Digital Jesus Christ created by artificial intelligence talked to people in Switzerland

Investigators and religious leaders this Sunday published an analysis of a two-month art experiment in a Catholic chapel in Switzerland where an avatar of "Jesus" on a computer screen, inserted into the confessional, based on the Holy Scriptures, answered the believers' questions about faith, morality, and everyday difficulties.

The idea was to recognize the growing importance of artificial intelligence (AI) in people's lives, as well as for faith, and to explore the limits of human trust in machines, said the chapel's theologian.

After the two-month run of the exhibit "Deus in Machina" (God in the Machine) in St. Peter's Chapel, which began at the end of August, 900 conversations of visitors with the program were anonymously transcribed, some of whom came more than once.

The creators of the project said that the project was largely successful, that the visitors were visibly moved or in deep thought when they left the confessional where they asked questions to Jesus Christ created by artificial intelligence and assessed that the use was not difficult.

After leaving the confessional, almost 300 visitors filled out questionnaires, the content of which was used for the report made by the project leaders.

"AI Jesus" was developed by computer experts and theologians of the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Lucerne. They "trained" him using the New Testament and religious texts on the Internet. Special attention is paid to ensure that the answers are in line with the theological understandings of St. Peter's Chapel itself.

Filip Hauslbauer, an IT expert from the University of Lucerne who was in charge of the technical side of the project, said that the artificial intelligence (AI) GPT-4o of the technology giant Open AI was used for the role of "AI Jesus" and the generation of answers, and for speech understanding version of artificial intelligence "Visper" (Whisper) of that company.

Halsbauer said that certain protections were not used because they noticed that GPT-4o "responds quite well to controversial topics".

Visitors raised many topics including love, life after death, feelings of loneliness and suffering in the world, the existence of God, sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, the Church's attitude towards homosexuality.

Most of the visitors said they were Christians, although there were also agnostics, atheists, Muslims, Buddhists and Taoists, according to a project report released by the Lucerne Catholic parish.

About one third spoke German, but conversations were also conducted in Chinese, English, French, Hungarian, Italian, Russian and Spanish since "AI Jesus" is programmed to speak about 100 languages.

Kapel theologian Marko Šmid said that people were serious with "AI Jesus", they did not come to joke, and pointed out that the project was presented as a "Jesus-like" person who is part of an artistic experiment intended to make people think about the intersection of digital and of God, that it is not a substitute for people's conversation or church confession with a priest, nor was it intended to save on church resources.

He said that it was clear to the visitors that it was a computer and not a real confessional, that "AI Jesus" was not programmed to give absolutions or say prayers.

From the Vatican down, the Catholic Church has been grappling with the challenges and possible opportunities brought about by society's interest in artificial intelligence since two years ago when OpenAI's CatGPT was released.

In his annual peace message, Pope Francis advocated for an international agreement on the ethical use of artificial intelligence technology.

Chatbots like ChatGPT work on algorithmic models trained on large amounts of text and other data to mimic speech and generate seemingly unique, human-like responses.

IT expert Filip Haslbauer is sensitive to the reaction of the public and has noticed an exchange on social networks where it is said that the project is "blasphemous" and that it is "the work of the devil".

"If you read the comments online about it, some are very negative, which is scary," said the long-haired Haslbauer, whose image was used as the basis for the avatar of the virtual Jesus.

Journalist Kenneth Cukier, writer and expert at the American non-profit organization "AI and Faith" (AI and Faith) said that it is good if the virtual Jesus helps people to connect more deeply with themselves and with the world. But he added that the risk is that it will ultimately draw people away from something that has greater meaning and authentic spirituality.

Chapel theologian Schmid said it was a pilot project and that he does not foresee an "AI Jesus" anytime soon.

"It was clear to us that we will only expose this Jesus for a limited time," he said, and added that he would still have to think more deeply about whether and how to proceed.

"We are considering ... that we could revive it again," Schmid said, pointing to interest from parishes, teachers, investigators and others as the project attracted media attention in Switzerland and around the world.

"Everyone is interested and would like to have an AI Jesus. So now we have to think about how we want to proceed," he said.