When worshippers first prayed at St. Peter’s Chapel 300 years ago, they probably thought about communing with Jesus as an expression of faith as opposed to a literal conversation.
Three centuries on, at Switzerland’s oldest church in the city of Lucerne, worshippers can now talk to a computer generated avatar of the Son of God.
“Deus in machina” was developed by a team at the Immersive Realities Research Lab at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, as well the chapel’s theologian Marco Schmid.
“Many people came to talk with him,” Schmid said, adding that around 900 conversations had been registered between the machine and people of “all ages.”
“What was really interesting to see (was) that the people really talked with him in a serious way,” Schmid said.
Developed using artificial intelligence software, the machine emerged from two months of collaborative experiments.
Participants enter a confessional booth and a lifelike avatar on a computer screen offers advice based on biblical scripture in more than 100 languages.
However, visitors are warned against sharing personal details and are required to acknowledge that their interaction with the avatar was at their own risk.
“This is not a confession; our aim is not to replicate a traditional confession,” Schmid said. Among the topics broached by visitors were true love, the afterlife, feelings of solitude, war and suffering in the world, as well as the existence of God.
The Catholic Church’s position on homosexuality and issues like the sexual abuse cases it has faced were also brought up.
Most visitors described themselves as Christians, but agnostics, atheists, Muslims, Buddhists and Taoists also took part, according to a recap of the project released by the Catholic parish of Lucerne.
The majority were German speakers, but the AI Jesus — conversant in about 100 languages — also had conversations in languages including Chinese, English, French, Hungarian, Italian, Russian and Spanish.
No specific safeguards were used because the technology can “respond fairly well to controversial topics,” said professor Philipp Haslbauer, who worked on the technical side of the project.
Noting that some on social media have called the project “blasphemous” or the “work of the devil,” he said, “If you read comments on the internet about it, some are very negative — which is scary.”