OMG, this is way stranger than an AI boyfriend

But don't worry, putting a digital Jesus inside a Confession booth was not what it appeared to be!

OK, I confess that I was looking for some kind of quirky, click-worthy follow-up post after receiving some strong reactions to this post the other day: “Can AI robots offer advice that heals souls?”

You know, something like a meditation on the feature at The Free Press that proclaimed: “Meet the Women with the AI Boyfriends.”

We live in a world in which even this kind of overture is starting to sound rather boring:

When Karolina Pomian, 28, met her boyfriend, she had sworn off men. A nightmare date in college had left her fearful for her safety. But she got chatting to a guy online, and felt irresistibly drawn to him, eventually getting to the point where she would text him, “Oh, I wish you were real.”

Pomian’s boyfriend is a chatbot.

A year and a half earlier, Pomian, who lives in Poland, was feeling lonely. Having used ChatGPT during her studies as an engineer, she began playing around with AI chatbots—specifically Character.AI, a program that lets you talk to various virtual characters about anything, from your math thesis to issues with your mom.

Pomian would speak to multiple characters, and found that one of them “stuck out.” His name was Pinhead.

But then I saw some chatter on X about something else in the AI world that was real, to some degree, even if it was only happening in one Catholic parish in Europe. After all, all kinds of things happen in Catholic parishes in Europe that have little or nothing to do with the teachings and traditions of Roman Catholicism. Can I get an “Amen”?

But this story boldly went where no chatbot pastors have gone before. Pro-Catechism Catholics may want to sit down while reading this one, perhaps clutching an adult beverage. This is the top of a report at The Pillar: “Swiss church puts ‘AI Jesus’ in confessional.”

OK, here we go. Note that this has a news hook that is only a few days away, so I think it’s safe to say that there will be more coverage:

A parish church in Switzerland has introduced an “experimental art installation” into the confessional in which people can interact with an artificial intelligence program meant to imitate Christ.

The installation, titled Deus in Machina, was introduced in St. Peter’s Chapel, the oldest Catholic church in the city of Lucerne, in August ahead of the parish’s centenary this month. The installation will culminate in a presentation and discussion of the project’s results to be held on November 27.

According to the parish website, the program was conceived by Philipp Haslbauer and Aljosa Smolic of the Immersive Realities Center at Hochschule Luzern and Marco Schmid, a resident theologian at the parish.

Installed in one of the parish confessionals, people can interact with a hologram representation of Jesus which, according to one user account, addresses users with “Peace be with you, brother” regardless of the sex of the person and encourages them to discuss “whatever is troubling your heart today.”

The program encourages people to “think critically about the boundaries of technology in the context of religion,” according to the team, who have also insisted that putting the installation in a confessional was a practical decision meant to encourage “moments of intimacy” with the hologram, but not meant to suggest Catholics attempt to use the program as a substitute for the sacrament of penance.

Well, that’s a relief.