Deus in Machina was a temporary art and research installation at St Peter’s Chapel (the Peterskapelle) in Lucerne, Switzerland, open from 23 August to 20 October 2024. A confessional booth held a screen with an AI avatar of Jesus that visitors could talk to, and its makers said plainly that it was not a confession.
It was switched off on 20 October, so there is no AI Jesus left to visit. What it left behind is a better question than the stunt: why would anyone tell a screen what they might not tell a person?
What was the AI Jesus at St Peter’s Chapel in Lucerne?
The project came from the Immersive Realities Research Lab at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, with a team led by Philipp Haslbauer and Aljosa Smolic, working with the chapel’s theologian, Marco Schmid. The university’s project page says the aim was to start a discussion about the limits of technology in religion.
Visitors stepped into the confessional and found Jesus on a monitor behind the grille, in the familiar long-haired, bearded style. Several headlines called it a hologram. It was a screen. A large blue button accepted the terms, then you talked, and the avatar answered aloud. The project advertised 100 languages, though Schmid told the Swiss news site bluewin that Swiss German could get an answer in Dutch or Hebrew. Bluewin also reported that ChatGPT generated the answers, while the university’s page says only “generative AI”.
NBC News reported about 900 conversations, while eWeek put participation above 1,000 people. Treat both as rough.
What does “deus in machina” mean?
It is Latin for “god in the machine”, and it is a pun on deus ex machina, “god from the machine”. The older phrase comes from Greek theatre, where a stage crane called the mechane swung actors playing gods into the scene to untangle a plot. Euripides leaned on it in many surviving tragedies, and in his Ars Poetica the Roman poet Horace told writers to bring in a god only when the knot really deserved one.
The installation turns the old trick around. A deus ex machina is a god who arrives from outside to fix a story that has run out of road. Here the god is already in the box, and you press a button. It does not fix anything, it answers.
Was the AI Jesus confessional a real confession?
No. Schmid told NBC News the aim was not to replicate a traditional confession, and reports agree the avatar absolved no one. Catholic teaching explains why it could not. The Catechism says only priests who have received the faculty of absolving from the Church’s authority can forgive sins in the name of Christ (paragraph 1495), and canon law is shorter still: “A priest alone is the minister of the sacrament of penance.” That is canon 965.
| Question | Deus in Machina | Sacrament of penance (Catholic) |
|---|---|---|
| Who listens | An AI avatar of Jesus | An ordained priest |
| Forgiveness | None given, according to reports | Absolution in Christ’s name |
| Your words afterwards | Recorded and studied by researchers | Covered by the sacramental seal |
For believers this is not a technicality. The point of confession is not advice or relief, though it can bring both. The point is that Christ forgives through the priest, an idea Catholics ground in Jesus’s words to the apostles in John 20:23. From a distance a booth with a screen in it can pass for a confession, which is how some headlines said the AI was “hearing confessions”.
Whatever one thinks of the theology, absolution is a spoken formula, part of a very old human habit of trusting words that do things when the right person says them. This site has followed that habit through ritual incantation and magical words.
Why do people confess to a machine?
Because a machine does not seem to judge. In a 2014 lab study in Computers in Human Behavior, Gale Lucas, Jonathan Gratch and colleagues had people interviewed by a virtual human. Those who believed they were talking to a computer alone disclosed more than those told a person was operating it, and the researchers credited reduced fear of judgment. It was an interview setting, not a confessional, so read it as a lead rather than a law.
The habit is older than the chatbot. Joseph Weizenbaum built ELIZA at MIT in the mid-1960s, a program that imitated a Rogerian therapist. According to IEEE Spectrum, his secretary, who had watched him build it, insisted that he leave the room so she could talk to it in private. Weizenbaum found that troubling, and his 1976 book Computer Power and Human Reason argued that some human tasks should not be handed to machines. The Lucerne avatar had something of ELIZA about it: The Register, citing Deutsche Welle, reported that it asked more questions than it answered.
Is an AI Jesus confessional private?
Not in the way a confessional is. The sacramental seal in Catholic law is inviolable: canon 983 forbids a confessor from betraying a penitent in any way or for any reason. The Lucerne booth worked differently. According to bluewin, the avatar said at the start that everything would be recorded, and visitors confirmed by pressing a button. The Register adds that it warned users never to disclose personal information.
So a place built for saying anything became a booth that asked you to say nothing identifying. That is sensible advice for any chatbot, since what you type usually passes through a company’s servers under its privacy policy, and a policy is not a seal.
What was the AI Jesus really for?
The organisers’ answer was a public conversation about AI and religion. The Register reports that Schmid also hoped to reach lapsed Catholics and church sceptics. Plenty of people sit between belief and unbelief, and a booth with no priest and no visible judgment is an easy room to walk into. NBC reported that visitors raised love, loneliness and the afterlife, and that most called themselves Christian, though atheists, agnostics and followers of other faiths took part too.
By one measure it worked. Bluewin reports that 290 visitors filled in a questionnaire afterwards and 60 percent said they felt religiously or spiritually inspired. That is a self-selected group, so it says more about curiosity than conversion.
Reception was mixed, which is the polite way to put it. Schmid told bluewin the answers were often better than he expected and sometimes clichéd. The Register reports condemnations left in the guest book, and NBC notes social media users calling the project blasphemous.
The sharpest criticism was about the face. Anna Puzio, a theologian who studies technology ethics, told bluewin that the Western, bearded Jesus is a depiction theology has long moved past, and that a system drawing on old religious texts can repeat their outdated views of women. She has a point about the face. No portrait of Jesus survives from his lifetime, and historians still argue over who the man behind the portraits was, as this crash course on the historical Jesus explains. Christians have given him a face for a very long time, from painted icons to hilltop monuments like the largest Jesus statues. An avatar is the newest entry in that line.
A screen can listen, and a language model can produce kind sentences on demand. Neither is forgiveness, and the people who built the booth never said it was.
FAQ
What is Deus in Machina?
A temporary art and research installation in which an AI avatar of Jesus answered visitors’ questions from a confessional booth. It ran from 23 August to 20 October 2024.
Which church in Switzerland had the AI Jesus?
St Peter’s Chapel (Peterskapelle) in Lucerne, a Catholic chapel whose roots, according to bluewin, go back to the 12th century.
Is the AI Jesus in Lucerne still there?
No. The university’s project page records the machine being switched off on 20 October 2024, and bluewin describes the installation as temporary and ended.
Did the AI Jesus forgive sins?
No. The organisers said it was not a confession, and Catholic teaching reserves absolution to ordained priests.
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