Week 7 Post #1 MBA 6101 ChatBot for Church?

 

This past month in Germany, a church conducted an entire 40 minute sermon via ChatGPT with four different chatbot avatars packed with 300 people. Now I am not a super religious person and I may have missed confession for the last 10 years but I do know when I attend church I love the personal feeling. I love being able to connect spiritually with my priest and feeling his emotion when he delivers his sermon. Bringing a chatbot into my place of worship makes that connection feel a little generic in my opinion. 

I am okay with accepting that AI is coming, its here and we need to adapt. However, there are some places where I am not so comfortable with it existing. Some of the churchgoers were impressed and some were curious but then there were some that found it off-putting and described the avatars as "soulless". One person said that the avatar's spoke too fast and made it hard to understand them. As one person mentions, maybe this is for the youngest generation that enjoys this kind of thing. But for the older folks, it just separates them from their connection to the whole church going process. 

Although it was sought to be impressive and a possibly good thing for all to feel more inclusivity within their house of worship, there was a concern that it would deliver more opinionated sermons that would be misused in sermons such as those with AI. 

Source:

https://apnews.com/article/germany-church-protestants-chatgpt-ai-sermon-651f21c24cfb47e3122e987a7263d348