St. Augustine’s concept of homiletic plagiarism and the challenges of artificial intelligence

Abstract

One of the major challenges of contemporary preaching is artificial intelligence, which is capable of generating texts of increasingly high formal and substantive quality. Its use in homiletics raises not only legal questions, related to plagiarism and the protection of intellectual property, but above all theological and ethical ones. The fundamental question concerns whether a text produced by artificial intelligence can bear any theological marks of faith understood both subjectively and objectively. The issue of preachers using texts written by others was already addressed by St. Augustine in his work “De doctrina christiana”. He considered such a practice permissible, yet his concept must be understood in the context of the ancient notion of authorship and his own theology of the “ownership of the Word of God.” Augustine, however, understood plagiarism in an entirely different way: for him, it meant living in a manner inconsistent with the Word of God one proclaimed. In this article, the author raises the question of the relevance of Augustine’s concept of preaching plagiarism and of his views on the use of other people’s texts in light of the modern understanding of authorship.