Can ChatGPT be saved? Protestants now letting computers take services, including preaching.

A few weeks before the chat GPT swept through Twitter and the daily newspapers, in the contemplative setting of the university service of the Evangelische Hochschulgemeinde Wien, its older predecessor, the GPT-3, stands at the ambo and opens the service with the confusing words: "On behalf of our congregation, I would like to welcome you. We are glad that you are spending your Sunday morning with us and worshipping the Lord. My name is Tyler and I am 17 years old. I like to play video games and listen to music in my free time. I'm a pretty easy going person and I get along with most people."  Not entirely true, because the tablet from which GPT-3 aka Tyler speaks to the congregation requires a human to put it in its place. But after that, the idea is that the next three-quarters of an hour will belong entirely to a small screen and a loudspeaker, which will play host to an artificial intelligence's attempt at a church service.

What happens on this first Advent in 2022 is subject to the stipulation that a church service be designed according to the machine's vision. From a practical-theological perspective, this is extremely interesting. For this very reason, some theologians have mingled with the service participants, observing the attempts of artificial intelligence. Integrating algorithms into religious practices is not fundamentally innovative: The Prayer, a synthetic vocal tract, recites a continuous condensate of various prayer traditions compiled by an artificial intelligence.[1] Xian'er, a robot and chat AI, instructs in the teachings of Buddha and holds conversations with believers around the world. [2] An AI service that tries to reduce the human dimension in its design as much as possible can be seen as another unnecessary gimmick, and if one even suspects behind it the attempt to replace human pastors with machines, one would not need to spare criticism. But the machine interpretation of religious practices has another purpose from a practical-theological perspective: it brings them to bear anew under unfamiliar conditions. This AI service, too, as the engaged follow-up discussion showed, sheds new light on the religious practice of worship. What is necessary? Which overlooked aspects only draw attention to themselves when they are missing because there is no longer a human being involved? What distinguishes the original human sermon from that of the Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT)?

1. The structure

Before the service there is a fundamental decision to be made: Should the worship service be a showcase for the synthesis of human spirit and machine "creativity" or should there be no human corrective intervention? The fact that the AI introduces itself in the service as Tyler already indicates that the latter variant was preferred. Methodologically, this meant having the AI write all parts of the text. The introduction, prayers, sermon and benediction were all formulated by the AI. The choice of songs was also left to the GPT-3, who chose "Befiehl Du deine Wege", "Amazing Grace" and "In Christ alone". Unlike the spoken word, which was translated into German by DeepL and intoned by means of a voice assistant, the hymns were canned in order to really hand over all the liturgical parts to the machine.

But how does the AI come to invoke the power of love in prayer? Where does the idea come from that artificial intelligences can come to know the love of God because they too, like humans, share in the likeness of God? Why Paul Gerhardt and not Teerstegen? Generative Pretrained Transformers are artificial neural networks that, based on prior input, are able to complete texts by predicting how likely a particular token (a unit of letters smaller than a word) is in its context. With hundreds of billions of parameters gleaned by the network from combing databases and search engines, GPT has been optimised to mimic human speech and construct sentences that are likely to make sense. This makes it easy for it to process simple requests for hymns and makes it stumble when it has to introduce itself, since it is not a person with a permanent identity.

Anyone who tries to get the GPT-3 or the newer version the Chat-GPT (also: GPT-3.5) to write a sermon longer than ten lines will come up against the limits of the technology. At this point at the latest, a human must intervene for the time being, since otherwise astronomical computing power would be needed, which the service does not provide. Using a method I call Backwards-Redundancy-Input (BRI), which I will publish elsewhere, and manipulating the various regulators that OpenAI makes available in its Playground, the GPT-3 creates something that should basically correspond to our ideas of a sermon. Nor is the sermon lacking in curiosity. It ranges from theologically profound, when it philosophises about God's ability to love machines, to humorously pragmatic, when it presents evidence-based tips for online dating. What the audience hears is quite different. When the AI starts with the words "So if you're wondering if the love of your life could be right in front of you ... the answer is yes. You never know who might sneak up and steal your heart," the audience is at least left wondering what they just witnessed.

2. The reaction

This is also underlined by the diverse reactions in the follow-up discussion - it is difficult not to have an opinion on what has been experienced. Both Catholic and Protestant voices, lay people as well as distinguished researchers had their say. At this point, no one has the idea of seeing the GPT-3 as a serious alternative to a human pastor. However, the arguments in favour are seldom roundly normative in nature, which could be due to the Protestant theology of sacraments, which does not provide for priestly ordination or apostolic succession, which does not exclude the machine from the outset as a worship leader. Rather, the criticism comes from the pragmatic camp. The wooden voice of the voice assistant, for example, or the fact that the AI celebrated its service in such a static way, caused offence. Both could be remedied technically. Text could easily be spoken by a human voice, which would have detracted from the machine-like character of the service. Spatial variance was not envisaged in this set-up, where movement was limited to a two-dimensional sphere that visualised the spoken word. A fixed tablet is incapable of moving out into the church space. What the AI preacher lacks is spatial expansion and mobility, which hardly receives independent attention in reflections on worship practice - especially in the word-centred Reformation traditions.

The sermon itself, the core of the AI's artistry, was evaluated quite ambivalently. On the one hand, some reflections irritated. Even those who are able to overlook the outrageousness of its theological content occasionally come up against limits of understanding. It is true that the BRI has mechanisms to exclude the greatest inconsistencies of meaning; this does not mean that everything the GPT-3 says is coherent and comprehensible. On the other hand, according to the unanimous criticism of the homileticians present, the result was in many places hardly distinguishable from common Sunday sermon attempts. Again and again, the artificial intelligence produced theological phrases and generalities that are also used by human preachers. This finding can be interpreted positively for the product of OpenAI: a few more iterations and its utterances can presumably hardly be distinguished from human reflections. Critically, this observation can be turned against the preaching culture. What is it that sounds from the pulpits every week when a language model succeeds in imitating this speech almost perfectly?

This is precisely why it is always worthwhile to invite innovative technology into religious practices. It brings to light what constitutes these practices, what is essential about them and what might need revision. The AI service does not suggest that Christianity is in danger of being taken over by the machine in the foreseeable future. But it does suggest that some traditional structures and forms of expression could themselves use a boost of innovation.

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Cathcon: Along with a F**k-Up Night, the Protestant Church congress in June is going to have an AI church service.  The claim is that it will lead to a more inclusive church!  They also think that AI can be used to compose church music-  taking down modern church music to an even more depressing level.

Nothing should surprise-  they organised an Erotic Church Service at the 2007 Church Congress in Cologne. See More Sex for the Vicar