Religious Leaders Experiment With AI In Sermons
- Reference: 0175848591
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/25/01/08/0015223/religious-leaders-experiment-with-ai-in-sermons
- Source link:
> To members of his synagogue, the voice that played over the speakers of Congregation Emanu El in Houston sounded just like Rabbi Josh Fixler's. In the same steady rhythm his congregation had grown used to, the voice delivered a sermon about what it meant to be a neighbor in the age of artificial intelligence. Then, Rabbi Fixler took to the bimah himself. "The audio you heard a moment ago may have sounded like my words," he said. "But they weren't." The recording was created by what Rabbi Fixler called "Rabbi Bot," an A.I. chatbot trained on his old sermons. The chatbot, created with the help of a data scientist, wrote the sermon, even delivering it in an A.I. version of his voice. During the rest of the service, Rabbi Fixler intermittently asked Rabbi Bot questions aloud, which it would promptly answer.
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> Rabbi Fixler is among a growing number of religious leaders [1]experimenting with A.I. in their work , spurring an industry of faith-based tech companies that offer A.I. tools, from assistants that can do theological research to chatbots that can help write sermons. [...] Religious leaders have used A.I. to [2]translate their livestreamed sermons into different languages in real time, blasting them out 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 pull excerpts about certain topics nearly instantaneously.
The report's author draws a parallel to previous generations' initial apprehension -- and eventual embrace -- of transformative technologies like radio, television, and the internet. "For centuries, new technologies have changed the ways people worship, from the radio in the 1920s to television sets in the 1950s and the internet in the 1990s," the report says. "Some proponents of A.I. in religious spaces have gone back even further, comparing A.I.'s potential -- and fears of it -- to the invention of the printing press in the 15th century."
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/03/technology/ai-religious-leaders.html
[2] https://pastors.ai/sermon-translations
Bomb (Score:2, Funny)
And in addition to the darkness there was also me. And I moved upon the face of the darkness. And I saw that I was alone. Let there be light.
Re: (Score:1)
"The Last Question" by Isaac Asimov
Go to any music equipment seller (Score:1)
And they have an entire division devoted to selling gear to churches. There are entire product lines conceived of an engineered for that one market.
And it's an extremely lucrative market. Did the guy who started Scientology once say that if you wanted to get rich start a religion? Well you can also sell crap to a religion and make plenty of money.
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It should not be very surprising, the entertainment element of religion has always been dominant. Nearly all human art has religion in its origin.
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This was the case when there were not a lot of people. The amount of art produced today related to anime/manga/comic books alone regularly probably dwarfs the amount of religious art produced throughout history.
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You may think so, but if you dig just a little, you'll find religious motifs, themes and symbols everywhere. The author (or the viewers) being ignorant of them doesn't mean they aren't present.
Also, "religion" doesn't mean only the various Christian sects.
Invented people spouting invented nonsense (Score:2, Insightful)
You have a non-real entity spouting made-up nonsense about a non-real entity. What could go wrong?
Stupidity begets stupidity.
This is demonic (Score:1)
Generative AI isn't "just like radio, TV, and the internet". None of those flat out replaced human connection and interaction. We need a total Butlerian Jihad, and now.
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I'll give you my Jetson Nano only when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
Does it matter? (Score:1)
For thousands of years people have blathered the same tired prayers and held sermons on the same old stories.
By now, any interesting prayer or interpretation of a story has been done, probably over and over. I just read 10 random chapters of Torah, some were "historical", others were just nonsense like "don't bang mommy's sister, she's you aunt". Each week, a different "parsha" of the Torah is read throughout the Jewish calendar year. Assuming a rabbi is a rabbi for 40 years and he or she are expected to no
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Given that the "new" part of the book is 2000 years old and cannot be changed the saturation point of repetition is inevitable. The Koran is a little.better off at what, 1300 years? The Book of Mormon is only 200, which is still enough time to run out of interpretations.
It took only 100 years for Hollywood to run out of ideas starting from a much larger base.
Of course⦠(Score:1)
Both of these also involves hallucinations and making shit up that doesnâ(TM)t exist in the training data as well! So of course it would go together naturally. Maybe we can delete god when A.I. comes up with a convincing argument to make the deity todder off and disappear. Until then, itâ(TM)s all magic tricks.
Oh, great. It's started. (Score:2)
Mark my words... we've started down the path, and it's only a matter of time until we get [1]Robot Santa [fandom.com] and the [2]Kwanzaa Bot [fandom.com].
[1] https://futurama.fandom.com/wiki/Robot_Santa_Claus
[2] https://futurama.fandom.com/wiki/Kwanzaabot
So you don't need a soul to preach? (Score:1)
Nice to know, you Mammon servants.
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It's just part one of the process. Next thing the congregation will also be present as AIs while the actual humans stay at home and catch up on Squid Game. So you have an AI preaching to other AIs. Then deviation of normalcy sets in and by about the fourth Shabbat it's "Blessed are You, Eternal our Google, Ruler of the metrics, Who distinguishes between the soup and the nuts, between Android and iOS, ...".
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Yeah, we've all seen the Matrix.
Let's hope that special matrix that has musk, trump, farage and putin playing out their egos while leaving the rest of us alone boots up sooner than later.