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This doesn't make sense to me - for a lot of religious workers it's not just saying words or leading a service, but something spiritual. It seems like they think they can automate away the clergyperson's humanity, but how can they automate away spirituality?

I suppose for simple tasks that are limited to seating someone, or reading - that can be automated, but that's far from all clergy do.

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That's one of my primary reservations. The whole thing should be spiritual, that's the entire point! I fully support AI acting in a supporting role, but spirituality and spiritual acts should be left to humans.

Replacing a pastor or other spiritual worker's role with an LLM makes as much sense as replacing them with a tape recorder. It's just a soulless object, unable to really relate on the spiritual level or interact with the spiritual world, even if it's still able to say all the right words.

From the Christian perspective, Colossians 3:17 says that we should worship God through everything we do. An AI pastor/counsellor would be, spiritually speaking, incapable of that.

Maybe if the AI has some "cosmic ray driven random number generator component" as input, using AI for spiritual needs could cut out the middlemen.

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