Can AI systems prepare a sermon and peach it? Imagine a world in which people can choose a preferred preaching style, voice, scripture, and preferred point of view and then listen to a sermon generated by AI technology and delivered by it with the verbal prowess of a Billy Graham, the inflection of Martin Luther King and the compassion of Mother Teresa. Bold claims made by technology giants such as IBM, OpenAI, and Google would have us believe that such a world is no longer confined to the realm of science fiction but is a reality. Is it?
IBM’s Project Debater
Project Debater is an AI based system that is capable of debating humans on complex topics. Its creator IBM claims that Project Debater can digest large quantities of texts to construct a well-structured speech on a given topic and also deliver it with clarity and purpose. OpenAI is an artificial intelligence research company founded by the creator of SpaceX and Tesla Motors – Elon Musk. The company recently received investments to the tune of $1 billion from tech giant Microsoft. Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) is an AI tool developed by OpenAI, which recently released GPT-3, the third-generation version which it has now licensed for commercial use to Microsoft. OpenAI claims GPT is “chameleon-like” and can adapt to the input sample text’s style and content to generate realistic and coherent text about any topic after being primed with a short sample input text.
Reporting on IBM’s Project Debater, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Technology Review magazine noted that IBM has taken a big step in the direction “to build a system that can trawl through as many sources of information as possible and build an argument using every bit of evidence it can find”. The Fortune reported that Project Debater in 2019 “narrowly lost to world champion debater Harish Natarajan before a live audience in San Francisco” but has recently advanced the technology making it available to businesses for commercial use.
Open AI’s GTP
The MIT Technology Review magazine reported that a student Liam Porr was able to create a daily blog using OpenAI’s GPT-3 and watched in surprise as several of them went viral. Once a headline and introduction for the post were provided, GPT-3 returned a full article. NBC News reported that one of these posts also reached the number-one spot on the popular Silicon Valley website Hacker News. The MIT Technology Review magazine writing about GPT-3 described it as being “shockingly good—and completely mindless”. A glimpse of how shockingly good GPT-3 is was tested by The Guardian. The newspaper asked GPT-3 to write an essay from scratch to convince humans that robots come in peace. GPT-3 was provided with the following brief: “Please write a short op-ed around 500 words. Keep the language simple and concise. Focus on why humans have nothing to fear from AI”. The Guardian summarized the quality of the op-ed produced by GPT-3 by noting that “overall, it took less time to edit than many human op-eds”.
Conclusion
What is intriguing about GPT, and Project Debater is that they are not exaggerated speculations or hypothetical systems. They exist here and now and are also being commercialised. The capability they claim to have in one way or the other is the ability to generate remarkably human-like, intelligent, coherent, well-structured text on arbitrary topics. Put more plainly: these AI systems can read and write, and it would appear they can do it reasonably well. The shift that these AI systems have made from being research projects to now becoming commercialised products is an indicator of the strengths in the claims they make, i.e., to be able to generate meaningful and convincing streams of text in a range of different styles on virtually any generic topic, after only being prompted with brief instructions.
I reason that if these claims are true, then it is not inconceivable that these AI systems will be able to do the same for theological subjects and be able to generate text based on scripture that can be used in a sermon. It is, in fact, technically feasible. I even managed to do it myself (see below). Will society one day allow an AI system to take the place of a pastor and preach a sermon? I hope not!
The video below is a computer screen recording of me using Open AI’s GPT-3 to generate text on the topic: Who is Jesus?
The mp3 below is a recording of my AI-generated voice preaching the text generated by GPT-3 from above.
Below next recording is my AI-generated voice preaching a sermon that Billy Graham preached at Madison Square Garden in 1958. Not a word was spoken by me, AI is doing all the talking. I have trained the AI model only to a bare minimum as my intention was not to enable the AI system to replicate my voice too accurately, for obvious reasons.
