Fact check: No, an artificial intelligence Jesus does not hear confessions

Numerous media outlets reported in recent days about a “Jesus” made with artificial intelligence (AI) that has begun to hear confessions in a catholic church in Switzerland.

Affirmation: A holographic “AI Jesus” has been created and installed in a chapel in Switzerland specifically to hear confessions.

CNA’s findingsEWTN News English agency: St. Peter’s Chapel in Lucerne, a historic parish church, recently installed “an innovative project exploring the use of virtual characters based on generative artificial intelligence in a spiritual context” in collaboration with the Immersive Realities Research Laboratory from the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Lucerne.

The AI ​​program was reportedly trained with content from the New Testament, with the goal of allowing the “Jesus” avatar to respond verbally, in one of 100 languages, to questions about the Bible from people entering the site. confessional.

(Numerous reports described the “Jesus” avatar as a “hologram,” which is a 3D projection created with a laser; but a video Deutsche Welle’s installation in action showed that the artificial face of “Jesus” simply appeared on a curved computer monitor behind the confessional screen.

The installation is titled “Deus in Machina” (a Latin phrase meaning “God in the machine” and a pun on the most commonly used literary phrase “Deus ex machina”). And announcement of the lab said the project, which is described as an “art exhibition,” “encourages thinking about the limits of technology in the context of religion.”

The problem: Despite being placed in the confessional, the parish points out on their website that the AI ​​installation is intended for conversations, not confessions. The confessionalso called penance or reconciliation, is one of the seven sacraments of the Church and can only be heard by a priest or bishop, and never in a virtual environment.

A Swiss parish theologian said the project also aims to help religious people become comfortable with AI and would have said who sees potential for AI to help with the pastoral work of priests, given that AI can be available at any time, “24 hours a day, so it has skills that pastors don’t have.”

Peter Kirchschläger, an expert in theological ethics, told Deutsche Welle in response to the theologian’s comments that “we must be careful when it comes to faith, pastoral care and the search for meaning in religion. This is an area in which humans are actually far superior to machines. So we should do it ourselves.”

The Swiss artistic project is the latest of a series of attempts (including the adoption of the technology in the Vatican itself) to put AI at the service of the Catholic faith, which has so far yielded mixed results.

CatéGPTFor example, an artificial intelligence chatbot designed by another Swiss, engineer Nicolas Torcheboeuf, aims to provide answers to questions about Catholic teaching based on authoritative documents. Other similar AI-based services have gained popularity, such as Mastery of AIfrom the United States.

Less successful was an artificial intelligence “priest” created and introduced earlier this year by the California-based apologetic apostolate Catholic Answers, which was criticized by some users for his video-game-like priestly avatar. What’s more, at least one user managed to incite the priestly character to listen to his confession, prompting a statement from the apostolate in which he promised to replace the priest’s character with a layman named “Justin.”

Verdict: The “AI Jesus” project exists, but its objective is not to hear confessions or replace a priest. Rather, it is an art exhibit created by researchers at a local technical university in conjunction with theologians who say they want to raise questions about the use of technology in religious settings and demonstrate the ability of AI to answer questions about the Bible.

We qualify this statement as deceptive.

Translated and adapted by the ACI Prensa team. Originally published in CNA.