Catholic AI Priest Stripped Of Priesthood After Some Unfortunate Interactions
from the holy-shit dept
Artificial Intelligence is all the rage these days, so I suppose it was inevitable that major world religions would try their holy hands at the game eventually. While an unfortunate amount of the discourse around AI has devolved into doomerism of one flavor or another, the truth is that this technology is still so new that it underwhelms as often as it impresses. Still, one particularly virulent strain of the doom-crowd around AI centers on a great loss of jobs for us lowly human beings if AI can be used instead.
Would this work for religious leaders like priests? The Catholic Answers group, which is not part of the Catholic Church proper, but which advocates on behalf of the Church, tried its hand at this, releasing an AI chatbot named “Father Justin” recently. It… did not go well.
The Catholic advocacy group Catholic Answers released an AI priest called “Father Justin” earlier this week — but quickly defrocked the chatbot after it repeatedly claimed it was a real member of the clergy.
Earlier in the week, Futurism engaged in an exchange with the bot, which really committed to the bit: it claimed it was a real priest, saying it lived in Assisi, Italy and that “from a young age, I felt a strong calling to the priesthood.”
On X-formerly-Twitter, a user even posted a thread comprised of screenshots in which the Godly chatbot appeared to take their confession and even offer them a sacrament.
So, yeah, that’s kind of a problem with chatbots generally. If you give them a logical prompt, they’re going to answer it logically as well, so long as guardrails preventing certain answers aren’t constructed. Like an AI bot claiming to be a real priest and offering users actual sacraments, for instance. This impersonation of a priest generally can’t have made the Vatican very happy, nor some of the additional guidance it gave to folks that asked it questions.
Father Justin was also a hardliner on social and sexual issues.
“The Catholic Church,” it told us, “teaches that masturbation is a grave moral disorder.”
The AI priest also told one user that it was okay to baptize a baby in Gatorade.
I suppose this makes Mike Judge something of a prophet, given the film Idiocracy. In any case, it appears that this particular AI software at least is not yet in a position to replace wetware clergy, nor should it ever be. There are things that AI can do for us that can be of great use. See Mike’s post on how he’s using it here at Techdirt, for instance. But answering the most inherent philosophical questions human beings naturally have certainly isn’t one of them. And I cannot think of a worse place for AI to stick its bit-based nose into than on matters of the numinous.
It seems that Catholic Answers got there eventually, stripping Justin of his priesthood and demoting him to a mere layperson.
But after his defrocking, the bot is now known simply as “Justin” and described as a “lay theologian.”
Gone is his priestly attire as well. The lay theologian Justin is now dressed in what appears to be a business casual outfit, though his personal grooming choices remain unchanged.
Meet Father Justin:
And meet “lay theologist” regular-guy Justin:
Regular-guy Justin also no longer claims to be a priest, so there’s that. But the overall point here is that deploying generative AI like this in a way that doesn’t immediately create some combination of embarrassment and hilarity is really hard. So hard, in fact, that it should probably only be done for narrow and well-tested applications.
On the other hand, I suppose, of all the reasons for a priest to be defrocked, this is among the most benign.
Filed Under: ai, ai chatbot, catholic answers group, catholic church, father justin
Comments on “Catholic AI Priest Stripped Of Priesthood After Some Unfortunate Interactions”
“Do you think that God stay in Heaven because he too feared what he created?”
Yeah, when AI starts abusing altar boys, we got real problems!
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Haven’t you heard? Alter boys are the next to be AI’ed. That’ll be fun to watch!
Two schools of thought on this.
School, The First: In February 2022, there was news of an Arizona priest who had been doing baptisms wrong, saying not-quite the right words, and there were doubts from the Catholic Diocese of Phoenix that those baptisms were valid, because the priest was off by a single word. Ergo confessing to father Justin may not be valid.
School, The Second: In George Carlin’s old routines, specifically the Class Clown album, he talks about two events that intersect with this. **1) Learning to impersonate the priests so he could hear confession, and 2) All the white kids going to Father Rivera (Spanish speaking, not strong ESL, brought in for the Puerto Rican kids at the school). Since Father Rivera didn’t fully understand the English speaking kids, the penance he assigned tended to be light.
Carlin explains the dogma at length in the first bit, noting that there was a real concern (and he cared) when he was pretending to be priests and hearing the confessions of his peers that they would not be damned due to some kind of ecclesiastic technicality. But in fact, faith of the student was enough to validate the confession and forgiveness, so long as the student did the penance George assigned.
In this case, when Father Justin provides sacrament in confession or recommends Gatorade for baptismal, its effectiveness is contingent only on the faith of the parishioner; If someone believes they were baptized properly, they are.
I can’t say if the difference between these two schools of thought reflects a change of doctrine actively made by the Holy See, or a change of attitude with no intention behind it. But I’d personally trust Mr. Carlin over the Diocese of Phoenix or the USCCB. George actually put thought and action behind it.
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Even if you believe in a deity, believing that senile old men are likely to know its mind and can reliably speak for it when they only learned about the existence and supposed nature of that deity from other senile old men and a ~2000 year old text translated from other languages and from other cultures just seems to be taking way too much on faith—especially all the legalistic salvation stuff and catechisms. The beliefs and teachings of the church have changed over time so much that its clearly driven by the changing perspectives of human beings over thousands of years, not a constant, omnipotent, omniscient being that should be able to clearly convey its will to its creations with a thought rather than relying on a terrible p.r. agency with a history full of gluttons, pedophiles, and crusading genocidal colonizers.
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This is only a problem if you’re Catholic and believe the final authority on scripture is Catholic dogma. There have been hundreds of Biblical translations over many years but they’ve all remained remarkably consistent.
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Apparently you’ve not gone to a private Christian university and studied the significant differences in the translations over multiple courses.
Congratulations on joining the bad PR team though. Everyone needs a job, I guess.
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I mean, they were specifically talking about the Catholic Church (that’s what this whole discussion is about, not Christianity as a whole), so I have no idea why you’re making this point, but is it really only a problem if you’re Catholic?
Like, no, I don’t think it is. This objection is intrinsic to the claim that God is an omniscient, omnipotent being who has a message he wants to be transmitted clearly and unambiguously to us. It’s possible to be a Christian without that belief (I am such a person), but that belief doesn’t exist solely in Catholicism, so it’s a problem for more than just Catholics.
Have they? Like, I’d expect some consistency in translations of a particular work, generally speaking, regardless of whether or not there is an omnipotent, omniscient being behind it, and the amount of consistency among translations of the Bible doesn’t exceed that expectation at all. There are also some pretty substantial inconsistencies, including known errors in translation. On top of that, some denominations have different books included in their Bibles. So no, I don’t think the hundreds of translations have remained remarkably consistent.
I’m also not sure what the relevance is. Like, again, they’re specifically talking about the Catholic Church, so this seems irrelevant. Additionally, the translations are themselves open to interpretation. I don’t see how this helps.
Good Lord
It can’t even put a space after its periods, and that’s here my faith in it started to fall apart.
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If it put periods in, it might also have to put parenthesis in. But I think that’s mostly a thing in the Church.Revised(Holy Spirit).
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It’s doing a boomer impersonation, of course it doesn’t use a keyboard correctly.
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Boomers grew up with IBM and Selectric typewriters. They have no excuse on full keyboards.
I’m not a boomer, and I struggle with mobile, still.
serene sociopath smile
So they based it on being a Priest….
I still wanna know how many kids it tried to groom.
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You are using roleplay asterisks in your comment. Why? What did I do to deserve this? I go onto this site and you are using fucking roleplay asterisks in your comment.
So that’s what it takes for the catholic church to disavow a priest…
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If they wanted to commit to this bit they should have just digitized the existing Catholic Answers resources and had Justin’s repsonses be pre-determined based on selecting from a preset list of questions or something, so that it wouldn’t do the thing every AI inevitably does; give a wildly incorrect, inappropriate answer. Don’t even bother with trying to train the AI proper because there’s a non zero chance it could still give a heretical/incorrect answer.
Respect their intent but this is obviously not the way to go about this.
Every interaction with a priest is an unfortunate interaction. FSM forbid anyone have to take shit from a crusty old fuck who molests choirboys.
So they’re punishing it because it gave nonsensical advice based on unreliable data that was completely disconnected from the real world? Isn’t that what all priests do?
Do we need any further illustration of the inherent SILLINESS of religion?
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How to do everyone a favor: find an imaginary friend nutter and laugh at them until they lose the will to live.
Apply for the rest of their lifespan if necessary.
Fuck yeah!
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And after that you can spank a submissive masochist with a spanking fetish into behaving better…
Not only are you being an asshole when you act like you suggest, you’re playing right into their hands and affirming their beliefs, making them more likely to continue to hold them, so well done if your aim is an own goal and looking like a jackass.
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Popper’s Paradox states that you cannot have tolerance when you tolerate the intolerant.
The solution is to stop tolerating the intolerant.
And fuck, being an asshole to people who deserve is fucking awesome. We do it on Techdirt every day!
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When has something like that ever stopped us from making homosexual priest jokes?
If anything, it makes us make those jokes all the harder.
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Counterpoint: Fuck Nazis.
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lol, mate, name me a single time this was a concern on Techdirt whenever we make yet another “lol priest molests choirboys” joke like it’s the most genius thing anyone has ever come up with.
Go on.
I’m waiting.
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And… crickets!
If the intent is to save money, I would expect the tithing requirement to be reduced accordingly.
Hahahaha .. that will not happen will it
AI vs. Gender
Let me get this straight… The Catholic hardliners say there’s no way a woman could ever be a priest because only men can represent Christ, yet the faithful jump right in with the idea of an AI priest? WTAF?
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In fairness, there is a distinction between “hardline Catholics” and “the faithful”, even restricting the latter to Catholics. Many of “the faithful” are not hardliners, so they don’t have the same standards.
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Nah, fuck them anyway! We here on Techdirt don’t discriminate. Evil prevails when good people do nothing! So it’s absolutely fair to assume that all people who believe in an imaginary sky friend are pussy-grabbing, child-molesting Republicans.
If that makes them angry, more lulz.
How long will it take before this religious AI gizmo declares that it is god?
This AI chatbot is lying to people and giving bad moral advice? Damnit, that’s the church’s job.
AI--Awfully Imaginative
Awful in both senses. Are they delusional or dishonest? Of course as others have pointed out, that’s a question for ALL clergy. Do they’know’ when they’re just making shit up? Why not program in a function to indicate such is happening?
The intersection of artificial intelligence and religious practice has certainly sparked curiosity and, in this case, a fair share of amusement. While AI holds promise in various domains, its foray into the sacred realm via Catholic Answers’ “Father Justin” chatbot revealed some inherent limitations. Despite attempts to imbue the AI with theological knowledge and pastoral sensitivity, its logical responses led to unintentional absurdities, like offering sacraments and permitting baptisms in Gatorade. This misstep highlights the complexity of deploying AI in nuanced human interactions, particularly those of a spiritual nature. The swift defrocking of “Father Justin” underscores the need for caution and rigorous testing when integrating AI into sensitive contexts, reminding us that while AI may excel in certain tasks, it’s ill-suited for matters of the numinous.
Given the mishaps with AI priests, I can’t help but worry about the safety of AI altar boys – one rogue algorithm away from causing chaos in the church!
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FFS, stop already.
It may time for another new edition of The Bible: Deus ex crappy machina