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Motivation

Preaching-AI is a research project aiming to understand the intersection of technology and religion, particularly how humans interact with artificial inteligence (AI) avatars in this context. With the popularization of AI generative approaches, several helpful applications have been emerging. One of them is the generation of videos of AI avatars. A particular case is making an avatar speak about a specific theme under a set of constraints. Preaching is an interesting application in this scenario for a number of reasons:

• Current generative videos of avatars are limited. The tools have difficulties representing excited and emotive speeches. Preaching is a good-case scenario because it tends to be calm, not varying too much in tone and speed, nor having abrupt movements.
• Current Large Language Model (LLM) chatbots are considerably well versed in theology, given the abundant literature they are trained upon.
• Language is an important barrier for preachers. LLM chatbots are also good at translating text.
• Appearance may also be a barrier. An avatar may have a custom appearance, which may help connecting with the community at hand.
• Avatars cannot suffer the effects of religious intolerance.
• Religion is a theme present in the lives of billions of people.

Participate!

Given the speed of the advances in AI technology, Preaching-AI is a participative project from the ground up. Help us understand your experience with AI-generated sermons. Your insights will contribute to this research project and will help the development of future tools to improve religion practice through technology. Please fill the following 3-min questionnaire.

Case Study: Christian Preaching

We choose Christian preaching as a pilot case study based on religion demographics. In this case we provided the following prompt for the text-generating AI:

"Create the script for a 45 seconds to 1 minute video with a Christian evangelistic preaching to the general public. It should be theologically flawless, centered into how Christ is the way to a better life near God. It should also be tranquilizing, soothing, a good message for the heart. It should end with a small prayer asking for blessing for the audience."

The following videos are the results generated by the Preaching-AI pipeline.