What is in Kelvin's Head?

AI Ethics Questions for Preachers

12/12/2025

The first time that I encountered ChatGPT was three years ago when I was staying in a seminary in the USA. It was a place dedicated to teaching theology and particularly to training Episcopal clergy.
The ChatGPT preview release was let loose on the world on 30 November 2022, so I must have discovered it very early on. AI has moved on significantly since then but at the time one could use it to render a piece of text in the voice of someone well-known. The entertainment at mealtimes was to give it a well-known piece of the Bible such as Psalm 23 and get it to rewrite the text in the voice of a well-known American politician.

The Lord is my shepherd — a truly incredible shepherd, by the way, the best. Nobody shepherds like He does!
I’m not going to want; I’ve got everything I need. Believe me!

This seemed very entertaining to the students though I suspect that the joke may not be quite so entertaining these days.

ChatGPT seemed an incredible plaything. A novelty. A curiosity. A wonderful new internet gewgaw.

Three years on and a lot of development later, AI has changed a lot even if people haven’t yet moved on quite so much and many are still using it primarily as a novelty. You can still ask ChatGPT to translate bits of the Bible into the voice of someone else. It still seems remarkable to many that a machine can write anything at all.

The primary thing that people think of when they think of text-based AI is still the creation of written material in response to some kind of prompt though there are vastly more interesting things that one can do with AI than you could back in the olden days of December 2022.

There have been a number of surveys released this year which focus on the use of AI by preachers and I thought that it might be interesting to mull over a few questions in order to think about the ethics of using AI in sermon generation.

The obvious question is perhaps the least interesting though I’m not 100% sure that it has a clear answer.

Is it ethical to preach a sermon generated by AI rather than something that you’ve thought up yourself?

I think many people might initially answer this question in the negative and be fairly sure that this isn’t OK. However, I find myself remembering being trained by clerics when I was first ordained and clearly remember being told – “If you find you don’t have a sermon of your own, then preach someone else’s”. In the intervening years, the internet has come of age and that has complicated this question. There are sites dedicated to providing sermons for particular Sundays. I sometimes read a few sermons by other people on a particular text before settling myself down to write one of my own. I suspect most people would think that was absolutely fine ethically – indeed it falls well within the learning and study that clerics are all supposed to pursue.

Would I lift an idea from someone else’s sermon?

Yes, absolutely.

You get to know the preachers who inspire you. I would pay particular tribute to the preaching of Fr Grant Gallup who, when he was alive preached audacious sermons. I think it is a positive good to catch hold of things that inspire you and let them inform your own thinking.

But would I lift a paragraph from someone else’s sermon?

No, I don’t think I would, though I have come across people who do. (And I’ve known people do it with things I’ve written).

I remember once assessing someone for a job and looking at some of the sermons that he had been preaching. Something didn’t seem quite right about them. A little clever googling revealed that he was simply lifting sermons wholesale from one particular preacher from the other side of the world and preaching them as though they were his own. “And that reminds me of something that happened to me this week…” falls a little flat when you know that the same thing happened word for word to someone else three years ago in the lectionary cycle.

I never outed him as stealing ideas from someone else. But there was no chance of him getting the job.

I’m not convinced that it is ethical to preach someone else’s words verbatim in a sermon.

AI raises whole new questions beyond that though.

It is more or less ethical to lift a paragraph from a sermon that no human being ever wrote?

I think that’s a complicated question and is made even more complicated for me by my knowing that some AI engines have been trained on my own sermons.

Indeed, one of my tests when looking at a new AI tool is sometimes to ask it to write a sermon in the voice and style of Kelvin Holdsworth on the Bible passages for a particular set of Bible readings. This test, which I have to acknowledge I’m rather pleased with myself for devising certainly sorts out the AI sheep from the AI goats.

I did it recently with one engine and it produced this paragraph:

“It reminds me of the week before my mother-in-law comes to visit. You know the drill. It doesn’t matter if the house is generally tidy; you go into a state of panic. You’re not just cleaning the surfaces; you’re clearing the cupboards and organising the spice rack. Why? Because you’re trying to create a perfect space for a very important guest. You want the place to look like your best self, a version of reality that lasts exactly as long as the visit.”

Now there’s no risk in my stealing anything from this at all. It doesn’t sound like my spoken style and anyone who has ever shared an office with me knows that tidiness isn’t necessarily next to provostness. The really exciting thing, I thought, was the appearance of a mother-in-law. I rather like the idea that in some alternative cyberspace I’m tidy, happily married and have a well-organised spice rack.

Here, in the real world alas, things are different.

However, I asked another AI engine to come up with a sermon in my style and the more I read, the more I realised that it had been trained on my own sermons, most of which have been freely available online for the last 25 years or so. Here’s a fragment that I asked it to generate for a sermon in my voice for Midnight Mass.

“And so we come here at midnight—a time for secrets, hushed voices, and the honest acknowledgement that the world is not always as we wish it to be. Midnight is truthful. It exposes our longings. It meets us without the polite veneer we put on during the day. Midnight Mass is the Church daring to say: God meets us in the dark.”

It isn’t better than me and the middle sentences are a bit vapid. But there’s an idea in there at the end that I could have come up with and could have preached. And maybe, who knows yet, maybe I will.

So it is ethical to preach a sermon that is generated from an AI engine that has been trained on one’s own voice?

That’s a really complicated question and worth a good deal of pondering. And it is a very different question from those facing authors who make a living from their work.

As I try to think about the ethics of where the words come from there will always be people who tell me that nothing ethical comes from AI because of the world’s resources of power and water that are consumed in their production. I get it. But people have frequently taken to social media to make that point to me without acknowledging the irony of doing so. We are living beyond our means environmentally in so many areas of life. Yes, AI contributes negatively to this. But I don’t think that fact is going to put it back in its box.

At the moment I’ve never read a sermon from an AI engine that I think is better than any that I could have written. However, I suspect that in a year’s time I won’t be able to make that claim.

So, is it AI generated sermons from me from now on?

No actually. But primarily because I enjoy the writing. Wrestling with the ideas, thinking about the scripture and pondering where the world is at gives me life and I suspect that ultimately those listening to sermons can tell whether there’s life and spirit in them. And being a preacher who does grapple with the text is part of who I think I am and part of what I think the church has formed me to do.

Are there easy ethical answers to AI related questions for preachers? I don’t think so. And I think that’s what makes those questions so very interesting.

Photo by cottonbro studio: https://www.pexels.com/photo/hand-of-a-person-and-a-bionic-hand-6153343/

AI, Artificul Intelligence, digital ministry, homiletics, plagiarism, preaching, sermons. preacher

47 responses to “Why saying No Thanks is the progressive option”

Richard

15/09/2014

Fascinated by the ethnicity/cultural comments so I’ll leave the economics alone for the time being. I’m a mongrel with a bit of Irish, English, Scottish thrown into the mix. I was parachuted into the Highlands from darkest Englandshire as an infant. My initial experiences at primary school were- well, an experience. I was ridiculed. Snowballs contained sharp objects. Someone setting light to ones’s jumper is an unpleasant experience, all the more so when one happens to be wearing it at the time.

Physical attacks- being pinned to the ground and punched in the face until it turns purple while a healthy crowd gathers round chanting “put the boot in!” Which they did. Freely and liberally.

High school would be different. Except on day one each child had to recite- in the music lesson- the poem “It’s a braw, bricht moon licht nicht the nicht”. At the end of the lesson I was thrown fully clothed from a bridge into the River Lossie.

The reason- accent.

Being stubborn, I became a Scots lawyer and devoted most of my spare time working for charities for the hardest pressed in Scottish society. I made lifelong friends with many Scots and am proud to be their friends. Together we climbed all the Munros, enjoyed the history and freedom of open bothies and howffs, and I had the privilege of fishing some of the finest rivers in the world.

The current referendum is a matter for each individual in the voting booth. I am clear and certain that many are motivated by a cultural love of their land and people, justifiably and rightly so. However, I am equally certain that many will be motivated by racism (look no further than the recent visceral response to the BBCs poor journalism, namely where to deposit one’s TV licence). The ballot box isn’t concerned with motives but in the totting up of yeses and nos, but I have lived the experience of racist bullying and I know it’s still there. I still tense up when I hear the “joking banter” of the rugby terraces variety.

It is right and proper that there is a referendum. We are all being asked to face up to a new reality and that is good, whichever way the vote goes. It is, however, important to recognise that there is an underbelly and that it is ugly. Polite society will deny its existence. I can tell you it is very real, and it is very painful.

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1. Ruth
  
  16/09/2014
  
  Yes it’s sad how even the nicest of people are turning spiteful, petty and vindictive, as fear of the promised utopia being snatched from their grasp swells to obliterate their rational minds. Their desire for a more just society in Scotland has been manipulated and exploited ruthlessly and as the feverish excitement rises it’ll be ugly whatever way the vote goes.
  
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  1. Tim
    
    16/09/2014
    
    It’s a natural matter of psychology that, once people make their minds up, they get more entrenched in their view and only seek evidence to support the adopted position. That some will lack the self-control to keep strength of feeling in check is certainly unfortunate but to a large degree inevitable, sadly.
    
    Reply
Paul Hutchinson

15/09/2014

I’m a Northern Englishman with exclusively Northern English ancestry for at least two centuries, living in Northern England. Whilst I can appreciate so much of the motivation for voting yes, I stand with Kelvin on this. Those of us who live north of the Humber need Scotland to be with us, and not across the border. We well understand that Scottish life (I think of church, law, and education, the three areas with which I have most contact) is distinctive, and we certainly can see all the frustration that arises out of government policy over the last 35 years; but Scotland is part of the solutions to the problems of Britain, and without it, the progressive case for the rest of us seems almost impossible to make. No, of course, I don’t have a vote on this, but I feel that the English elites have not made the case that Scotland’s nearest neighbours would want them to hear. Bravo Kelvin – of course I agree.

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Colin Souter

15/09/2014

http://t.co/AoNHm1g6JL

I hope you read these comments, that you read this link and that you understand you are buying into the propaganda machine that is Westminster. We can help people through a more socially just and equitable society but that means starting to “eat the elephant” in bite sized chunks. What we can achieve in an iScotland can be a catalyst for change elsewhere in the UK. It’s not about turning our backs, it’s about giving people the confidence to see what can be accomplished successfully…..

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Alan McManus

15/09/2014

I was about 7 when I learned the word ‘lemman’, when another little boy asked me in the playground in Scots if I had a girlfriend. He went to work in a soap factory as he couldn’t anglicise as easily as I could. I went on to gain more degrees than sense and encountered that word again when my sister was studying the Middle English. 300 years of aggressive anglicisation meant that when Scots children used our rich linguistic legacy from sources as diverse as Norman French and the Hanseatic League we were ridiculed not affirmed. That obsessive educational mindset has hardly changed today. The bland ubiquity of the White English middle class discourse exerts a normalising power of erasure of the cultural diversity of the UK. Racism is evil as is all oppression. We are not nasty bairns in some narrowminded kailyard masquerading as a school. We are a people striving to free ourselves from cultural domination. We are sick of charges of racism and tire of repeating ourselves that independence has NOTHING TO DO WITH BEING ANTI-ENGLISH!

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1. Tim
  
  16/09/2014
  
  My word you have a huge inconsistency error there. Objecting to a `bland ubiquity of the White English middle class’ and yet it’s not anti-English?
  
  You should supplement your identity-based argument with some other reasons, lest your path lead to the dark side.
  
  Reply
  1. Alan McManus
    
    16/09/2014
    
    Tim if you’re going to quote me (inevitably someone was going to play this victim card) then do so correctly. The last four words in your truncated quote are adjectival. The noun is ‘discourse’. Dominant discourse need not be bland but in its attempted erasure of the diversity of all other discourse, it becomes bland. Why? Because it relies on phatic communication: what is said is not important. What matters is that always and everywhere that voice is on the air.
    Critical theorists have identified the same phenomenon with Anglo-American discourses. Why is this news to the thinking people who read and contribute to this blog? Perhaps because naming the historical and continuing English colonial attitude to Scotland is such an inconvenient truth that people prefer to divert this discussion down the rabbithole of utter nonsense.
    An example of which is ‘our’ PM pleading ‘heart, mind and soul’ for Scotland not to leave the UK. Thus confusing 1707 with 1603. He doesn’t care about the difference because he doesn’t care about history. What he does care about is power. You’re uncomfortable because I dare to state clearly that there is an abuse of power in the UK and it’s based on class, race, accent, nationality (and all sorts of other categories). The White English middle class, at least those who are complacent in their performance of niceness, are surprised to find that others find their assumptions patronising. And by the way can we all stop using ‘dark’ and ‘black’ as synonyms for evil?
    This strategy of excursion from the unanswered issues brought up by Jo, Robin, Derek, Adrian, Christine and Cliff is a bore. Can we stop now? If you’re not going to address them, or even consider them, then read this written by a good friend of mine from Bristol living in Scotland (no it’s not JKR!): http://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2014/09/13/drumchapel-conversations/
    
    Reply
Richard

16/09/2014

I agree with Kelvin’s suggested model of a more Federal union, and yes, Ruth, it is sad.

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Rosemary Hannah

16/09/2014

Of course most Scots are not anti-English. Of course a significant minority are. Of course this campaign has made more Scots anti-English and some already anti-English and Scotland, especially in rural areas, a harder place to live with an English accent.

But Kelvin’s arguments are not about this, and it would be good to get back to substance. I am an internationalist and do not see how voting for separatist nationalism can possibly be squared with that. We are not a colony. We have direct representation in the national parliament.

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Steven McQuitty

16/09/2014

While perhaps not decisive on this debate, one factor that should at least be taken into account is the impact this will have on Northern Ireland. What is left of the Union after a “Yes” vote will be unstable. I can’t imagine a de facto English Parliament in Westminster wishing to retain the union with Northern Ireland given the expense and trouble this has caused in the past. Those who may wish to de-stabilise things further in NI might well resort to the tried and tested [and successful, it turns out] means of politically motivated violence. A well placed dissident Republican bomb in England would no doubt encourage the English to say, right enough is enough – you are on your own. There is, in my view, a significant chance that Scottish independence might well lead to the collapse of the Northern Irish political settlement giving rise to a return to violence. Unionists in Northern Ireland will be feeling particularly vulnerable [which rarely leads to good things] and there will some Irish Republicans who will not be able to resist stirring that particular pot to see how things end…

I suspect most Scots won’t consider this their problem but it will be if they have to deal with an influx of Ulster-Scots “refugees” returning home after a 400 year sojourn in Ulster [with tongue only half in cheek].

I visit Scotland regularly, love the country, and see it as the most confident, progressive and beautiful part of the United Kingdom. I would love to live in Scotland. I wish the best for Scotland, whatever the outcome, it will always have a place in my heart. My children will continue to be subjected to Munro-bagging, beaches on Mull and Harris, the National Museum of Scotland and Blackwell’s bookshop on Chambers street!

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Tim

16/09/2014

Kelvin,
You once tweeted at me that [paraphrase] waiting to get everyone to get on-board was the opposite of progressive leadership.

Here, you’re advocating letting a massive opportunity pass by in a desire to improve the lot of a greater majority (with no mechanism for such on the table) – and yet you’re calling this progressive. I’m afraid this does not compute.

Wikipedia: “Progressivism is a broad political philosophy based on the Idea of Progress, which asserts that advances in science, technology, economic development, and social organization can improve the human condition.”

I guess it’s up to each to decide whether the current choice constitutes an advance, but that simply degenerates to affirming your position regardless of whether it’s progressive or not.

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Elizabeth

16/09/2014

I’m still undecided, but I appreciate the postitive, progressive vision for being better together presented here, after growing rather weary of negativity and fear-mongering.

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Alan McManus

17/09/2014

Outside Tesco, across Maryhill Road from McDonalds, along from the Police Station and the JobCentre, about half a mile from St Mary’s and half a world away, a group of YES campaigners and a smaller group of NOs, side by side, shout slogans and laugh and wave banners and flags and cheer passing car drivers honking in support of one or the other. North Kelvinside, the posh part, is content to display some YES and a very few NO stickers – it’s not done here to make a fuss. The scene outside Tesco only sounds raucous to ears unaccustomed to emotional display. What I hear and what I see is that the people of a place often considered a problem are alive to the possibility of making a difference. Their agency is sought after, Prime and First Minister appeal to them. Their vote counts. Whatever the result of tomorrow’s vote, whatever their continuing problems, this experience of agency is part of the solution.

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