Are chat bots changing the face of religion? Three faith leaders on grappling with AI

"Write a sermon in the voice of a rabbi of about 1,000 words that relates the Torah portion Vayigash to intimacy and vulnerability. That was the prompt rabbi Joshua Franklin put in ChatGPT, the results of which he used to deliver a sermon to congregants of the Jewish Center of the Hamptons in December 2022. The sermon the chatbot came up with spoke of Joseph, the son of Jacob and a prophet in the Abrahamic faiths. It quoted from a book by Brown, a professor who specializes on topics of intimacy, to define vulnerability as "the willingness to show up and be seen when we have no control over the outcome". Being vulnerable could mean "we are able to form deeper, more meaningful bonds with those around us", the chat bot wrote. It wasn't the greatest sermon, Franklin thought, but it was passable. And that was his point. The irony of the AI-written speech about vulnerability and human connection was that it lacked exactly what it preached: human vulnerability and emotion. "It actually had a little bit of content to it," he said. "And the congregation thought it was written by some other famous rabbis.