• Pick up the receiver I’ll make you a believer:
For some evangelical Christians, faith is about having a personal relationship with Jesus. At $1.99 per minute, the tech company Just Like Me is taking that concept to a new level.
Users of the platform can join video calls with an avatar of Jesus generated by artificial intelligence. Like other religious A.I. tools on the market, it offers words of prayer and encouragement in various languages. With the occasional glitch, it remembers previous conversations and speaks through not-quite-synced lips.
This “tech company Just Like Me” is, according to that report, part of “a faith-based AI gold rush.” But I don’t think there’s gold in them thar hills.
Yes, there is a market for faith-based grifts like this cross between ELIZA and Miss Cleo, just as there was a market for those little strips of cloth that Robert Tilton sold to his viewers. And while most “A.I.” requires mind-bogglingly expensive data centers and such, I’m guessing the scripted banalities and Forer-effect pablum recited by this “Jesus Avatar” are a lot cheaper to produce.
But even so, this product/service/scam still seems to have limited appeal. Most devout believers will view it as borderline blasphemous, while everyone else will have no interest in it at all — especially not at $120 an hour. (Even Bryon Noem isn’t paying those rates for fantasy chats online.)
They’ll collect whatever they can from the kind of folks who read Charismanews, but it likely won’t be sustainable or profitable — even after selling all the data they’ll collect from the rubes. In six months, the “faith-based tech company” pushing this will either have folded or moved on to its next big idea — “A.I. Urim and Thummim” or what have you.
• Then again, I’d have thought there wasn’t a sustainable market for “prayer apps” either. This is a category of thing that I find confusing — like those wi-fi enabled toasters. But it turns out “prayer apps” are a thing and enough of a big deal to line up celebrity endorsements.
That’s what caused trouble for “Hallow: The #1 Christian prayer app in the world.” Hallow’s celebrity spokespeople include Mark Wahlberg and Chris Pratt and yet, unexpectedly, neither one of those was the celebrity endorsement that created their most recent controversy. Instead, it was this: “Prayer app Hallow faces backlash over Lenten partnership with Tucker Carlson.”
I suppose I’m glad for the backlash over that, but it’s still weird to me that there were, apparently, plenty of Christians whose idea of prayer involves thinking “I wish I had something on my phone that enabled me to pray like Mark Wahlberg, but not so much like Tucker Carlson.”
I suppose there is a line you could draw in between those two — Carlson wasn’t surprisingly good in Three Kings or The Departed — but I still find this whole thing odd.
• “The use of A.I. in proclamation evangelism.”
This is like those old Reeses Peanut Butter Cup commercials, except instead of two great tastes that taste great together it’s about two Bad Ideas combined to create one Even Worse Idea.
Happily, Gretchen Huizinga’s article is mostly skeptical about any purported benefits from A.I. making “proclamation evangelism” more efficient: “In an increasingly artificial and disembodied world, it is the authentic and embodied human that brings the tangible love of Christ to the lost and lonely.” Less happily, she’s generally less skeptical about the artificial and disembodied, intangible marketing known as “proclamation evangelism.”
The book of James says “If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,’ and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that?” It would surely be worse if instead you had an “artificial intelligence” program designed to say to them “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,” but just because that would be worse doesn’t make the thing James describes good.
• This is a solid report from Inae Oh about Pope Leo’s calm, peaceable response to Trump’s weird recent rants against him: “Pope Leo: ‘I Have No Fear’ of Trump.”
I do have one quibble with the final sentence here, thought:
Though Leo has generally avoided mentioning Trump by name, the pope has been increasingly vocal in his criticism of Trump’s war in Iran, telling reporters as recently as last week that the president’s threat to destroy “a whole civilization” was “truly unacceptable.”
In a late March sermon widely viewed as a rebuke of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s framing of the war as divinely sanctioned, Leo condemned leaders who have “hands full of blood.”
That last comment created a huge stir among MAGA evangelicals, who were livid with the pope for suggesting that God does not listen to the prayers of those whose hands are full of blood. Franklin Graham was apoplectic with Leo for saying this.
But of course Leo didn’t say it. He quoted it. From Isaiah. And, if you believe Isaiah, then he wasn’t the one who said it either because, the prophet Isaiah said, this was God speaking: ” Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood.”
That’s Isaiah 1:15. Chapter and verse.
It is hilariously revealing that the “biblicistic” B-I-B-L-E, sola scriptura, inerrantist, literalist, etc., evangelicals like Graham didn’t recognize the words of scripture and attacked them as “woke” ideology. But it’s not surprising.
This is, after all, just exactly how white “Bible Christians” reacted when Frederick Douglass preached a long sermon drawing heavily on this same chapter of Isaiah. They were horrified by “What to the Slave Is Your Fourth of July?” and attacked it as anti-religious.
Of course, in a sense I suppose that was true since, again, Douglass was drawing on Isaiah 1, and God, in that chapter, is vehemently anti-religious.
• The title for this post comes from Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus.”
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