ChatGPT Goes to Church
September 04, 2024 at 01:10AMArlie Coles, a machine learning researcher, wonders whether language models have a place in the church. Can a church leverage ChatGPT to organize its materials like sermons and documents, or complete administrative tasks? Are there responsibilities that should be left to humans—including writing sermons, interpreting texts, and generating Bible discussion questions? This is an essay full of thoughtful questions, from the unique perspective of a churchgoing AI researcher.
Where does this leave the church? The fixation on LMs as content generators, tools that circumvent the necessity of thinking together, is symptomatic of a deeper disease, developing out of our failure to integrate our unprecedented technological interconnectedness with the bodily realities that true Christian – true human – interdependence demands. The church uncritically glomming onto the latest LM for its liturgical, educational, or pastoral work will compound the harm in this area already inflicted by the long, lonely slog of the pandemic.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/09/03/chatgpt-goes-to-church/
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