If You’re Using AI To Replace Discipleship, You’re A Bad Pastor– thefederalist.com
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EXCERPT:
PreacherBot ain’t got no soul.
But people really want him — or rather, it — to have one. This is bad, as was demonstrated by a recent New York Times profile of Justin Lester, a California Bay Area pastor who has created an AI “twin” of himself using “almost two million words of his sermons, podcasts, books, text messages and emails.” This AI facsimile is “available on his website and Facebook page for online chats or phone calls … to provide advice around the clock.”
Lester is not the first to do something like this — a Catholic parish in Switzerland even installed AI Jesus in a confessional for a while — and he won’t be the last, in part because he is encouraging and assisting other pastors in following his lead. And though his efforts are concentrated among historically black Baptist churches, everyone from Catholics to Pentecostals to Presbyterians will be tempted to create a PreacherBot of their own.
The incentives are simple: There are not enough pastors, and pastors don’t have enough time. As his life and ministry got busier, Lester, a longtime tech enthusiast, turned to AI, first as an assistant, then as a substitute. He won’t use AI to write his sermons, but otherwise he adopted AI as a way to multiply his ministry, first by using it to handle some mundane tasks, and then by multiplying himself via an AI doppelganger that is always available for in-depth conversations, even with “people he’d never met who had questions he’d never been asked.” He thought this AI “twin” captured not only his views but also his voice, and he became comfortable with it dispensing advice in his image.
But using AI in this way seems to further increase the distance between Lester and his congregation. For instance, The New York Times related that “he shook a young woman’s hand after church and then watched her walk to the car and begin chatting on her phone with his digital twin.” In this case, Lester’s efforts to expand his pastoral role shrunk it, as a congregant who could have taken time with him in person instead turned to the ersatz digital self he had commissioned. Yet he still pushes other pastors to build PreacherBots of their own.
