Business
Religious Leaders Experiment with A.I. in Sermons
To members of his synagogue, the voice that played over the speakers of Congregation Emanu El in Houston sounded just like Rabbi Josh Fixler’s.
In the same steady rhythm his congregation had grown used to, the voice delivered a sermon about what it meant to be a neighbor in the age of artificial intelligence. Then, Rabbi Fixler took to the bimah himself.
“The audio you heard a moment ago may have sounded like my words,” he said. “But they weren’t.”
The recording was created by what Rabbi Fixler called “Rabbi Bot,” an A.I. chatbot trained on his old sermons. The chatbot, created with the help of a data scientist, wrote the sermon, even delivering it in an A.I. version of his voice. During the rest of the service, Rabbi Fixler intermittently asked Rabbi Bot questions aloud, which it would promptly answer.
Rabbi Fixler is among a growing number of religious leaders experimenting with A.I. in their work, spurring an industry of faith-based tech companies that offer A.I. tools, from assistants that can do theological research to chatbots that can help write sermons.
For centuries, new technologies have changed the ways people worship, from the radio in the 1920s to television sets in the 1950s and the internet in the 1990s. Some proponents of A.I. in religious spaces have gone back even further, comparing A.I.’s potential — and fears of it — to the invention of the printing press in the 15th century.
Religious leaders have used A.I. to translate their livestreamed sermons into different languages in real time, blasting them out to international audiences. Others have compared chatbots trained on tens of thousands of pages of Scripture to a fleet of newly trained seminary students, able to pull excerpts about certain topics nearly instantaneously.
But the ethical questions around using generative A.I. for religious tasks have become more complicated as the technology has improved, religious leaders say. While most agree that using A.I. for tasks like research or marketing is acceptable, other uses for the technology, like sermon writing, are seen by some as a step too far.
Jay Cooper, a pastor in Austin, Texas, used OpenAI’s ChatGPT to generate an entire service for his church as an experiment in 2023. He marketed it using posters of robots, and the service drew in some curious new attendees — “gamer types,” Mr. Cooper said — who had never before been to his congregation.
The thematic prompt he gave ChatGPT to generate various parts of the service was: “How can we recognize truth in a world where A.I. blurs the truth?” ChatGPT came up with a welcome message, a sermon, a children’s program and even a four-verse song, which was the biggest hit of the bunch, Mr. Cooper said. The song went:
As algorithms spin webs of lies
We lift our gaze to the endless skies
Where Christ’s teachings illuminate our way
Dispelling falsehoods with the light of day
Mr. Cooper has not since used the technology to help write sermons, preferring to draw instead from his own experiences. But the presence of A.I. in faith-based spaces, he said, poses a larger question: Can God speak through A.I.?
“That’s a question a lot of Christians online do not like at all because it brings up some fear,” Mr. Cooper said. “It may be for good reason. But I think it’s a worthy question.”
The impact of A.I. on religion and ethics has been a touch point for Pope Francis on several occasions, though he has not directly addressed using A.I. to help write sermons.
Our humanity “enables us to look at things with God’s eyes, to see connections, situations, events and to uncover their real meaning,” the pope said in a message early last year. “Without this kind of wisdom, life becomes bland.”
He added, “Such wisdom cannot be sought from machines.”
Phil EuBank, a pastor at Menlo Church in Menlo Park, Calif., compared A.I. to a “bionic arm” that could supercharge his work. But when it comes to sermon writing, “there’s that Uncanny Valley territory,” he said, “where it may get you really close, but really close can be really weird.”
Rabbi Fixler agreed. He recalled being taken aback when Rabbi Bot asked him to include in his A.I. sermon, a one-time experiment, a line about itself.
“Just as the Torah instructs us to love our neighbors as ourselves,” Rabbi Bot said, “can we also extend this love and empathy to the A.I. entities we create?”
Rabbis have historically been early adopters of new technologies, especially for printed books in the 15th century. But the divinity of those books was in the spiritual relationship that their readers had with God, said Rabbi Oren Hayon, who is also a part of Congregation Emanu El.
To assist his research, Rabbi Hayon regularly uses a custom chatbot trained on 20 years of his own writings. But he has never used A.I. to write portions of sermons.
“Our job is not just to put pretty sentences together,” Rabbi Hayon said. “It’s to hopefully write something that’s lyrical and moving and articulate, but also responds to the uniquely human hungers and pains and losses that we’re aware of because we are in human communities with other people.” He added, “It can’t be automated.”
Kenny Jahng, a tech entrepreneur, believes that fears about ministers’ using generative A.I. are overblown, and that leaning into the technology may even be necessary to appeal to a new generation of young, tech-savvy churchgoers when church attendance across the country is in decline.
Mr. Jahng, the editor in chief of a faith- and tech-focused media company and founder of an A.I. education platform, has traveled the country in the last year to speak at conferences and promote faith-based A.I. products. He also runs a Facebook group for tech-curious church leaders with over 6,000 members.
“We are looking at data that the spiritually curious in Gen Alpha, Gen Z are much higher than boomers and Gen X-ers that have left the church since Covid,” Mr. Jahng said. “It’s this perfect storm.”
As of now, a majority of faith-based A.I. companies cater to Christians and Jews, but custom chatbots for Muslims and Buddhists exist as well.
Some churches have already started to subtly infuse their services and websites with A.I.
The chatbot on the website of the Father’s House, a church in Leesburg, Fla., for instance, appears to offer standard customer service. Among its recommended questions: “What time are your services?”
The next suggestion is more complex.
“Why are my prayers not answered?”
The chatbot was created by Pastors.ai, a start-up founded by Joe Suh, a tech entrepreneur and attendee of Mr. EuBank’s church in Silicon Valley.
After one of Mr. Suh’s longtime pastors left his church, he had the idea of uploading recordings of that pastor’s sermons to ChatGPT. Mr. Suh would then ask the chatbot intimate questions about his faith. He turned the concept into a business.
Mr. Suh’s chatbots are trained on archives of a church’s sermons and information from its website. But around 95 percent of the people who use the chatbots ask them questions about things like service times rather than probing deep into their spirituality, Mr. Suh said.
“I think that will eventually change, but for now, that concept might be a little bit ahead of its time,” he added.
Critics of A.I. use by religious leaders have pointed to the issue of hallucinations — times when chatbots make stuff up. While harmless in certain situations, faith-based A.I. tools that fabricate religious scripture present a serious problem. In Rabbi Bot’s sermon, for instance, the A.I. invented a quote from the Jewish philosopher Maimonides that would have passed as authentic to the casual listener.
For other religious leaders, the issue of A.I. is a simpler one: How can sermon writers hone their craft without doing it entirely themselves?
“I worry for pastors, in some ways, that it won’t help them stretch their sermon writing muscles, which is where I think so much of our great theology and great sermons come from, years and years of preaching,” said Thomas Costello, a pastor at New Hope Hawaii Kai in Honolulu.
On a recent afternoon at his synagogue, Rabbi Hayon recalled taking a picture of his bookshelf and asking his A.I. assistant which of the books he had not quoted in his recent sermons. Before A.I., he would have pulled down the titles themselves, taking the time to read through their indexes, carefully checking them against his own work.
“I was a little sad to miss that part of the process that is so fruitful and so joyful and rich and enlightening, that gives fuel to the life of the Spirit,” Rabbi Hayon said. “Using A.I. does get you to an answer quicker, but you’ve certainly lost something along the way.”
A landmarked downtown Los Angeles apartment building designed by famed Los Angeles architect John Parkinson is on the market as its owners face foreclosure.
Residences in the Metropolitan, a 10-story tower built in 1913, are nearly filled with tenants but its ground floor retail spaces on Broadway and 5th Street are unoccupied, as are other street-level stores in downtown’s Historic Core.
The historic building was once considered one of the best in the city and is owned by the Fallas family, which operated a chain of value-priced clothing stores based in Gardena including one called Fallas Paredes in the Metropolitan.
Fallas-Paredes at 449 S. Broadway, Los Angeles, CA 90013.
(Google Maps)
Around 2011, Michael Fallas, who once worked in family’s downtown store as a stock boy, converted the upstairs floors from offices to apartments while continuing to operate Fallas Paredes. The store closed more than five years ago in the wake of a 2018 filing by its parent company for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
Earlier this month in state Superior Court, a special servicer representing Fallas’ lender asked for a judicial foreclosure of the property, alleging that Fallas had stopped making payments on a $32 million loan dating to 2017. After leasing the property for years, Fallas bought the building in the 1990s.
Fallas didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The location of the Metropolitan where the buildings stands was hailed in a Times story in 1912, saying “it is regarded by many realty men as the most valuable piece of real estate in Los Angeles.”
The building today is recognized as a city historic-cultural monument because “Broadway became the commercial center of the Southland, a title it retained until well after World War II,” with its development, the city said. One of the architects who designed the Metropolitan in the Beaux-Arts style was John Parkinson, who is credited with designing such well-known local structures as City Hall, the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and Union Station.
Notable tenants in the Metropolitan have included the Los Angeles Public Library, Owl Drug Co., variety store J.J. Newberry and real estate company Janns Investment Co., which sold the land where UCLA is built and developed Westwood Village, among other Los Angeles neighborhoods.
In recent years, the buildings around the Metropolitan have struggled to keep retail tenants after a spurt of residential conversions of historic buildings starting in the early 2000s brought commerce to the neighborhood. Many downtown businesses have struggled since the pandemic reduced occupancy in offices downtown and reduced the flow of visitors.
“The lack of bodies on the street is generally hurting downtown, and that’s one of the reasons that has building has problems,” said downtown real estate broker Hal Bastian, who lives in the Historic Core.
There are close to 1,000 residential units in historic buildings at the intersection of Broadway and 5th Street, Bastian said, but all the ground floor stores are closed. Drug stores there suffered substantial losses from shoplifting he said, and now, “our challenge on Broadway is leasing.”
The 88 apartments in the Metropolitan are 91% rented, according to a listing for the property by the Zacuto Group, which also touts its roof deck with pool, fitness center and barbecue grills. No sale price is set.
Business
January 2025 wildfire victims seek tougher penalties against State Farm over claims handling
A fire survivors’ group announced Thursday it was seeking tougher penalties against State Farm over its handling of January 2025 wildfire claims.
The Every Fire Survivor’s Network said it was petitioning to join a state enforcement action announced this year against the company to make sure the case results in meaningful changes at California’s largest home insurer.
“We’re seeking a systematic review of all their claims and penalties calibrated to the actual scale of the harm — and we’re seeking the payouts that families are owed,” said Joy Chen, executive director of the group, at a Pacific Palisades news conference joined by victims of the fires.
The Department of Insurance in May filed an administrative action against State Farm General — the subsidiary of the giant Bloomington, Ill., insurer that handles California home insurance — after completing a “market conduct” exam.
The Jan. 7, 2025, fire damaged or destroyed more than 18,000 structures and killed 31 people.
State Farm has received more January 2025 claims than any other insurer — more than 13,700 auto and homeowners claims as of May 4, with payouts totaling $5.7 billion, according to the company.
The market conduct exam looked at 220 sample claims filed by the victims and found 398 violations of state law in about half of them.
Among other alleged violations, it found that the company failed in numerous cases to pursue a “thorough, fair and objective investigation” into claims, failed to come to “prompt, fair, and equitable settlements” and made settlement offers that were “unreasonably low.”
In announcing the action, Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara called the company’s claims handling “unacceptable” and said his department was taking “decisive action to hold them accountable.”
The state is seeking a “cease and desist” order to stop the insurer from engaging in unfair or deceptive practices.
It also has threatened to suspend State Farm’s license over the alleged violations, which each carry a penalty of up to $5,000 — or twice that figure if found to be willful. That could amount to a penalty of $2 million or more.
The threat to actually suspend State Farm’s license and its authority to write policies has been viewed skeptically by some, given its roughly 20% market share of the state’s home insurance market.
The company, which had an opportunity to include its responses in the exam report, denied fault in some cases and admitted fault in others. It often blamed problems on individual adjusters and denied systemic issues with its claims handling.
The petition filed by the wildfire survivor’s group criticizes the sample size of the market conduct exam as too small to capture all the alleged deficiencies in State Farm’s claims handling, which it claims are a “general business practice” of the company.
The group is seeking to conduct discovery, cross examine witnesses, present testimony from fire victims and bring more that 1,600 firsthand policyholder statements regarding State Farm’s practices into evidence, according to the petition.
It also wants State Farm to reopen cases in which claimants were paid too little, and it is seeking to participate in settlement discussions in order to increase any penalty State Farm would pay.
It calculated that a $2-million penalty would amount to a minute fraction of the assets of the State Farm Group.
“I submit to you that doesn’t defer bad conduct, it just allows you to continue to do it,” said Michelle Meyers, an attorney for Every Fire Survivor’s Network, at the news conference.
Consumer Watchdog, which has been a harsh critic of State Farm, also is providing legal support for victims’ effort.
Sevag Sarkissian, a spokesperson for State Farm, said the company was aware of the petition.
“We recognize that many wildfire survivors, including those that are State Farm General policyholders, continue to face difficult recovery challenges,” he said. “Our focus remains on helping customers recover.”
Michael Soller, a spokesperson for Lara, said the department is “acting with urgency to assist wildfire survivors in their ongoing recovery by investigating formal complaints filed by survivors and conducting the expedited market conduct exam that led to this enforcement action.”
He added that the department’s position is the state’s Administrative Procedure Act does not contemplate the commissioner or department staff authorizing intervention requests in the case.
He said that would be a hearing officer’s or administrative law judge’s decision when one is assigned to the case.
Meyers acknowledged the request was novel but said her reading of the law is that Lara can make the decision because no judge is yet assigned.
In response to the criticism, State Farm pledged earlier this year to improve its claims handling, including by providing single points of contact and improved communication so there are “fewer handoffs, fewer repeated explanations, and seamless support.”
It also named a new vice president of customer relations for State Farm General.
The state’s trial attorneys and Uber say they have reached a last-minute deal to scrap their dueling ballot measures and avert what was gearing up to be one of most expensive battles of the November election.
The deal, which comes a day after both measures qualified for the November ballot, has Uber agreeing to bulk up safety measures, while the trial attorneys will limit how much they can claim for lien-based medical treatment of victims who get in Uber or Lyft accidents, according to spokespeople for both sides of the campaign.
“Both sides agree: Californians deserve a system that’s safe, fair, and accountable,” read a joint statement from Uber and the Consumer Attorneys of California, a powerful attorney trade group. “This agreement protects patients from unnecessary treatment or getting overcharged, ensures access to medical care and legal representation, and strengthens safety measures.”
The agreement, finalized Thursday, means the ride-share giant will kill its ballot measure to cap how much attorneys can earn in vehicle collision cases and limit medical damages to rates based on insurance. Uber has argued that the costs for medical treatment done on a lien, which allows doctors to get paid from a cut of the plaintiff’s payout, far exceed what it would cost if the victim had used their own insurance.
In return, the Consumer Attorneys of California will cancel its competing ballot measure that sought to increase legal liability for ride-share companies if a passenger is sexually assaulted by a driver. The measure followed an investigation by the New York Times into sexual assault by drivers.
Both sides had poured tens of millions into the campaigns, plastering billboards across Los Angeles.
Lawyers claimed the fight had turned existential with the measure threatening to decimate the profit margin of many personal injury cases and leave drivers with small or thorny cases unable to find an attorney willing to take their case.
Spokespeople say the deal is predicated on their agreement being codified into a bill within the next week. Otherwise, they said, each side will move forward with its ballot measure.
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