing press in the 15th century.
Religious leaders have used ai to <a target="_blank" class="css-yywogo" href="https://pastors.ai/sermon-translations” title=”” rel=”noopener noreferrer” target=”_blank”>translate your live-streamed sermons into different languages in real time, broadcasting them to international audiences. Others have compared chatbots trained on tens of thousands of pages of Scripture to a fleet of newly trained seminary students, able to extract excerpts on certain topics almost instantly.
But ethical questions around using generative ai for religious tasks have become more complicated as the technology has improved, religious leaders say. While most agree that using ai for tasks like research or marketing is acceptable, some consider other uses of the technology, such as writing sermons, to be a step too far.
Jay Cooper, a pastor in Austin, Texas, used OpenAI's ChatGPT to generate an entire service for his church as an experiment in 2023. He marketed it using robot signs, and the service attracted some new and curious attendees: “gamer types” . Said Mr. Cooper, who had never been to his congregation before.
The thematic message he gave to ChatGPT to generate various parts of the service was: “How can we recognize the truth in a world where ai blurs the truth?” ChatGPT came up with a welcome message, a sermon, a children's program and even a four-verse song, which was the group's biggest hit, Cooper said. The song said:
While algorithms weave webs of lies
We look up to the infinite skies.
Where the teachings of Christ illuminate our path
Dispelling falsehoods with the light of day
Since then, Cooper has not used technology to help write sermons, preferring to draw on his own experiences. But the presence of ai in religious spaces, he said, raises a broader question: Can God speak through ai?
“That's a question that a lot of Christians online don't like at all because it creates some fear,” Mr. Cooper said. “It may be for a good reason. But I think it's a worthwhile question.”
The impact of ai on religion and ethics has been a point of contact for Pope Francis on several occasions, although he has not directly addressed the use of ai to help write sermons.
Our humanity “allows us to look at things with the eyes of God, to see connections, situations, events and discover their true meaning,” the Pope said. he said in a message beginning of last year. “Without this kind of wisdom, life becomes dull.”
And he added: “That wisdom cannot be sought in machines.”
Phil EuBank, pastor of Menlo Church in Menlo Park, California, compared ai to a “bionic arm” that could power his work. But when it comes to writing sermons, “there is that mysterious valley territory,” he said, “where you can get really close, but getting really close can be really weird.”
Rabbi Fixler agreed. He recalled being surprised when Rabbi Bot asked him to include in his sermon on ai, a unique experiment, a line about himself.
“Just as the Torah commands us to love our neighbors as ourselves,” said Rabbi Bot, “can we also extend this love and empathy to the ai entities we create?”
Historically, rabbis have been early adopters of new technologies, especially for printed books in the 15th century. But the divinity of those books was in the spiritual relationship their readers had with God, said Rabbi Oren Hayon, who is also part of Congregation Emanu El.
To aid his research, Rabbi Hayon regularly uses a custom chatbot trained on 20 years of his own writings. But he has never used ai to write sermon parts.
“Our job is not just to put together pretty phrases,” Rabbi Hayon said. “It's about writing something that is lyrical and moving and articulate, but that also responds to the uniquely human hungers, pains and losses that we are aware of because we are in human communities with other people.” And he added: “It cannot be automated.”
Kenny Jahng, a tech entrepreneur, believes fears about ministers' use of generative ai are overblown, and that leaning into the technology may even be necessary to attract a new generation of young, tech-savvy churchgoers when Church attendance across the country is on the decline. decline.
Mr. Jahng, editor-in-chief of a publication focused on faith and technology. media company and founder of a ai educational platformhas traveled the country over the past year to speak at conferences and promote faith-based ai products. He also runs a <a target="_blank" class="css-yywogo" href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/aiforchurchleaders” title=”” rel=”noopener noreferrer” target=”_blank”>facebook group for technology-curious church leaders with over 6,000 members.
“We are looking at data that the spiritual curiosity of Generation Alpha and Generation Z is much greater than that of boomers and Generation x who have left the church since Covid,” Jahng said. “It's this perfect storm.”
Some churches have already begun to subtly infuse ai into their services and websites.
The chatbot on the website of Father's House, a church in Leesburg, Florida, for example, appears to offer standard customer service. Among their recommended questions: “What time are your services?”
The next suggestion is more complex.
“Why are my prayers not answered?”
The chatbot was created by <a target="_blank" class="css-yywogo" href="https://pastors.ai/” title=”” rel=”noopener noreferrer” target=”_blank”>Shepherds.aia startup founded by Joe Suh, a tech entrepreneur and attendee of Mr. EuBank's church in Silicon Valley.
After one of Mr. Suh's longtime pastors left his church, he had the idea to upload recordings of that pastor's sermons to ChatGPT. Mr. Suh would then ask the chatbot intimate questions about his faith. He turned the concept into a business.
Mr. Suh's chatbots are trained with archives of a church's sermons and information from its website. But about 95 percent of people who use chatbots ask them questions about things like service times rather than delving deeper into their spirituality, Suh said.
“I think that will eventually change, but for now, that concept might be a little ahead of its time,” he added.
Critics of the use of ai by religious leaders have pointed out the problem of hallucinations, moments in which chatbots make things up. While harmless in certain situations, faith-based ai tools that fabricate religious scriptures present a serious problem. In Rabbi Bot's sermon, for example, the ai invented a quote from the Jewish philosopher Maimonides that would have passed as authentic to the casual listener.
For other religious leaders, the ai question is simpler: How can sermon writers hone their craft without doing it themselves?
“I worry that pastors, in some ways, don't help them stretch their sermon writing muscles, which is where I think a lot of our great theology and great sermons, years and years of preaching, comes from,” Thomas Costello said. , pastor of New Hope Hawaii Kai in Honolulu.
On a recent afternoon at his synagogue, Rabbi Hayon recalled taking a photo of his bookshelf and asking his ai assistant which of the books he had not cited in his recent sermons. Before ai, they would have pulled out the titles themselves, taking the time to read their indexes and carefully checking them against their own work.
“I was a little sad to miss that part of the process that is so fruitful, joyful, rich and illuminating, fueling the life of the Spirit,” Rabbi Hayon said. “Using ai allows you to get an answer faster, but you've certainly lost something along the way.”
