WCC News: Martin Luther steps into 21st century

On Reformation Day—31 October—a Martin Luther avatar will be answering questions and bringing history to life.  On Reformation Day, 31 October, The Evangelical Church in the Rhineland is inviting people to share their questions with the AI-powered Martin Luther.   Photo: ekir.de 30 October 2023 The Evangelical Church in the Rhineland is inviting people to share their questions with the AI-powered Luther.  During the premiere on Reformation Day, questions will be sent to the Martin Luther avatar via the YouTube chat. These will be passed on to ChatGPT, which is trained to answer in the style of a 21st-century Martin Luther. To avoid unwanted responses from ChatGPT, manual content filtering is currently being carried out before the AI-generated answers are fed to the avatar as audio using a text-to-speech engine.  The Luther avatar is based on a Cranach painting of Martin Luther. XRhuman transformed the painting into a photorealistic 3D representation of the reformer using AI algorithms. For Luther's robe, a colleague was scanned in 3D as a double. The head and body were then combined, resulting in an avatar that can move realistically in the Metaveres. Rev. Ralf Peter Reimann of the Evangelical Church in Rheinland, one of the creators of the project, said: "The AI Luther avatar is an experiment, but with artificial intelligence, we strive to make the Reformation's message tangible for our era. On YouTube, people can directly ask Martin Luther their questions and receive answers in real time. They can interact with Luther as if he were alive, bringing the 500-year-old message of the Reformation into the 21st century." The project on the 31 October will be available via the youtube channel of the Evangelical Church in Rheinland, www.youtube.com/@EKiRInternet. Learn more from the Evangelical Church in Rheinland See more

The World Council of Churches promotes Christian unity in faith, witness and service for a just and peaceful world. An ecumenical fellowship of churches founded in 1948, today the WCC brings together 352 Protestant, Orthodox, Anglican and other churches representing more than 580 million Christians in over 120 countries, and works cooperatively with the Roman Catholic Church. The WCC general secretary is Rev. Prof. Dr Jerry Pillay from the Uniting Presbyterian Church in Southern Africa. Media contact: +41 79 507 6363; www.oikoumene.org/press Our visiting address is: World Council of Churches 150 route de Ferney Geneve 2 1211 Switzerland