Deus in Machina - the end of the beginning of conversational AI?

A Swiss church has created an AI powered avatar of Jesus himself. The conversational interactive installation, placed in the confessional booth of St Peter’s Chappel, Lucerne, has been used by over 1,000 people who attended the church.

As an AI practitioner and someone who closely watches the adoption of AI in societies all over the world, what I find amazing is just how serious the interaction with AI has become. This is one of the oldest churches in Switzerland, choosing to experiment with an AI Avatar of Jesus himself, in a confessional booth. And people who attended church took it serious as well. Amazingly, two thirds of the people who used it reported that they had ‘a spiritual experience’! That’s powerful. It means it moved them. It means the interaction with the AI created an emotional experience they are familiar with and which they presumably attach a lot of value to personally.

Of course, there is still a lot of improvement possible. While the majority of people reported a meaningful interaction with the avatar, a minority reported that they conversations relied on cliches and tropes. And this avatar is not empathetic. It’s needlessly blind to see who’s in the confession booth, and deaf to the emotion they express. But these are known issues that multiple companies, including BLUESKEYE AI, are actively working to solve, and it will not be long before an avatar of Jesus can be truly empathetic.

That’s really fascinating. For me, this is a watershed moment.

We’re at a point where both AI’s technological readiness and societies' awareness of AI has now come so far that it has opened up truly meaningful, human, philosophical discussion about AI.

Unsurprisingly, the initial criticism by the Church were about routine conventions: the use of an image of Jesus can be an affront to some, and the use of a confession booth might imply that you could confess your sins in the future to an AI system rather than a god.

But these are only relatively small matters. You can have much, much more meaningful discussions that are traditionally the domain of religion, and where religion could now perhaps play a role in discussing these topic. What is life? Who can create life and who has the right to do so? What is intelligence, and is everything that is intelligent also alive? Does the soul reside in our body at all or can you have a disembodied soul? And for that matter, what is the relation between emotion and the soul?

Philosophy is sometimes defined as thinking about things that cannot be studied yet by science, and therefore all you can do is postulate and contemplate. It can be great fun to have long academic talking shops about what intelligence, creation, life, emotion and the soul are outside of man and animal are, but it becomes something much bigger, more serious, and more pressing when what is being contemplated in a comfortable room becomes a reality outside of that room.

It is mildly ironic that the word avatar, nowadays used most frequently to describe a virtual representation of a person, is originally defined as ‘the descent of a deity to the earth in an incarnate form or some manifest shape; the incarnation of a god’. With this avatar of Jesus, we’ve come full circle.