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.”
In a high-stakes decision that will shape California’s economy for years, air officials late Friday approved a sweeping overhaul of the state’s signature climate program, cap-and-invest.
The 10-3 vote from the California Air Resources Board determines how aggressively the Golden State will curb planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions in the years ahead — and how billions of dollars in revenue will flow through communities, businesses and public programs statewide.
Cap-and-invest was nation-leading when it launched in 2013. The program forces major polluters to pay for their share of emissions by buying allowances at auctions or being granted them for free. It uses the revenue to fund public transit projects, wildfire prevention, affordable housing, clean energy, electric vehicles and safe drinking water.
The pollution limit — or cap — declines each year, reducing the total amount of emissions in the state and helping California reach its ambitious climate targets, including 100% carbon neutrality by 2045.
The Legislature voted last year to extend cap-and-invest through 2045. Officials at the Air Resources Board then spent the last several months drafting and revising the plan voted on this week, which received considerable feedback from oil and gas companies, environmental groups, lobbyists and lawmakers all jockeying for different priorities.
Some 200 people testified in person during the marathon two-day meeting preceding the vote, and the final proposal received more than 1,000 written comments.
Industry groups warned that capping emissions too much and too quickly would push refineries out of the state and drive up already soaring energy costs. But environmentalists and other stakeholders said giving too many concessions to fossil fuel interests would defeat the program’s purpose, which is to drive down emissions along a pathway consistent with what scientists say could preserve a recognizable climate.
The program was always planned to become stricter as the years unfolded, to give businesses more time to make the stronger reductions in their emissions.
Officials were under legal, market and budgetary pressure to pass a plan without delay, and also said it’s important for California to signal market certainty.
“It is no secret that climate policy is at a crossroads — under attack by an openly hostile and well-funded opposition and upended by global economic upheaval,” CARB chair Lauren Sanchez said during the meeting. “At a moment of uncertainty at the federal and international levels, California has the opportunity to lead with consistency.”
Among the key updates to the program are the removal of 118 million pollution permits, or allowances, from the market by 2030, and 900 million after 2030. Officials say this will amount to a steep, 11% annual lowering of the cap by the end of this decade, and 7% from 2031 to 2045, in keeping with the state’s mandated targets.
Critically, however, the update will also create a new pool of 118 million allowances above the cap that polluters can apply for and receive if they invest in decarbonization projects, a program dubbed the Manufacturing Decarbonization Incentive.
The incentive program is intended to discourage regulated industries from leaving the state. Two major refineries have announced exit plans in recent years, including Valero’s Benecia refinery and Phillips 66’s Los Angeles refinery, which shut down in 2025.
But many critics — including transit, affordable housing, environmental justice and clean water groups — said this amounts to a dismantling of the program.
“CARB has proposed creating exactly 118.3 million additional allowances … outside the cap, the precise number of allowances that must be removed from the cap to keep us on track for our 2030 targets,” said Caroline Jones, a senior analyst with the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund. “This undermines the cap’s role in actually limiting climate pollution, which is the core function of this program.”
The board approved the decarbonization incentive but committed to additional workshops and evaluations of the program before issuing any allowances for it.
Other updates include more free allowances for industrial facilities and refineries, which regulators said will help reduce pressure on gasoline prices. Critics described the free permits as subsidies for oil and gas.
The update will also shift some allowances from gas to electric utilities, and increase funding for the California Climate Credit, a rebate that appears automatically on people’s utility bills.
But perhaps most controversial is how the update will affect the program’s multibillion-dollar revenue, which flows into the state’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund each year and is distributed to various programs. Cap-and-invest has delivered $35 billion for climate projects in California since its inception.
The new incentive pool will mean the loss of $2 billion annually to the fund, or roughly half the amount it has received in recent years, according to an analysis from the Legislative Analyst’s Office.
While the Air Resources Board does not determine how the fund is divvied up — that’s the Legislature — opponents warned that this could amount to significant cuts for the Affordable Housing and Sustainable Communities Program, the Low Carbon Transit Operations Program, the SAFER drinking water program and the Community Air Protection Program, among many others that rely on revenue from cap-and-invest.
“This could create serious consequences, including a potential zeroing out of the state’s support for critical emission reduction programs,” said Phillip Fine, executive officer at the Bay Area Air District. “Striking the right balance is critical, but all consequences must be fully considered.”
It was a sentiment echoed by many who delivered comments during the board meeting.
“These additional allowances would not only endanger our emissions targets, they would also flood the auction market and depress cap-and-invest revenues,” said Pam Odell of the group Climate Action California. “These revenues fund vital programs, promote climate resilience, clean transit and transportation, and public health, especially in the most heavily exposed front-line communities.”
Some groups came out in support of the update, however, including Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas & Electric. The plan strikes a “balance between program stringency and affordability,” Fariya Ali, air and climate policy manager with PG&E, said during the meeting.
Assemblymember Jacqui Irwin (D-Thousand Oaks), who authored the bill that reauthorized the program last year, was cautiously supportive, noting that she would like to see more guardrails around the incentive program to ensure it aligns with state climate targets. But delaying the update would only create more uncertainty at a time when the Trump administration is already canceling clean energy funds and revoking California’s authority to set clean vehicle standards, she said.
“If we fail now to adopt the proposed amendments to cap-and-invest, it would be without a doubt the greatest victory that the Trump administration could possibly hope for to achieve against California’s climate policies this year,” Irwin said.
Oil and gas groups were tepid. Jodie Muller, chief executive of the Western States Petroleum Assn., said the update provides some near-term relief for refineries, but leaves too much uncertainty after 2030 to drive continued investment.
Brian McDonald, regulatory affairs manager with Marathon Petroleum Corp., said similarly that the oil company is “deeply concerned that the current proposal does not go far enough to provide the regulatory certainty needed to sustain in-state fuel production.”
In a briefing ahead of the vote, California climate economist Danny Cullenward said the update threatens both the “cap” aspect of the program by introducing the new allowance pool, and the “invest” aspect by threatening to reduce the program’s revenues.
The proposal is “being presented as a compromise when in fact it is sacrificing both of the key goals of the program,” he said.
The new plan is slated to go into effect Sept. 1.
Layoffs have continued with another tech company saying it was cutting people to enable it to use more artificial intelligence.
Groupon announced in a security filing this month that it will cut up to 400 jobs, or nearly 25% of its worldwide workforce, as part of a broader restructuring plan to make the platform AI-native. The Chicago company plans to carry out the layoffs in the coming months.
Earlier the company’s Chief Executive Officer Dušan Šenkypl had said the company “fell short of our expectations” last quarter.
Since 2022, more than 800,000 tech workers have been laid off, according to Layoffs.fyi, a website that tracks job cuts.
The surge in pink slips started in 2023, when companies that had gone on hiring sprees during the COVID-19 pandemic began to cut back. From January to April this year, U.S. tech employers announced 85,411 job cuts, up 33% from the same period last year, according to global outplacement and executive coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
Groupon said in the filing that the decision to shift toward an AI-based company is to “better deliver on our mission, serving both customers and merchants.”
The company said the layoffs will cost it as much as $13 million, but save it more than $20 million per year.
This announcement comes as many e-commerce companies are shifting their business models to AI to reduce costs by automating many roles.
Artificial intelligence has also triggered fierce competition for top talent and is also fueling tens of thousands of layoffs this year. The result is that the class divide is widening in Silicon Valley as a tiny group of employees are landing unprecedented packages for AI skills, while many others struggle to find work.
The have-nots are doing everything that used to guarantee great jobs — refreshing resumes, optimizing LinkedIn profiles and doing interviews — but companies are much more picky these days. The tech jobless are rethinking their lives. Some are taking pay cuts, while others are leaving tech. Some are going back to study or launch startups. Some have retired.
Groupon shares, which have fallen 27% over the last 12 months, slipped 1% on Thursday to $21.20.
Walt Disney Co.’s ABC has filed renewal applications with the Federal Communications Commission “under protest” after an order mandating a years-early review of the network’s eight television station licenses.
The criticism was part of the network’s applications for the FCC review, which were filed ahead of a deadline Thursday. In an objection to the early renewal, Disney’s New York station WABC called the FCC order “unlawful, arbitrary and unconstitutional” and said it was “legally indefensible.”
“The Commission had not demanded early renewal in over five decades,” the station wrote in its filing. “And it has never before demanded simultaneous license renewal applications from a group of stations commonly owned with a network as it has here. The order has no legitimate purpose.”
The licenses for the eight ABC-owned TV stations, including KABC in Los Angeles, were originally scheduled for renewal between 2028 and 2031.
The FCC order came shortly after ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel made a joke about First Lady Melania Trump looking like an “expectant widow” days before a gunman tried to breach the White House Correspondents’ Assn. gala last month that President Trump attended.
Trump has frequently threatened to have TV station licenses pulled when he is unhappy with their coverage, but the order is the first time the government has acted on his wishes, sparking anger from free speech advocates. The FCC has said the order is part of an investigation into whether Disney’s diversity and inclusion policies violate federal law and the agency’s rules against “unlawful discrimination.”
In its response, WABC said the “only plausible reason” to issue the order was to “punish the station for speech the government does not like.”
“The ultimate injury here is not to the station or its parent company. It is to the public,” WABC wrote. “When a broadcaster must weigh regulatory retaliation before making editorial decisions, the public loses access to journalism that is free from government influence.”
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said in a statement Thursday that Disney filed its applications to renew its broadcast licenses only after the company was told its previous answers were “disingenuous, deficient and improper.”
“Contrary to Disney’s claim that the FCC called in their broadcast licenses for early renewal for no reason, the record shows something very different,” Carr said. “Broadcast licensees have a unique obligation to operate in the public interest. The FCC will follow the facts and law wherever they may lead.”
FCC Commissioner Anna M. Gomez, the panel’s only Democrat who has backed Disney in its fight, cheered the Burbank media and entertainment company’s filing, saying in a post on X that she was “glad to see them expose the FCC’s actions as nothing more than naked political retribution and an unlawful assault on free speech and a free press.”
Times staff writer Meg James contributed to this report.
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