Religious leaders turn to ChatGPT for sermon writing, but find it lacks human touch

AP Photo/Robert Bumsted

Religious leaders have turned to the language model ChatGPT for help with their sermon writing, but are finding that it lacks the human touch that their congregants crave.

ChatGPT is an AI tool that can generate text based on a prompt given to it by a user. Many religious leaders have been testing the tool, inputting prompts such as "Preach to me about the raising of Lazarus in John 11," and analyzing the results.

Initial experiments have shown that ChatGPT can pull together relevant and coherent thoughts from religious texts, and produce stirring and poignant phrases. Some religious leaders believe that ChatGPT could help alleviate some of their more mundane tasks, such as explaining holidays, freeing them up for more meaningful spiritual counseling. However, they also note that ChatGPT lacks empathy and the ability to show genuine love or compassion.

Rabbi Joshua Franklin of the Jewish Center of the Hamptons in New York used ChatGPT to write a sermon about the theme of vulnerability in a story from Genesis, and was surprised when his congregants assumed it had been written by his father or a famous rabbi rather than AI. However, Franklin notes that ChatGPT was missing his own personal anecdotes and perspective.

While the technology is impressive, it is not a substitute for human connection in religious settings. Todd Brewer, managing editor of a religious publication called Mockingbird, notes that while the AI-generated content is mostly okay, it lacks any human warmth. Religious leaders may need to offer guidance and moral suasion to the tech industry as AI technology continues to advance.

Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Daniel Huttenlocher recently predicted in a Wall Street Journal essay that "the arrival of an unknowable and apparently omniscient instrument, capable of altering reality, may trigger a resurgence in mystic religiosity."