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As a reporter overlaying the tech business, I spend a variety of time fascinated by synthetic intelligence.
Billboards for AI firms are dotted round my neighborhood in San Francisco. I recurrently discuss to individuals – firm executives, my family and friends – about AI chatbots. I even tried using AI clones repair my relationship life.
So after I got here throughout a Fb group known as “AI for Church Leaders and Pastors,” my curiosity was piqued. On the web page, I discovered a neighborhood of spiritual leaders discussing updates to AI packages like ChatGPT and Claude, even utilizing picture and video mills to recreate biblical scenes.
The parallels have been intriguing: For a lot of tech lovers within the San Francisco Bay Space and past, AI itself had turn out to be one thing of a faith. I wished to penetrate deeper how spirituality and AI collide in spiritual establishments all through the nation.
I scoured the web for clergy who’ve experimented with AI to assist write their sermons and known as over a dozen. I additionally visited a number of native church buildings, synagogues, and mosques to ask spiritual leaders what they thought of utilizing AI of their work.
I rapidly found that AI is already a controversial subject in many spiritual communities. I even discovered a Bible examine group made up of engineers from high AI firms that met weekly within the basement of a church in Silicon Valley.
The spiritual leaders I used to be most involved in speaking to have been those who noticed AI as a dilemma: Sure, the know-how may make their jobs simpler. However at what value?
I’ve discovered that almost all stories on AI are about advances within the know-how itself, comparable to updates to chatbots or the rising international marketplace for computer systems and the semiconductor chips that energy them. However I’ve all the time had an curiosity in reporting on the opposite facet of AI – how individuals use it and the moral points that come up from automating the extra private elements of our lives.
I felt that faith was a superb subject to discover in my reporting as a result of the foundations of most religions are written scriptures that AI can ingest simply as it might information articles or books. However I may additionally see many the explanation why individuals can be against utilizing AI in a apply the place human intimacy is in some ways the entire level. How would spiritual leaders react when AI had hallucinations — statements that chatbots provide you with?
One among my most informative conversations was with Jay Cooper, a pastor in Austin, Texas. He was the primary of a number of spiritual leaders to pose the query: Can God communicate by AI?
In his personal reply, Mr. Cooper quoted a a passage from the Book of Johnthe place Jesus, who claims to be king, confronts Roman officers. Jesus tells them, “All who’re on the facet of the reality hearken to me,” to which a Roman minister replies, “What’s the reality?”
Personally, I’ve all the time been involved in these sorts of conversations, though I take into account myself extra “non secular” than spiritual. My dad and mom met in seminary. My mom is a longtime hospice chaplain. I attended a Lutheran school the place I typically accompanied associates to morning chapel and took part in religion discussions within the dorm.
It is all the time useful when reporting on delicate matters to be accustomed to the topic. Whereas reporting, spiritual leaders typically requested me what I thought of AI, and with the ability to muster a considerate response was vital to constructing sentiment and belief.
The article got here collectively after I interviewed Rabbi Oren Hayon and Rabbi Josh Fixler by way of Zoom in December. With the assistance of Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad, a Muslim AI researcher on the College of Washington, Rabbi Fixler created a program known as “Rabbi Bot.” Educated in Rabbi Fixler’s outdated sermons, Rabbi Bott may write sermons in his type and even ship them throughout a service with an AI model of his voice.
Watching a YouTube video of a sermon given by Rabbi Bott two years in the past, I used to be intrigued by the scene of Rabbi Fixler chatting with the chatbot aloud throughout a service and his booming voice responding by the synagogue audio system as if from the heavens. I knew instantly that it might open my article.
Throughout our Zoom name, Rabbi Hayon provided a pointed evaluation of how AI suits into a bigger story of technological instruments altering the methods individuals worship. This consists of applied sciences comparable to radio and tv and the Web, but additionally older instruments relationship again to the invention of the printing press within the fifteenth century.
In relation to AI extra typically, it is simple for individuals to return out strongly for or towards the know-how. The job of reporters is to not take sides, however to tell. I hope that readers will come away from my article pondering in a extra nuanced means in regards to the concept of utilizing AI in faith and in addition in different elements of life.
