Rabbi Josh Franklin from Long Island has admitted to using an open source artificial intelligence tool called ChatGPT to write his entire sermons.
Rabbi Franklin used the tool when he had writer’s block ahead of his Shabbat sermon last year, inserting a series of prompts to create a four-minute sermon on the Torah portion related to vulnerability and intimacy.
While he found the bot’s version lacked human empathy, he still praised the overall effectiveness of using ChatGPT.
The rabbi challenged his congregants at the Jewish center of the Hamptons to guess who wrote the sermon, and no one suspected it was a bot.
The AI tool is estimated to have reached 100 million monthly active users in January, and experts believe that it, along with other forms of AI, will continue to improve rapidly.
However, Rabbi Franklin emphasized that religious leaders cannot be replaced by bots, as they possess distinctly human qualities that cannot be replicated by AI.
