Artificial Intelligence has become, rapidly, one of the biggest parts of our day-to-day lives. In a time when science fiction predicted we would have flying cars and personal jetpacks, we are instead left with AI assistants trained on the largest and most robust set of data devised by the human race — the internet. It’s terrifying how quickly AI took over different portions of the mundane — my professors regularly mention ChatGPT. One simply challenged us to use the chatbot to do our homework. “If you pull it off”, he said, “tell me about it, because I would call that an amazing accomplishment.”
It seems AI is here to stay, but the real question is, where do we draw the line?
For some, it’s AI art. But for others, that line is a lot murkier, and there’s been a desire to see AI become a part of religious events.
See, recently, there was a push by some Christian and Jewish religious leaders to try out AI-assisted sermons. In some cases it was more for idea generation, and in others it was to write and help produce the sermon itself, but it broached the idea of technology in religious settings in a completely new way: Do we believe that an AI can interpret a holy book?
Rabbi Shlomo Silverman of Pittsburgh had an interesting perspective on the use of AI to help write sermons. To him, the tool was interesting, but flawed — while it had a nasty habit of making up its sources and saying things that weren’t anywhere in scripture, he still found it interesting. Rabbi Silverman pointed out that it could be used “just like you’d use for an essay”: get some ideas, poke around the sources, make sure you know the material well enough to edit it, and then go from there. It wasn’t a corruption of scripture, but a new way to help someone write or think up ideas for sermons. Rabbi Bot (as I called it, I’m sure many different names and versions exist), was “a tool, and you can use it to do something good,” Rabbi Silverman said. While it’s currently not in a state to be much more than an idea generator, should Rabbi Bot manage to improve to the point where it doesn’t make up quotations or references to scriptures that don’t exist, it could become a larger part of the writing process for some Rabbis.
While there’s still quite a bit of discourse in this area, it’s interesting to see how widespread adoption of AI might get in the near future — from our schools, to our homes, to even our places of worship.
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