American Christians are more likely to be skeptical of artificial intelligence and are particularly concerned about using generative AI in religious services, according to a recent survey.
Just over a quarter of Christians (28%) surveyed by Barna this fall said they were hopeful about the development of AI, while 39% of self-identified non-Christians said the same .
Only a fraction of Christians surveyed agree that “AI is good for the Christian Church,” according to the Barna survey, conducted through a consumer panel. Only 22% said they agreed that AI would be positive for the Church, while 30% strongly disagreed and 21% said they somewhat disagreed.
Hesitation about AI hasn’t stopped some churches around the world from experimenting with tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
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Violet Crown City Pastor Jay Cooper tells Fox News Digital about using AI software to host a church service last month. (Interview with Fox News; NurPhoto/Contributor)
Jay Cooper, Methodist pastor at Violet Crown City Church in Austin, Texas, created an entire service earlier this year using ChatGPT to see what he could do.
Although the experiment was successful in sparking debate about the new technology and showed an impressive understanding of Christian concepts, Cooper found something missing.
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“As I preached, I became less and less comfortable. Although he made some interesting points, there was no human element. I knew it wasn’t coming from my mind or my heart,” Cooper said. Fox News in October.
“Without the human element, it wasn’t worship to me.”
Some have encouraged churches to adopt aspects of AI, with reservations.
Kenny Jahng, founder of AiForChurchLeaders.com and editor-in-chief of ChurchTechToday.com, said at an event hosted by Barna that AI, like any technology, “is there to serve us and not the other way around.”
Visitors and participants during an AI-created worship service at a church in Bavaria, Germany. (Daniel Vogl/photo alliance via Getty Images)
“There’s all this fear that AI will take over the world, it will be a clash between man and machine. (But) if we step back and look at it, there are things where the AI is really good,” he said.
However, how AI is used makes all the difference.
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“This AI technology is hallucinating, as we say. It doesn’t always return factual information. Sometimes it’s wrong, sometimes it’s wrong, and it says it with confidence,” Jahng told the Church Leaders podcast ” earlier this year. .
As society faces rapidly evolving technology, a Catholic theologian has warned that AI could represent a dangerous type of development for the world.
“The Church always encourages the development of technology that will be at the service of the human person. And, thus, when it facilitates our development as human beings, when it helps us to do the good that we want already try to do, the Church – always as long as there are no detectable ethical violations – would normally be behind this as a general principle,” said Fr. Anselm Ramelow said in A conversation with the Catholic Minute.
The problem with AI is that the technology seems to be advancing in ways that are replacing uniquely human abilities like cognition, Ramelow said.
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“I think it’s a violation of human dignity and, more importantly, I think it gives us a false sense of what it really means to be human. I think before long we’re going to be talking about our AI as if it were equivalent to being human because we have reduced the human person to a simple series of cognitive functions,” Ramelow said.
Fox News’ Gabriel Hays contributed reporting
