Sometimes a story is shared by the people that contribute articles to this website which vaults immediately and directly into the “finals” folder, and today’s story shared by W.G. (with our gratitude) is no exception. And to me it is a kind of icon – pardon the usage of that term here – of everything that is spiritually and morally wrong with the modern west.
And here – again, not to coin any pun – is the crux of the story:
The small, unadorned church has long ranked as the oldest in the Swiss city of Lucerne. But Peter’s chapel has become synonymous with all that is new after it installed an artificial intelligence-powered Jesus capable of dialoguing in 100 different languages.
“It was really an experiment,” said Marco Schmid, a theologian with the Peterskapelle church. “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.”
The installation, known as Deus in Machina, was launched in August as the latest initiative in a years-long collaboration with a local university research lab on immersive reality.
After projects that had experimented with virtual and augmented reality, the church decided that the next step was to install an avatar. Schmid said: “We had a discussion about what kind of avatar it would be – a theologian, a person or a saint? But then we realised the best figure would be Jesus himself.”
Short on space and seeking a place where people could have private conversations with the avatar, the church swapped out its priest to set up a computer and cables in the confessional booth. After training the AI program in theological texts, visitors were then invited to pose questions to a long-haired image of Jesus beamed through a latticework screen. He responded in real time, offering up answers generated through artificial intelligence.
People were advised not to disclose any personal information and confirm that they knew they were engaging with the avatar at their own risk. “It’s not a confession,” said Schmid. “We are not intending to imitate a confession.”
Now I am so appalled by this I don’t even know where to begin. “It’s not a confession,” we’re told. Ok, but if it isn’t, then why install this monstrous avatar in a confessional?
It took me some time to think about this whole article, trying to identify why I am so appalled. What is it about this that is really at the root of my difficulties?
I think there are two factors at the root of my disgust. The first is the explicit nature of the assumptions being made about the essence of Christian belief and piety, namely, that it is something that can be normally experienced or formed apart from the liturgical, and sacramental, context, or rather, that it is reducible to a set of theological propositions than can be spit out by a machine, like a fortune being told by one of those antique carnival fortune-telling machines, and that mere mental or psychological assent to said propositions constitutes Christian belief, faith, and practice. In other words, it is bypassing the genuine humanity of the experience and replacing it with a similacrum – an avatar, an appearance – of that experience and of the Person with Whom one is having that experience. It’s that “appearance-similacrum-avatar” aspect of things that actually has a formal name, a name taken from the most ancient heresy in the history of Christianity: Doketism, or to give it its more familiar spelling, Docetism, from the Greek word dokein, meaning “to appear.” The early Docetists believed that because the material world was perpetually entangled with evil, that matter itself (and hence the physical part of human nature itself) was evil, and thus that God the Son would hardly become incarnate in it. What one encountered in Christ was the mere appearance of normal natural human existence, a hologram, a movie, a projection, an avatar. Correspondingly, as St. Ignatius of Antioch, one of the earliest disciples of the disciples (in this case, of St. John the Apostle) noted that the Doketists also abstained from the Eucharist (another horribly material thing) and martyrdom. In other words, what the Doketists believed about Christ – that He was a hologram – affected all aspects of the piety deriving from that central core belief. And now it’s back with force majeur in Switzerland.
