Meet your own personal AI Jesus in the confessional of this Swiss church
- A church in Switzerland has an AI Jesus who makes confessions and gives advice
- The church partnered with a local university to design and deploy the AI
- The AI is trained in the New Testament to imitate Jesus
A Swiss church is trying a new way to connect with Jesus in the confessional. It uses AI to simulate the personality of the first-century Galilean for visitors as part of a religious-themed art project called Deus in Machina (God in a Machine). The digital simulacrum of Jesus Christ engages visitors and offers spiritual guidance based on what people say.
When you enter the confessional, you will see the AI Jesus appear on a screen. The distinctly Swiss-looking man from the Roman-run Middle East of two millennia ago listens to people voice their questions or concerns. The AI model underlying the simulation was built by a church team working with the Immersive Realities Research Lab at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, using the New Testament as the basis for how Jesus thinks and speaks. So far it has been performing well.
“AI fascinates us. But it also has its limits and raises ethical questions,” St. Peter theologian Marco Schmid explains in a statement (translated from German by Google). “In all previous tests, his answers matched our theological understanding of St. Peter’s Chapel.”
Reach out and touch faith
The video of people commenting on AI Jesus show mixed reviews. One parishioner expressed surprise at how easy it was and how good the advice they received was. Another said it was very generic and not very impressive. A disagreement over the religious interpretation suggests that AI Jesus is performing 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, an entire universe where the one and only person is you and everyone you talk to is just an AI character. Or you can be a kind of priest yourself for the traumatized AI personalities you encounter on Friend.com. If you’re really unsure about how to use AI ethically in a religious context, you can always ask the Pope. He and IBM have put together an entire guide to ethical AI use.
