Originally published at National Catholic Register
Numerous news reports in recent days reported that a new artificially intelligent “Jesus” has begun taking people’s confessions at a Catholic church in Switzerland.
Claim: A holographic “AI Jesus” has been created and deployed at a chapel in Switzerland specifically to hear confessions.
CNA finds: St. Peter’s Chapel in Lucerne, a historic parish church, recently installed “an innovative project that explores the use of virtual characters based on generative artificial intelligence in a spiritual context” in collaboration with the Immersive Realities Research Lab at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts.
The AI program was reportedly trained with content from the New Testament, with the goal of allowing the “Jesus” avatar to verbally respond, in one of 100 languages, to questions about the Bible from people entering the confessional.
(Numerous reports described the “Jesus” avatar as a “hologram,” which is a 3D projection created with lasers; but a Deutsche Welle video of the installation in action showed that the artificial face of “Jesus” merely appeared on a curved computer monitor behind the confessional screen.)
The installation is titled “Deus in Machina” (a Latin phrase meaning “God in the machine” and a play on the more commonly used literary phrase “Deus ex
