Church of England clergy should not use AI to write sermons as it fails to 'convey the preacher's faith or integrity', senior bishop warns

Clergy must not use artificial intelligence to write sermons as it fails to 'convey the preacher's faith or integrity', a Church of England bishop has warned.

The Rt Rev Martin Seeley, Bishop of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich, said he recently attended a conference on sermons where many were 'quite open to the benefits'.

One person claimed 'all the AI app does is take other people's work – countless sources that it has access to - and shape them into a sermon according to the preacher's instructions'.

But Bishop Seeley highlighted the danger of removing an individual's input from the process, saying: 'A preacher is meant to have faith and integrity and that needs to come across when they preach.

'How can an electronically constructed sermon, where the preacher has simply told the AI device what to write, convey the preacher's faith or integrity?

'After all, in preaching, the preacher themselves is a key part of the message.'

He added: 'With this surge in technological innovation, it can be hard, I think, to remember what it means to be a human being in all this.

'We have been tempted to treat technology as substitutes for human beings – rather than agents for human connection…

'Chat GPT may well produce a well-crafted sermon but the best communicators are those who connect to their congregation on a deeper, human-to-human level.'

Bishop Seeley said some argue that AI is 'just an extension of what happens now, where a preacher scours books and reads other people's sermons before shaping the sermon they go on to preach'.

But he continued: 'An AI sermon is no substitute for a sermon preached directly from the heart.

'It may speed up the process of writing a sermon, an essay, or whatever else but, as the name suggests, it will always be 'artificial'.'

His concerns were shared by Nicholas Cardwell, professor of information systems engineering at the University of Suffolk, who said an AI-generated sermon was 'just nice words that you have instructed a machine to generate for you'.

AI is a 'text producer on steroids,' he added, comparing it to predictive text where the author doesn't have to type the words.

'When he delivers the sermon, it will be from a position of faith. The AIs will come from a position of what they have been fed with and we have got to hope that what the AI has been fed with will be accurate,' Prof Cardwell said.

He also backed Bishop Seeley's fears that advances in AI and electronic communications in general were feeding the loss of 'human-to-human connection'.

AI has been hailed for its benefits, ranging from greater accuracy in spotting prostate cancer than hospital doctors to recreating the voices of dead stars for narrating audio books.

Ex-prime minster Sir Tony Blair yesterday(TUES) warned ministers must embrace the use of AI in the public sector generate annual savings of £10 billion by the end of this Parliament and £35 billion in a decade.

But school and university chiefs fear the technology is being used by students to take an easy shortcut when writing essays, while some, including Elon Musk, have predicted a 'job apocalypse' with workers replaced en masse.

Two months ago, the Tesla and SpaceX boss predicted AI will soon surpass human intelligence and become so ubiquitous that 'intelligence that is biological will be less than one per cent'.