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Developing materials to AI-generated sermons and Jesus avatar, whereas synthetic intelligence enters the house of worship, a have a look at the modifications and issues
Many raised doubts over the dearth of context and accuracy in AI-generated sermons and chatbots. (AI-generated picture for illustration solely)
Not simply workplaces, synthetic intelligence (AI) has additionally slowly crept into worship too.
While some use AI to “simulate conversations with Jesus”, others take help from the technology to write sermons, even as academics and religious leaders warn about the risks and potential harm, according to a Reuters report.
Developing material to chatbots
In 2024, Justin Lester, a pastor of Friendship Baptist Church in Vallejo, California, built a custom GPT for his church that uses his sermons to develop small group materials and allows other church leaders to build lessons based on those sermons. “Jesus said we will do greater things,” he informed Reuters. “And I feel (AI) is a part of the higher.”
Meanwhile, Siraj Raval found ‘TalkToHim’, an AI-powered chatbot that simulates conversations with Jesus, as he battled loneliness and existential dread. “I had an experience where I felt listened to by a presence that was divine,” he informed Reuters concerning the app, which he used to hunt solutions to his non secular questions, equivalent to tips on how to reside with guilt, forgive when it feels unimaginable, and to behave morally.
“It was higher than a textbook. It was higher than studying the Bible,” Raval, who regularly attends a non-denominational Christian church in Idaho, said.
AI Jesus avatar, AI-generated sermons
Last year, St. Peter’s Chapel in Switzerland installed an AI Jesus avatar in its confessional booth as part of an experimental art installation with a local university. What most surprised Marco Schmid, a theologian at the church, was how seriously people took the experience, with some even thanking the chatbot, Reuters reported.
“Do you say to your computer when you finish, ‘Oh, thank you, computer?’ No,” Schmid informed Reuters. “But you see how a lot folks customized and humanized the system as a result of it was so good.”
Rabbi Josh Fixler of Congregation Emanu El in Houston, 41, during the Jewish High Holidays in 2023, shocked his congregants when he played a recording of himself discussing the impact of AI on humanity — a sermon that he later revealed was AI-generated.
The concerns
“I came away from that sermon with real concerns about both the ethics of the technology and also the hyperfocus on the technology,” Fixler mentioned, including that a few of what the chatbot got here up with merely wasn’t true. “It quoted an awesome Jewish scholar named Maimonides, however as finest I can inform, it made up that quote,” he told Reuters.
“I think there is something distinctive about the nature of Christian community, which is about being in person and face to face and being deeply human,” Steven Croft, the bishop of Oxford, mentioned.
Croft’s hesitancy is shared by different spiritual leaders and teachers, a lot of whom cite an absence of belief in AI’s capability to supply sound spiritual recommendation. Beth Singler, an assistant professor in digital faith on the University of Zurich, recalled an occasion when a Character.ai “Buddah” erroneously claimed there were five noble truths in Buddhism, instead of four. But it’s not just inaccuracies that she’s concerned about.
“There are questions about the ethics of representations of religious leaders,” Singler mentioned, particularly if the chatbot says one thing profane or, worse, harmful. “We’ve seen particular examples of individuals being pushed in direction of suicide by conversations with chatbots. There (are) some actually scary statistics about how typically that occurs.”
Yaqub Chaudhary, a visiting scholar at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge, also questions whether AI is the best medium to deliver valid and attributable religious information — particularly in the context of his faith, Islam, which considers the Quran the direct and unaltered word of God.
“Is that a true communication of the Islamic meaning if it is produced by an LLM, mixing together whatever it has in its training set?” he informed Reuters. “That is a very large downside when it comes to realizing the halal, the haram, the advisable, the permissible, the impermissible, the disliked.”
“I think that the work of religion is not trying to get machines to be more human,” Fixler mentioned. “The work of faith is attempting to get us all to be probably the most human human.”
With Reuters inputs
February 09, 2026, 13:54 IST
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