Researchers and religious leaders on Wednesday released findings from a two-month experiment through art in a Catholic chapel in Switzerland, where an avatar of “Jesus” on a computer screen — tucked into a confessional — took questions by visitors on faith, morality and modern-day woes, and offered responses based on Scripture.
The idea, said the chapel’s theological assistant, was to recognize the growing importance of artificial intelligence in human lives, even when it comes to religion, and explore the limits of human trust in a machine.
After the two-month run of the “Deus in Machina” exhibit at Peter’s Chapel starting in late August, some 900 conversations from visitors –- some came more than once –- were transcribed anonymously. Those behind the project said it was largely a success: Visitors often came out moved or deep in thought, and found it easy to use.
How to loade it in temple os?
Deus ex Machina
Someone to hear your prayers
Someone who cares
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Project Deus In Machina was a great name for this.
That’s fucking sad. Aren’t these religious zealots usually really distrustful of technology? Curious that they suddenly don’t mind having a machine record their confessions.
AI as it currently stands is basically pseudo-random noise being run through a very large and complex network and you get something out the other side that is very close to human generated text but instead of a mind behind it, it’s those random numbers.
So … AI is essentially like a human psychic.
Whenever you read about AI doing something like this, replace it with “psychic” and think about how it makes the feel of the story change.
This remembers me of an AI Catholic Father who lost “his cassock” after hallucinating. His “AI Jesus” will hallucinate, too, it’s just a matter of time.
(I actually like AIs, NLP as well as related fields, concepts and tools, but it’s the reality of the current state of LLMs, they hallucinate; while hallucination is fine for tasks such as a “digital Ouija board” or surrealist/Dadaist poetry, it’s not desirable for things that needs strict consistency, such as STEM knowledge as well as knowledge from dogmatic religions, in this case, Catholic matters and knowledge)
Another problem with the “AI priest” was that people were going online to confess to it. It was replying in character, simulating the sacrament. Problem is, you can’t even confess to a real priest anywhere other than in person. The people in charge realized how bad this was and made the change.
Let us be thankful we have commerce
