- A church in Switzerland has an AI Jesus confessing and offering advice
- The church worked with a local university to design and implement the AI.
- AI is trained in the New Testament to imitate Jesus
A Swiss church is testing a new way to connect with Jesus in the confessional. It uses AI to simulate the personality of the 1st century Galilean for visitors as part of a religious-themed art project called Deus in Machina. The digital simulacrum of Jesus Christ interacts with visitors and offers spiritual guidance based on what people say.
If you enter the confessional, you will see the Jesus AI displayed on a screen. This decidedly Swiss-looking man from the Roman-ruled Middle East of two millennia ago listens to people express their questions or concerns. The AI model underlying the simulation was built by a church team working with the Immersive Realities Research Laboratory at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts using the New Testament as the basis for how Jesus thinks and speaks. So far, it has worked well.
“AI fascinates us. But it also has its limits and raises ethical questions,” explains St. Peter's theologian Marco Schmid in a statement (translated from German by Google). “In all previous tests, their answers matched our theological understanding of St. Peter's Chapel.”
Reach out and touch faith
The video of people reacting to AI Jesus shows some mixed reviews. One parishioner expressed surprise at how easy it was and how good the advice he received was. Another said it was very generic and not very impressive. A disagreement over religious interpretation suggests that AI Jesus is acting exactly as he should. Now that AI Jesus is here, the question is, what comes next?
If you want to experience the other side of the religious experience, you can try Social AI, a complete universe where you are the only real person and everyone you talk to is just an AI character. Or you could choose to be a sort of priest to the traumatized AI personalities you encounter on Friend.com. If you're really not sure how to use AI ethically in a religious context, you can always ask the Pope. He and IBM have put together a comprehensive guide to the ethical use of AI.
