The first time I heard of ChatGPT was last year, when I received an email circulated among some university chaplains. We were presented with an AI-generated sermon, and we were asked whether we should be worried. “Yes,” came back one reply, “this is, worryingly, better than about half of the sermons one might expect to hear on Sunday!”
Although I don’t have any immediate fear of being replaced by an AI chatbot (after all, it’s ontologically impossible for a bit of silicon to celebrate the sacraments), there is obviously going to be a lot of social turmoil if people start believing that anything a human being can do, AI can do better.
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