JAMEY KEATEN, AP; ‘AI Jesus’ avatar tests man’s faith in machines and the divine
"Researchers and religious leaders on Wednesday released findings from a two-month experiment through art in a Catholic chapel in Switzerland, where an avatar of “Jesus” on a computer screen — tucked into a confessional — took questions by visitors on faith, morality and modern-day woes, and offered responses based on Scripture...
Philipp Haslbauer, an IT specialist at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts who pulled together the technical side of the project, said the AI responsible for taking the role of “AI Jesus” and generating responses was GPT-4o by OpenAI, and an open-source version of the company’s Whisper was used for speech comprehension.
An AI video generator from Heygen was used to produce voice and video from a real person, he said. Haslbauer said no specific safeguards were used “because we observed GPT-4o to respond fairly well to controversial topics.”
Visitors broached many topics, including true love, the afterlife, feelings of solitude, war and suffering in the world, the existence of God, plus issues like sexual abuse cases in the Catholic Church or its position on homosexuality.
Most visitors described themselves as Christians, though agnostics, atheists, Muslims, Buddhists and Taoists took part too, according to a recap of the project released by the Catholic parish of Lucerne.
About one-third were German speakers, but “AI Jesus” — which is conversant in about 100 languages — also had conversations in languages like Chinese, English, French, Hungarian, Italian, Russian and Spanish."
