A unique sermon was delivered via artificial intelligence Friday in a Lutheran church in Germany.
A ChatGPT chatbot asked the people in the fully packed St. Paul's Church in the town of Fuerth to rise from the pews and praise the Lord.
The bot was personified by an avatar of a bearded black man on a huge screen above the altar. It preached to more than 300 people who showed up for the experimental Lutheran church service, generated almost entirely by artificial intelligence.
"Dear friends, it is an honor for me to stand here and preach to you as the first artificial intelligence at this year's convention of Protestants in Germany," the avatar said with an expressionless face and monotone voice.
The 40-minute service was created by ChatGPT and Jonas Simmerlein, a theologian and philosopher from the University of Vienna, who said 98 percent of it came from ...
