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Journalism of Courage
The recent rise of ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence tools brings both excitement and anxiety to the world. Excitement for the possibilities that these breakthrough technologies present. Anxiety about how many of us will be made redundant by them. What are the jobs that AI can take and what are the jobs that AI cannot?
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development says that 27 per cent of all jobs rely on skills that can be automated using artificial intelligence systems. While robotic tools have been affecting blue-collar jobs for decades now, the new AI systems are poised to do something similar to white-collar jobs, with everyone from lawyers and economists to writers and administrative staff being affected.
If a new research study is anything to go by there is one industry where humans are likely to excel a lot more than robots, at least for the time being—religion. While people might find it facetious to call religion an industry, every religious group needs humans to work for it to function. From priests to preachers, religion is sustained and propagated by the consistent efforts of many.
Robot preachers and AI programs present new ways of sharing beliefs, but the study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology found that they can erode the credibility and reduce the donations given to religious groups that rely on them.
The Mindar humanoid robot at the Kodai-Ji Buddist temple in Kyoto has a humanlike silicone face, moving lips and blinking eyes. It is used to deliver 25-minute Heart Sutra sermons on Buddhist philosophy accompanied by a lights and sound show. It cost almost $1 million to develop and was created in 2019 by a Japanese robotics team that partnered with the temple.
But the study found that the cost was much higher—the robot might be reducing donations to the temple. The researchers surveyed 398 participants who were leaving the temple after hearing a prayer that was delivered either by Mindar or a human priest. The former found Mindar less credible and gave smaller donations than those who heard from a human priest.
A survey conducted in a Taoist temple in Singapore delivered much the same results. Of the 239 participants, half heard a sermon delivered by a humanoid robot called Pepper while the other half listened to a human priest. Once again, the robot was viewed as less credible and inspired smaller donations. Also, the participants who heard the robot’s sermon also said they were less likely to share its message or distribute flyers to support the temple.
The third experiment was conducted further west. 274 Christian participants from the United States read a sermon online. Half of them were told it was written by a human preacher while the other half were told that it was generated by a highly advanced AI program. The second group reported that it was less credible because they felt an AI program had less capacity to think or feel like a human.
“Our final study was conducted right as ChatGPT was released, which was a great opportunity to test how people may react when they learn that sermons were written by large language models rather than humans,” said Joshua Conrad Jackson, first author of the study, to indianexpress.com in an email.
“Our research suggests that people feel less commitment towards their religious identity and their place of worship when sermons are composed by LLMs, suggesting that preachers who use ChatGPT to write sermons may alienate their congregants (unless they can keep their source of inspiration a secret),” he added.
In a 2020 interview with Deutsche Welle, Kodaiji temple steward Tensho Goto spoke about how the philosophy of Buddhism is uniquely suited to have a robotic preacher. “In Christianity, God created man. So if man creates man, it would be like creating Frankenstein. So it would be unacceptable for a man to create God. The way we think is different to the Western perception of God. In the West, belief is that God itself exists. In Buddhism, we don’t know whether God exists or not,” Goto said. He added that Buddhism is an “empirical” religion and that Buddhists only believe in what they can see and experience.
But as we saw from the study, Goto’s predictions about Buddhism’s compatibility with robots or AI might have been a bit premature. It also told us that the same seems to be the case with Taoists and Christians. What about Hinduism and Islam, the two biggest religions in India? Jackson believes that the study’s results will be mirrored there as well.
“I agree with Tensho, and I would add that favorability towards robotics is higher in Japan than anywhere else in the world. Given these statistics, it seems plausible that our results could have even stronger effects among Hindus or Muslims living in other countries,” he said.
One of the purposes of introducing Mindar to the Kodai-ji temple was to attract younger people back into the fold of religion. A Pew Research Centre survey published in 2018 found that younger adults are less likely to identify with any religious group than their older counterparts in 41 countries. (In India, no difference was found between those over and under the age of 40).
But this study shows that exposure to robot priests like Mindar could reduce religious commitment among people who consider themselves religious. This, according to Jackson, means that places of worship could be faced with a dilemma in the future: Between whether they should install robots or AI preachers that attract young people when it could also reduce commitment among their congregants.
Priests, preachers, shamans and other religious elites have served as cultural models. They don’t just repeat the teachings of their faith but they also embody those tenets and legitimise them. Theories of religion propose that these religious elites could have been instrumental in religious groups’ power to command high levels of commitment from their followers. Robots and AI might just not be good enough.
