In Jesus’ Name A church in the Swiss city of Lucerne has set up a computer inside a confessional booth that allows churchgoers to converse with an “AI Jesus.” As The Guardian reports, anybody wanting to speak to the large language model, which was trained on theological texts and can speak 100 different languages, has been advised not to disclose any personal information. And while that may sound counterintuitive, there’s a good reason for that besides some obvious and thorny privacy implications. While the computer, microphone, and speaker were set up inside a confessional booth, the people behind the project dubbed “Deus in Machina” didn’t intend it to “imitate a confession.” “It was really an experiment,” one of the church’s theologians Marco Schmid told the Guardian. “We wanted to see and understand how people react to an AI Jesus. What would they talk with him about? Would there be interest in talking to him? We’re probably pioneers in this.” Thoughts and Prayers Schmid and his collaborators had already experimented with VR and AR. The next step was to resurrect Jesus himself in the form of an AI chatbot. “We had a discussion about what kind of avatar it would be — a theologian, a person, or a saint?” Schmid told The Guardian. “But then we realized the best figure would be Jesus himself.” Over a test period of two months, more than 1,000 people chatted with the AI Jesus. More than two-thirds of them found it to be a “spiritual experience,”…Church Sets Up AI-Powered Jesus Inside Confessional Booth