Artificial Intelligence (AI) has quickly found a place in our homes, schools and work. Now, it is preaching sermons to a congregation in a German church.

Churchgoers at St. Paul’s in the Bavarian town of Fuerth, were greeted by an AI avatar of a bearded Black man on a screen, preaching a Lutheran church service generated by ChatGPT.

Over 300 people had shown up for the experimental Friday morning service almost entirely generated by the chatbot, as reported by the Associated Press.

‘Dear friends, it is an honour 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 monotonous voice.

The 40-minute service — including the sermon, prayers and music — was created by ChatGPT and Jonas Simmerlein, a theologian and philosopher from the University of Vienna.

‘I conceived this service — but actually I rather accompanied it, because I would say about 98% comes from the machine,’ the 29-year-old scholar told The Associated Press.

However, the experiment received mixed reviews from the people in the pews. While the AI service attracted a long queue outside the church an hour before it began, many refused to even pray along with the avatar.

Heiderose Schmidt, 54, said she was excited and curious when the service started but found it increasingly off-putting as it went along.

‘There was no heart and no soul,’ she told AP. ‘The avatars showed no emotions at all, had no body language and were talking so fast and monotonously that it was very hard for me to concentrate on what they said.’

‘But maybe it is different for the younger generation who grew up with all of this,’ added Schmidt.

The entire service was ‘led’ by four different avatars on the screen, two young women, and two young men.

However, the only emotion the AI-generated avatars were able to evoke was laughter when it told devotees that in order ‘to keep our faith, we must pray and go to church regularly’ with a deadpan expression

Marc Jansen, a 31-year-old Lutheran pastor found the experiment impressive but found it devoid of any kind of emotion or spirituality, which he says is essential when he writes his own sermons.

‘I had actually imagined it to be worse. But I was positively surprised how well it worked. Also the language of the AI worked well, even though it was still a bit bumpy at times,’ Jansen told AP.

The AI church service was one of hundreds of events at a convention of Protestants that takes place every two years in Germany.

This year’s motto, ‘Now is the time’ was one of the sentences Simmerlein fed to ChatGPT when asking the chatbot to develop the sermon.

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