If your priest starts beeping he’s probably doing his job wrong. If he’s built to beep he’s definitely doing it wrong.
According to a recent study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, robotic preachers and artificial-intelligence-driven religious services result in lower rates of religious commitment. The study found that participants thought the digitized services less credible than services performed by humans because robots lack the spiritual capacity that a human official has:
Robots are capable of writing and delivering sermons, but people do not view them as credible religious elites, a critical perception for sustaining religious commitment in adherents. Two field studies and an online experiment support our key claims and suggest that automation of religious duties may prompt declines in religious commitment.
On a scale of 1 to 5, the credibility of the artificial official registered at 3.12, the human at 3.51. While this isn’t a night-and-day difference, the secondary effects are worth noting. The robot’s lack of credibility resulted in smaller donations for the church that used such an official as compared to the traditional service. It also led participants to be less likely to advertise the church or spread its flyers.
None of this is surprising. Congregants recognize that for something to be spiritual it needs to be real, and that AI religion simply isn’t that. As I wrote in June about the lack of conscience in a computer:
This voice from beyond ourselves is integral to the human condition. Importantly, it is the filter through which religious faith is interpreted, and the reason why the passing down of religious traditions from human to human is important. An AI does not have that filter because it does not have a soul. It does not matter how detailed an input you may feed ChatGPT or how well-structured the sermon it produces is; nothing about such a sermon is divine because it is fundamentally not a product of the human conscience.
People understand this intuitively. They know that salvation is the purview of God and man, not machines. Religious institutions don’t have to take my word for it; the data now back it up. Hopefully they will heed this study before jumping on the latest craze.