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November 28, 2024
An unusual art experiment in Lucerne's St. Peter's Chapel has caused a worldwide stir over the past two months: An AI-generated Jesus avatar was available to visitors in the confessional for dialogue. The project "Deus in Machina," a collaboration between the church and the Immersive Realities Research Lab of the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, aimed to explore the boundaries of technology in a religious context. Over 900 conversations were recorded, transcribed, and subsequently anonymized and evaluated.
Reactions to the AI Jesus were varied. While a majority of visitors, according to a study, described the interaction as a spiritual experience and were touched by the avatar's responses, others expressed criticism. Some felt the statements were clichéd and superficial, while others saw the project as a trivialization of religious practices. The choice of the confessional as the place to encounter the AI Jesus was also controversially discussed. While the initiators saw the protected space as ideal for intimate conversations with the avatar, others criticized the supposed mixing of the sacred and the artificial.
Technically, the AI Jesus was based on the ChatGPT-4o language model and was trained with content from the New Testament. Speech recognition was handled by Whisper, enabling the avatar to communicate in 100 different languages. Depictions of the AI Jesus show a young man with long hair in a modern black sweater.
The experiment in Lucerne is not the first point of contact between the church and artificial intelligence. As early as 2023, a chatbot preached at the German Protestant Church Congress in Nuremberg. The Vatican is also intensively engaged with the topic and has appointed a Franciscan monk and former engineer as papal advisor for AI. The increasing importance of AI in societal areas, including religion, presents new challenges for churches and simultaneously opens up unusual opportunities for engaging with questions of faith.
Although the "Deus in Machina" project in Lucerne was concluded as a successful art experiment, no further deployments of the AI Jesus are currently planned. A "resurrection" of the digital avatar would require "deep reflection," according to theologian Marco Schmid, head of the project.
Mindverse, as a German company for AI-supported content creation, image generation, and research, is following such developments with great interest. The development of customer-specific AI solutions, such as chatbots, voicebots, and knowledge systems, is the focus of Mindverse. The company sees artificial intelligence as a powerful tool that can also enable new forms of communication and reflection in a religious context.
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