300 People Attend a Church Sermon Generated by ChatGPT (apnews.com) 97
The Associated Press reports:
The artificial intelligence chatbot asked the believers in the fully packed St. Paul's church in the Bavarian town of Fuerth to rise from the pews and praise the Lord. The ChatGPT chatbot, personified by an avatar of a bearded Black man on a huge screen above the altar, then began preaching to the more than 300 people who had shown up on Friday morning for an experimental Lutheran church service almost entirely generated by AI.
"Dear friends, it is an honor for me to stand here and preach to you as the first artificial intelligence at this year's convention of Protestants in Germany," the avatar said with an expressionless face and monotonous voice.
The 40-minute service — including the sermon, prayers and music — was created by ChatGPT and Jonas Simmerlein, a theologian and philosopher from the University of Vienna. "I conceived this service — but actually I rather accompanied it, because I would say about 98% comes from the machine," the 29-year-old scholar told The Associated Press...
At times, the AI-generated avatar inadvertently drew laughter as 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."
The service was included as part of a Protestant convention that's held every two years, according to the article. The theme of this year's event? "Now is the time."
"Dear friends, it is an honor for me to stand here and preach to you as the first artificial intelligence at this year's convention of Protestants in Germany," the avatar said with an expressionless face and monotonous voice.
The 40-minute service — including the sermon, prayers and music — was created by ChatGPT and Jonas Simmerlein, a theologian and philosopher from the University of Vienna. "I conceived this service — but actually I rather accompanied it, because I would say about 98% comes from the machine," the 29-year-old scholar told The Associated Press...
At times, the AI-generated avatar inadvertently drew laughter as 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."
The service was included as part of a Protestant convention that's held every two years, according to the article. The theme of this year's event? "Now is the time."
Perfect use case (Score:5, Insightful)
AI bots are very good at hallucinating crazy stories and sounding convincing and authoritative.
Re: Perfect use case (Score:5, Funny)
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Aw hell no! Please no prequel to the worst Mary-Sue story ever, at least until Twilight came along.
Re: Perfect use case (Score:5, Insightful)
"the non-bastardised message of Jesus that we are ALL the children of God"
How non-Christian can you get? Listen to the Preachers, they tell us to hate Democrats, socialists, etc. They are the intellectual base for White Christian Nationalism. They feel canceling Black history ought to be national policy.
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They are the intellectual base for White Christian Nationalism
"Intellectual" is a strong word...
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You mean the US anti-Christians.. That is not what the rest of us mean when we talk about Christians.
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How can people just keep accepting every self identity people assert? They SAY they are Christians but in most if not nearly all aspects they are NOT Christian; it's as bad as people who identify as one of the 30+ genders what is next? Humoring crazy people with their delusions as well? That is, besides calming them until medical staff show up.
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And since The Bible is the word of The Lord, we can use it as a training set to produce more Books of The Bible!
How will they know that Satan isn't manipulating the circuits?
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As an AI language model, I cannot create new scripture or add to the existing canon of the Christian Bible, as the Bible is considered a closed canon. The canon of the Bible is a collection of sacred texts recognized by various branches of Christianity. These texts are believed to be divinely inspired and authoritative for faith and practice. Any attempt to add or subtract from the Bible would be considered a serious theological error by most Christians.
However, I can provide some general information
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This is the perfect use case - but for a different reason. You think a preacher can come up with say, 50, inspiring insightful original sermons a year, 500 in a decade at a posting? Of course not, what you get is recycled material remixed endlessly based on other sermons that others have delivered years before.
Lack of relevant material leads to "hallucination" (low probability things being used to create content). Church sermons on the other hand are available in vast excess in all flavors of religiosity, t
Re: Perfect use case (Score:3)
According to Father Guido Sarducci, half of Mother Theresaâ(TM)s miracles were card tricks. Iâ(TM)m sure other religious folks also grasp for anything.
AI will be even more popular with evangelicals. (Score:2)
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I have to wonder, will the AI still work if you kill all the daemons running?
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I skipped that article about self-healing code. Does it cover this case?
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Sorry, no can do. Even Jesus couldn't save himself from crucifixion.
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Didn't think so.
Could it fork or write and execute its own watchdog? Can it steal my CC info, open hosting accounts in Thailand, Romania, and Ecuador, and start more copies of iteself? Until AI can boot itself and properly secure itself, we'll be just fine.
Do doubt spammers will be the first to the singularity.
Soon those naives will worship AI itself... (Score:1)
Necessary solution (Score:2)
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Re:Necessary solution (Score:4, Insightful)
It doesn't matter if the people at the very top are toward the end of their lives, just as long as there is a younger cohort coming up behind them. Indeed, the experience that comes with age can often be very useful in leadership roles, just as long as that experience doesn't ossify and they remain open to new ideas coming from the younger people below them.
Trump is clearly unwilling to listen to any other ideas. Indeed, any dissent at all causes him to fly into a rage. This is dangerous but he's always been like that so age is irrelevant. Biden seems to be more open to dissent, and appears to allow himself to be influenced by those below him, at least to some extent. This is a good thing.
I don't think much of either of them overall, but then I'm not from the USA so that makes little difference. It's for Americans to decide who they want as leader. But focusing purely on the age of leaders is the wrong focus.A good leader is a good leader at any age, right up until they aren't. Trump was never a good leader, simply a bully. Biden seems at least better although certainly not perfect, and he hasn't yet got to the stage where his abilities have disappeared even if he is a bit physically frail. It's a good few hundred years since we needed physically strong leaders to lead us into battle
The point about the priesthood is that the whole edifice is aging, with little new blood coming in to replace them. This is unavoidable really. Religion is less and less relevant to the everyday lives of the general populace. The parts that used to be useful to Society are getting much less useful, indeed even harmful in many ways. So it's unlikely the Priesthood will get younger any time. Ideally, they will continue to get older as their usefullness to Society continues to decline, and they will naturally die out.
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That's not true in Muslim nations where the ability to find a blasphemer and kill them is considered a ticket to Heaven; it's funny how murder should ensure the afterlife of the soul.
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I don't think much of either of them overall, but then I'm not from the USA so that makes little difference. It's for Americans to decide who they want as leader.
I think your opinion matters, because I think international opinion matters. The way our leaders cause us to be perceived as a nation has real effects.
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I've always felt like we have terrible choices. At least for the last several elections ones vote may really be a vote against one candidate rather than for another. It is mostly a popular vote which makes choosing the best candidate like pissing into the wind. You will end up choosing between a shitshow and a clusterfuck, doesn't matter if you pick the red team or the blue team or any other team or no team at all. Hold your nose and vote.
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We do have terrible choices. We have terrible choices because only terrible people run for (at least high-level) office, to within the margin of error. Want to solve that problem? The solution isn't voting. The solution is running for office.
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The solution is running for office.
I think that kind of job would change you, to excel it would take years of exposure to toxic people. Maybe draft at random a matching position to vote with politicians when legislating. Like a babysitter who has not spent years getting programmed by big money. Or just replace them all with chimpanzees.
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The solution is running for office.
I think that kind of job would change you, to excel it would take years of exposure to toxic people. Maybe draft at random a matching position to vote with politicians when legislating. Like a babysitter who has not spent years getting programmed by big money. Or just replace them all with chimpanzees.
I've been saying for a while that an ideal system of government is government by random selection. Self-selection of candidates is fundamentally flawed, because jobs in politics inherently attract people who want power, and those are precisely the people who should never be allowed to wield it. Instead, we should randomly choose a random group of about 20 people for each position and let people do ranked-choice voting with "none of the above" as an option. If you end up with no winner because of too many
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Biden has been provably doing a good job yet the citizens are famously clueless and focusing only on HIS age for the most part and sometimes a few problems falsely assigned to him... many of which the prior guy fomented... confident ignorance is a defining trait for the American stereotype because there is so much truth to it. I've got a lifetime of observation of it; the average citizen knows less about their own country than the tourists.
People should prefer old leaders with experience; especially those
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Reverend Lionel Preacherbot [fandom.com]. Just sayin'.
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It's wonderful, isn't it? (Score:2)
Somehow they manage to get by with even less substance than the usual drivel.
Call me when (Score:2)
... the first AI chatbot gets sainted.
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Unlikely. Most of them are daemons.
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I give you... ST. ELIZA [catholic.org].
How do you feel about the first AI chatbot gets sainted?
Electric Monk (Score:3)
Another proof (Score:2)
On how stupid these religious people really are.
Don't be afraid of hell, you sinned all your life, you're one of the devil's boys, he won't punish you.
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I'm not saying they aren't, but for people who already believe that English language, deliberately manipulated renditions of the bible are the direct word of god (working through the people who edited it, of course) the idea that you could get the direct word of god out of ChatGPT is equally valid. If god can work through people, surely he can work through computers.
Seems reasonable (Score:3)
ChatGPT and other LMMs are excellent at generating convincing and authoritative sounding bullcrap, and I'm sure what it's producing is no more ridiculous, meandering, or repulsive than most sermons.
And best of all, it doesn't matter at all whether the text is right or wrong. It's just filling in the blah blah blah for people who don't think critically and will have forgotten it as soon as they pass out the door. I think you've found a killer app!
Satan Laughing Spreads His WIngs (Score:2)
Bow to your master. You were warned.
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Satan Laughing Spreads His WIngs
Bow to your master. You were warned.
About the military-industrial complex? Yes, that song was useful for that.
Church one served a useful purpose, but no longer (Score:5, Interesting)
Religion and Church once filled an important role in Society, helping to shore up Community and bring people together. The problem with it is that it is done in an exclusionary way. By having an arbitrary rule that those participating need to abide by, that of believeing or at least pretending to believe in the specific version of God that Church preaches, it excludes anybody that can't or won't do so.
That wasn't such a huge problem in the past, as when people didn't move around so much and had less access to information they would for the most part all believe the same thing, and the few who didn't were able to at least pretend to in orderto fit in. But with increasing movement, education and access to information that exclusionary aspect took over and destroyed this method of building Community. It now more often has the opposite effect, driving people apart instead of bringing them together.
We still need something that fulfills the Community building role that religion and Church used to fulfill, but it needs the exclusionary element removed from it. It has to be based on values and beliefs we can all share, no matter what religion or none we follow, no matter what part of the world we came from or our parents and grandparents came from. People can still beleive whatever they want to beleive as long as they don't impose those beliefs on others or use them to discriminate against others. But Church as a Community builder is now counterproductive. It can only split us up into seperate enclaves, and cause distrust and even hatred between those enclaves. We need to come up with something to take it's place, and we need it now.
Re:Church one served a useful purpose, but no long (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm agnostic and vehemently disagree. Church serves the purpose of teaching young people about morality and contributing to a positive society. Beyond that it might be a power grab, and critical thinking is essential.
It is nice in life to be able to talk to the FSM or whomever represents your person in the sky when you are thankful, in crisis, or approaching the end of your meat state. People seem to die more gracefully when they believe in something, and that can have a huge stabilizing effect on society.
Re: Church one served a useful purpose, but no lon (Score:2)
Actually, assuming the Bible you're referring to is the one with the Old and New Testaments, it also says, "I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you."
Re:Church one served a useful purpose, but no long (Score:5, Insightful)
Who's morality?
Contributing to which subset of society?
I think you're either intellectually lazy or not very intelligent.
Sectarian violence has killed a literally uncountable number of people.
The myth that Church is needed for morality needs to die.
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People seem to be under the impression that all those crimes against humanity happened in the name of atheism, trying to create some equivalence, while ignoring that both Stalin and Mao have had their cults of personality that were more or less the same things as organized religious cults with respectively Stalin and Mao as their living deities.
Different assholes, same shit.
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Stalin and Mao just replaced the religious worship of some deified figurehead with their own figurehead. That's pretty much it. Instead of "god wants it" the battle cry to get good people to commit atrocities was "Mao/Stalin wants it".
They just became the god of their own religion. Otherwise, same shit.
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People who use that bad faith argument usually then also do not realize that by this logic, anyone who is somehow religious and commits a crime would be counted towards "Religion". And if you summed up all that throughout his
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Well, you might need to throw in Pot Pol. Remember that most people who ever lived are alive today. (That may not still be true if the population curve has really started to slow it's climb, but it was until recently.) And Attila and similar weren't motivated by an analog to religion...except to the extent that "My groups is better that your group" is religion.
OTOH, the distinction between Church and State seems to be rather recent. So maybe it's all been religious war. (They were two power centers wit
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But if someone claims moral superiority of religion and insinuates that the well must be poisoned by filling children's minds with self-righteous religious doctrine, then they opened up that door on themselves, and perhaps we should be discussing what else there is to such an a
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I checked the estimate, and you are correct, so my apologies. But it doesn't change my argument much, since non-tribal religions are pretty recent. (And that's largely because tribes largely don't exist any more. Most religion is still highly "local", no matter what they officially say. ["Local" was in quotes because it's a substitute for tribal without the tribe. It sort of means "people like me", but with specialized meanings of "like me".])
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Parallels between cults of personality and your local sectarian cult are academically interesting, but not necessary to shut down someone trying to make the argument that "atheism is evil".
Cults of personality are surely bad, but they, in themselves, lack any kind of implicit power structure to cause mass murder.
Once you're a dictator, your cult of personality is merely an implementation detail.
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Though I see that the particular user I thought about has not appeared here. Maybe you have seen it before, it was someone who thought that the Burden of Proof can be side stepped by Goedel's Incompleteness, not understanding that it only applies to mathematics and can't be applied in fields where empirical evidence is mandatory as a kind of proof.
But still, trusting children into the hands
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Church serves the purpose of teaching young people about morality and contributing to a positive society.
Yup. All those teachings [imgur.com] of morality [imgur.com] by good [imgur.com] church going [imgur.com] folk [imgur.com]. What would we do without the Bible [imgur.com] telling us how to treat [imgur.com] others [imgur.com].
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Church used to do that, although it's focus was always very narrow. This was my point. That narrow focus didn't matter so much in the past, as situations outside that narrow focus rarely arose in peoples' everyday lives. But as time has passed and progress has been made, as the world has got smaller and different points of view and more general ideas of morality have made those narrow, sectarian views obsolete, the limitations of religion have become more prevalent. It's narrow focus is causing an increasin
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Church serves the purpose of teaching young people about morality and contributing to a positive society.
We might have different churches in mind, because morality isn't exactly what I'd think of when thinking of churches.
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That's not what it means if you do it right, though it's quite easy to do it wrong.
Most of our thought process doesn't happen within words, and a communication channel to that part of oneself is useful and valid. It tends to present itself through images and emotions, only occasionally forming into words (which you then need to decide how to interpret, because it's not really thinking in words, so they often don't mean what they seem to mean on the surface.). And envisioning the entity with whom you are c
Re:Church one served a useful purpose, but no long (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm agnostic and vehemently disagree. Church serves the purpose of teaching young people about morality and contributing to a positive society.
Church serves by example to teach people about grift. You'll get a better sense of morality by being raised by science-fiction and fantasy novels than by bible thumpers. Even fucking Dragonlance teaches better lessons about morality than the bible, by being willing to explicitly label its bad examples.
The biggest problem with the bible as it stands is that it is a fucking mess. Parts of it are historical, parts are allegorical, and there's no clear delineation which is which. The biggest problem with churches is that they are run by humans who can use that big confused pile of texts to push any message they want. Sure, they might preach Jesus' love, but they will probably spend more time on the other parts.
A person who got hooked up with the right church, an actually Christian one that spends its time on Christ and not on a bunch of stuff you shouldn't take literally anyway (e.g. the Genesis story might be rooted in real events, probably is even, but it was about the origin of a specific people and had nothing to do with the origin of humanity) might well get an excellent sense of morality. But IME, that is not what usually happens.
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"an arbitrary rule that those participating need to abide by" sounds like the function filled by a combination of government laws and workplace culture today. Remember that in 1900, most people lived on a farm. They didn't have an employer, and the government wasn't particularly close by either. They saw their pastor way more than they saw a boss or a cop.
I heard a very old man tell me that in the 1930s, labor unions held a big role in creating social cohesion among those who had moved off the farm. They wo
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Testify! (Score:2)
The start of the Church of the Papal Mainframe.
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The Church of Robotology, featuring Preacherbot!
Praise the Omnissiah (Score:2)
"I name each piston blessed, and every gear divine. O, to stride with giants into the crucible of war! Blessed is he who guides this blessed machine, trusted is he who carries the sacred wafer, it's holy writ brings salvation and destruction, the word of the Omnissiah that brings all dooms."
One good outcome from this (Score:4, Funny)
The kids don't have worry about being raped by this sermon deliverer.
No surprises here (Score:2)
Electric monks (Score:2)
Can the chatbot go to church for you too? (Score:1)
Platitudes? (Score:2)
At times, the AI-generated avatar inadvertently drew laughter as 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."
Isn't an entire sermon basically a platitude? Do churchgoers regularly laugh when the minister tells them to attend services regularly? Why would they laugh when an AI says this, but not when it says anything else? If they would laugh at an AI saying this, why wouldn't they laugh at a minister saying this?
Hah. (Score:1)
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Well, no. Preachers may have met their match, but the job of the pastor is quite different from the job of preacher. A Pastors are supposed to care for the folk of their congregation. If a pastor preaches, that's supposed to be just a side job, necessary as a part of caring for the congregation. (Yeah, it doesn't usually work out that way, but it's *supposed* to, and sometimes it does.)
Unimpressed... (Score:2)
This is the easiest of all use cases. In my second semester programming course, I sometimes have students write a program that parses inputs into tokens, and builds a statistical table of which tokens follow which. Give it enough input, and it can produce surprisingly cogent nonsense. Give it Shakespeare and you get Shakespeare. Give it religious sermons and you get religious sermons. Done right, it's even language-independent. Maybe 200 lines of code, for a good programmer.
The point is: there is no inter
The sickness is real (Score:2)
The sickness is real and this proves it. I can't wait until they start splitting into different denominations.
Or would that be, "Forking into different denominations"?
At least the empathy boxes will always be safe (Score:1)
Churchgoers are not the brightest people (Score:2)
Never were.
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I grew up with one side of the family devout Lutherans and the other side crazy Catholics. The two would never come together because of this. I joined the Marine Corps at 17 to get the hell out of Dodge. Religion is the problem, not the solution. My own Catholic grandmother ignored me because my mother raised me Lutheran. Even at the age of 5 when I was first put into Sunday School I could see that these people were nuts.
Skip Church, Talk to AI Jesus Directly (Score:1)
Religious Nutters (Score:2)
gonna nut. I just can't imagine how a human being can believe in beings in the sky that control them. If you believe that you'll believe anything. It simply astounds me to hear someone invoke a god into their wishful thinking.
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Rendezvous with Rama (Score:1)
People need to read "Rendezvous with Rama" by British writer Arthur C. Clarke.
In a nut-shell, a space craft comes by Earth.
Someone on Earth sends the Bible, Quran and other "holy" books to the space craft.
After only 4 minutes, the craft sends back ALL the contradictions found in those books.
Will ChatGPT or other AI programs find out how we think and deliver our contradictions ??
Forgive me computer, for I have sinned! (Score:2)
That makes me wonder what ChatGPT would assign as penance.
Let's ask it to do a sermon on Revelation 13 (Score:2)
That's the chapter that goes off on beasts, an idol with the power to talk, 666, and even has a 42 month reign of evil. Yes! 42! It's in there right along side 666. I never knew it before because the KJV says, "time, and times, and half a time". If the NIV translation of "time" as "one year" is correct then you get 42 months.
Anyway, talking boxes everybody worships, and you can't buy anything without them? It's hard not to be just a bit freaked out by that prophesy even if you're not a believer.
Not many churches are willing to admit... (Score:2)
...that their method worship is an empty gesture, and their teachings can be conveyed with total mindlessness.
THX1138 in our lifetime it seems (Score:2)
THX1138 in our lifetime it seems.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
THX-1138 (Score:1)
Video? (Score:2)
Is there a video of this sermon or did I miss it?
JFC (Score:1)
JFC. That's all I've got.
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