Artificial intelligence
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence
Modern religious leaders are experimenting with A.I. just as earlier generations examined radio, television and the internet.
Rabbi Josh Fixler at Congregation Emanu El in Houston worked with a data scientist to create his experimental “Rabbi Bot.”Credit…Michael Starghill Jr. for The New York Times
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By Eli Tan
Eli attended several worships in Silicon Valley to inform this article.
To members of his synagogue, the voice he played at Congregation Emanu El in Houston resembled that of Rabbi Josh Fixler.
In the same steady rhythm that his congregation had become accustomed to, the voice delivered a sermon on what it meant to be a neighbor in the age of synthetic intelligence. Then Rabbi Fixler took the Bimah himself.
“The audio you heard a moment ago may have sounded like my words,” he said. “But they weren’t.”
The recording created through what Rabbi Fixler called “Rabbi Bot,” an A. I. Chatbot shaped his old sermons. The chatbot, created with the help of a knowledge scientist, wrote the sermon, even delivering it in an A. I. editing of his voice. For the rest of the service, Rabbi Fixler intermittently asked the rabbi’s bot questions aloud, to which he would quickly respond.
Rabbi Fixler is among a growing number of religious leaders experimenting with A.I. in their work, spurring an industry of faith-based tech companies that offer A.I. tools, from assistants that can do theological research to chatbots that can help write sermons.
For centuries, new technologies have replaced the way other people love radio in the 1920s to televisions in the 1950s and the Internet in the 1990s. Some followers of A. I. In devout spaces, he even returned to extraarray comparing the perspective of A. I. – And fears – to the invention of printing in the fifteenth century.
Religious leaders used to translate their sermons A. I. To alive to other languages in real time, making them reach a foreign audience. Other chatbots formed tens of thousands of entry pages to a fleet of newly formed seminars, capable of extracting extracts on certain subjects almost almost instantly.
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