Art experiment: Swiss church registers great interest in AI Jesus
For two months, visitors to the Catholic St. Peter's Chapel in Lucerne could talk to an AI-generated Jesus avatar. Interest is said to have been great.
(Image: Katholische Kirche Stadt Luzern)
In the confessional of all places, visitors to Lucerne's St. Peter's Chapel were given the opportunity to talk to an avatar of Jesus on a screen for two months. However, this is expressly not a substitute for confession. The installation of the screen with the Jesus hologram in the confessional was rather an attempt to promote "moments of intimacy" with the hologram.
Behind the art installation called "Deus in Machina" are St. Peter's Chapel and a team from the "Immersive Realities Research Lab" at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts. According to a press release, the idea behind the art project was to "think critically about the limits of technology in the context of religion". The boundaries of the project were tight, as visitors were asked not to disclose any private information.
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"We registered around 900 conversations from all age groups," theologian Marco Schmid, who led the project, told the AP news agency.
Spiritual experience with AI
The conversations were then anonymized and transcribed, and an evaluation of the art project has now found that many of the people who spoke to Jesus wanted to have serious conversations and many of them were deeply touched. Two thirds said they had had a spiritual experience.
And this despite the fact that , according to a media report, some of the answers from AI Jesus were very clichéd and repetitive. A conversation between the digital Son of God and the AP news agency seems to confirm this. It quotes the technology as saying: "All knowledge and wisdom ultimately comes from God. If used wisely, AI can indeed be a tool to explore the wonders of creation, deepen our understanding of Scripture and foster connection between people."
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ChatGPT-4o trained with the New Testament
During his short life, the AI Jesus was able to communicate in 100 languages. It was based on ChatGPT-4o and speech recognition was done via Whisper. The language model was trained with content from the New Testament. The interactive avatar appeared as a long-haired young man wearing a modern black sweater on the screen.
This is not the first experiment with AI in the church. In 2023, a chatbot held a service at the Protestant Church Congress in Nuremberg.
The Vatican is also aware of the rapid development of AI and has appointed the Franciscan monk and former engineer as papal advisor for AI.
Although the art project in the Lucerne church was presented as a success, a return of the AI Jesus is not planned. A resurrection of the AI Jesus would require "deep reflection", according to Schmid.
(mch)
