Religious leaders experiment with AI in sermons
To members of his synagogue, the voice that blared from the speakers at Congregation Emanu El in Houston sounded just like that of Rabbi Josh Fixler.At the same steady pace his congregation had grown accustomed to, the voice delivered a sermon on what it meant to be a neighbor in the age of artificial intelligence. Then, Rabbi Fixler went to the bimah himself.“The audio you heard a moment ago might sound like my words,” he said. "But they weren't."The recording was created by what Rabbi Fixler called the “Rabbi Bot,” an AI chatbot trained on his old sermons. The chatbot, created with the help of a data scientist, wrote the sermon, also delivering it in an AI version of its voice. During the remainder of the service, Rabbi Fixler intermittently asked Rabbi Bot questions aloud, which he prom...