The sermon that was read was by…

Can ChatGPT write a sermon?

In the church where I recently led the opening of the church year, an elder claimed that ChatGPT can write a sermon just like that. He had tried it. "But", he said, "you can still tell it is from AI."

Honestly, I doubted that last part. As I wrote in another post, the result depends very much on the quality of the prompt.

I put it to the test. I asked ChatGPT to analyse several sermons on prekenweb.nl for style and then to write a brand-new sermon. I presented the first page of two existing sermons and one non-existing sermon to my family members, and asked them to indicate which sermon was by ChatGPT and which was "real".

The confusion was great: in fact everyone had a different answer, and in the end only one person chose the real answer.

Well… what to make of this result?

In any case it shows that AI can make a contribution to scripture explanation, provided it is prompted well. With AI a wealth of (targeted) sources can be consulted so easily.

Yet I hope the time never comes that, after a read sermon, it is said: "The sermon that was read was by ChatGPT." 😯

Would you notice it?