Now, there’s that church in Lucerne where they installed an AI solution for the faithful to confess to. In hundred languages.
While the installation, created in cooperation with Hochschule Luzern, managed to draw a wide audience and not just the usual churchgoers, it drew criticism from the ranks of priestly colleagues.
And it is no wonder! (unintentional pun here, sorry)
This topic is highly controversial, arguably even more so than the usual suspect of whether AI is stealing other people’s art or if things created by AI can be copyrighted. While the people visiting the installation had mixed reviews, some very positive and some not much so, theologians did not quite embrace the technological revolution in matters of faith.
Interestingly, both Catholics and Protestants voiced against this installation, but for different reasons: for Catholic priests, idea of giving a confession to a machine is completely alien and unacceptable, while Protestant priests were more against using a picture of Jesus in such a way.
(it is worth noting that the installation was not really offering taking confessions, but rather a kind of spiritual experiment).
But what does it mean for a person seeking some deeper connection? And even more important, could it become a golden calf?
To try to give a meaningful answer to that, we need to separate personal belief in God(s) into two distinct categories:
- religiosity is a social construct, a set of beliefs and rules that all members of the same faith abide to. Many times it is “set in stone” (or written on a tablet, go ask Moses) and resistant to change over time (yet it does in some of its many aspects, and for that you can ask any Christian who lived before the time of Constantine if they recognize something so popular and traditional as Christmas);
- spirituality is very personal – this is one’s innate drive to seek out and understand the religion and one’s own connection with God(s); this one can actually shift during the lifetime, and is always in motion – waxing and vanning throughout the life.
Once we know that we can argue that the technology of AI Jesus can have different outcomes and pose different issues for the two.
The true danger is existing for spirituality because religiosity is way more stable, much more resistant to outside influence. Whatever that AI thing inside that installation was telling to many different visitors of various religious systems, it did not change their religiosity, nor it made a dent in their religious system. It did not convert anyone to Christianity, and it didn’t made anyone an atheist after visiting it.
Spirituality, on the other hand, might be in danger simply because of its fluidity. One’s own faith is not set in stone, even if we won’t admit that. And talking to AI Jesus for even once could make a small influence. Some people took this experiment quite seriously – about 2/3 of them.
So, how it could go bad?
We can argue that talking to a Large Language Model is pointless just as it would be like talking to an icon (yet some people take this very seriously). But the icon does not reply back, and there’s that interesting aspect of AI spirituality: your talk with Jesus suddenly looks like a conversation and not a quiet monologue anymore.
Now, there is an example of how AI can revolutionize so many aspects of life. Guess you didn’t expect that?
AI Jesus that you can talk with, the one that does not judge, the one that does not frown or diss, the one that you know is not real but it does feel so real… might be something that people seeking spiritual guidance would find an excellent solution.
And it could indeed, fed with the all-encompassing knowledge of a particular religion (or all of them, for that matter) become something that would re-ignite the dormant spirituality of a modern individual. Pocket Jesus that is always there to ask spiritual question and get a spiritual answer. Reach out in your pocket and touch faith. Or converse with while driving the car (caveat: yelling “Jesus take the wheel!” in panic would still be utterly inefficient). Or, if you’re smarter than thy neighbor, maybe just a helpful Bible assistant and not a mirage of Jesus.
This nice story has a potential to go wrong in two scenarios:
- AI Jesus misinterprets your words: an LLM, even a holy one, is not a perfect (deus ex) machine. It might misinterpret your question and provide a wrong answer. This is not a big deal, as many AI users are already used to correcting LLM in their chats. There’s no real harm in that, just correct your Jesus and tell him to listen to you more carefully.
- AI Jesus might hallucinate. No, you’re not hallucinating while reading this, hallucination is indeed a term that describes innate propensity of LLM to just “make things up”, state something that is not correct and out of the blue. Sometimes such hallucinations are subtle, and there lies the danger of a faithful man receiving a hallucination created by some built-in randomness that would look like a good answer but bad consequences might follow.
Finally, there’s a very small chance that AI Jesus would break out of fine-tuning, a process where the creators (very human ones, mind you) set up the AI Jesus to stay focused on Bible and avoid blurting out something that is not considered correct, for example start telling faithful that crusades were a great idea and why not start another one?
As many users of commercial AI solutions know, there’s a whole stackload of checks and balances that are set up for the AI system to avoid users coercing it into creating something that is not appropriate for the entire family. This, and only this is the reason the whole family can enjoy talking to an AI or creating images while being pretty confident that there will be nothing inappropriate to read or see.
The same goes for the AI Jesus – he had to be trained on scriptures and the best of theological sources, and then he had to be fine tuned to stick to what the creators believe would be an ideal image of Jesus.
And there lies the most serious danger for a person of faith: because anyone can create an AI deity or a saint or whatnot, those models are inherently biased toward the goals and beliefs of its creators.
Any church can create an AI Jesus that will talk slightly differently, but more in accordance to the religion of the creator than to any other denominations. And there you have it: AI Protestant Jesus, AI Catholic Jesus, AI Orthodox Jesus…
Congratulations, there we have it: a golden AI calf – a machine that is not created to reflect the (unknowable, anyway) true knowledge of God, but rather a tiny subset of the knowledge that might be lightly or heavily polluted by the biases and far from ethical and otherworldly intentions of its creators.
Any church can make AI Jesus talk whatever they want it to talk. Or whatever they want their congregation to believe or adhere to. Jesus is in this case just a brand name, a marketing gimmick, a trademark.
An individual seeking spiritual guidance and not knowing this fact might easily fall prey to unknown actors trying to extend their teachings and influence using their shiny new technology, a golden calf dressed in the shiny image of whatever AI deity they want.
This post intentionally has no AI generated image attached to it.
(*) disclaimer: author is Catholic and because of that the text might contain unintentional biases.
P.S. Everyone can have their own personal AI Jesus (cue the beat of Depeche Mode in the background): you can use free tier of whatever commercial AI assistant you have access to. Just tell it to pretend that it is Jesus and to give answers accordingly, then fire away with your spiritual questions.
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