{"id":12013,"date":"2024-11-07T09:36:23","date_gmt":"2024-11-07T14:36:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/christnewstoday\/?p=12013"},"modified":"2024-11-07T10:20:13","modified_gmt":"2024-11-07T15:20:13","slug":"growing-number-of-ai-chat-bots-being-used-for-questions-of-faith","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/christnewstoday\/2024\/11\/growing-number-of-ai-chat-bots-being-used-for-questions-of-faith.html","title":{"rendered":"Growing Number of AI Chat Bots Being Used for Questions of Faith"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_12007\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-12007\" style=\"width: 1200px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12007\" src=\"https:\/\/wp-media.beliefnet.com\/sites\/409\/2024\/11\/ask-cathy_credit-Adobe-Stock_Inset-askcathy.ai_.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1200\" height=\"900\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-12007\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Adobe Stock | Inset: askcathy.ai<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.msn.com\/en-us\/money\/careersandeducation\/ar-AA1tpJyX\"><em>Business Insider<\/em><\/a> recently featured a story on Churchy Answers That Help You, or Cathy for short, a faith-based chat bot that utilizes the traditions of the Episcopalian church to respond to people\u2019s search for truth and guidance. Cathy was developed by TryTank Research Institute, with the intention to \u201ctranslate\u201d the Bible into everyday language for searchers, particularly younger people. \u201cCathy represents our innovative approach to leveraging technology in support of spiritual exploration,\u201d said Episcopal priest and founding director of TryTank, Reverend Lorenzo. It can also be used to help develop sermons. Developers stressed that Cathy is not meant to replace priests, but rather can be used as a tool to ask questions that may be difficult to ask in-person. The technology has not been without its hiccups though; Catholic Answers \u201cdefrocked\u201d its chatbot, Father Justin, after it suggested things like using Gatorade for baptism.<\/p>\n<p>The growing use of AI in religious spaces is, of course, not without <a href=\"https:\/\/www.scientificamerican.com\/article\/the-god-chatbots-changing-religious-inquiry\/\">its detractors<\/a>. Ilia Delio, chair of theology at Villanova University, expressed a concern that chatbots offered \u201cshortcuts to God\u201d that undermine the benefits of engaging with the actual religious texts personally. Rabbi Joshua Franklin utilized ChatGPT to deliver a sermon for his congregation in December 2022. What he found was a \u201cpassable\u201d sermon that lacked the human elements necessary to bring it to any meaningful life. \u201cIt actually had a little bit of content to it. And the congregation thought it was written by some other famous rabbis,\u201d <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/technology\/2023\/apr\/07\/chatgpt-artificial-intelligence-religion-faith-leaders\">he said<\/a>. \u201cBut if I\u2019m going to preach about vulnerability and intimacy, I would share something of myself as a model for vulnerability. And that\u2019s something that artificial intelligence and ChatGPT cannot do.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Beth Singler, an anthropologist specializing in AI and an assistant professor of digital religions at the University of Zurich, stated that many people don\u2019t understand how AI functions. \u201cIt takes the corpus [of text], remixes the words and puts them next to each other in terms of their probability of what word follows the next&#8230;. That\u2019s not the same as understanding and explaining a doctrine,\u201d she told <em>The Guardian. <\/em>\u201cThat is a concern in itself that there\u2019s going to be a reforming of the theological knowledge that\u2019s been shared so accurately and so patiently for hundreds of years, because ChatGPT is sort of hallucinating answers. It\u2019s a correlation machine. It\u2019s not a knowledge-finding machine. What it does is it predicts the likelihood of the following word.\u201d The danger is in searchers misunderstanding the way AI generates its responses, often drawing on a \u201cstatistically logical order\u201d rather than what is true.<\/p>\n<p>OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said that AI should be treated as \u201chuman-compatible\u201d but not \u201chuman.\u201d \u201cIt&#8217;s important to design human-compatible systems, but it&#8217;s a mistake to assume that they are humanlike in their thinking. I try not to project my human anthropomorphic biases onto it,\u201d he said. Baptist theologian, Joshua K. Smith, said that it\u2019s another case of human desires leading humanity astray. \u201cWe sometimes believe that technology is supposed to make life easier as if that is a primary concern of God or religion, and I don&#8217;t believe that it is,&#8221; &#8220;We will always see ourselves inside the machine. It is not the tech that leads us astray, it is the desires behind why we create said technology and what hopes we put upon its synthetic shoulders.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp; Business Insider recently featured a story on Churchy Answers That Help You, or Cathy for short, a faith-based chat bot that utilizes the traditions of the Episcopalian church to respond to people\u2019s search for truth and guidance. Cathy was developed by TryTank Research Institute, with the intention to \u201ctranslate\u201d the Bible into everyday language&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":627,"featured_media":12007,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fbia_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12013","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-christian-news"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Growing Number of AI Chat Bots Being Used for Questions of Faith<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/christnewstoday\/2024\/11\/growing-number-of-ai-chat-bots-being-used-for-questions-of-faith.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Growing Number of AI Chat Bots Being Used for Questions of Faith\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"&nbsp; Business Insider recently featured a story on Churchy Answers That Help You, or Cathy for short, a faith-based chat bot that utilizes the traditions of the Episcopalian church to respond to people\u2019s search for truth and guidance. Cathy was developed by TryTank Research Institute, with the intention to \u201ctranslate\u201d the Bible into everyday language&hellip;\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/christnewstoday\/2024\/11\/growing-number-of-ai-chat-bots-being-used-for-questions-of-faith.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Christ News Today\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2024-11-07T14:36:23+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2024-11-07T15:20:13+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/wp-media.beliefnet.com\/sites\/409\/2024\/11\/ask-cathy_credit-Adobe-Stock_Inset-askcathy.ai_.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1200\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"900\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Cecilia Buchanan\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Growing Number of AI Chat Bots Being Used for Questions of Faith","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/christnewstoday\/2024\/11\/growing-number-of-ai-chat-bots-being-used-for-questions-of-faith.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Growing Number of AI Chat Bots Being Used for Questions of Faith","og_description":"&nbsp; Business Insider recently featured a story on Churchy Answers That Help You, or Cathy for short, a faith-based chat bot that utilizes the traditions of the Episcopalian church to respond to people\u2019s search for truth and guidance. Cathy was developed by TryTank Research Institute, with the intention to \u201ctranslate\u201d the Bible into everyday language&hellip;","og_url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/christnewstoday\/2024\/11\/growing-number-of-ai-chat-bots-being-used-for-questions-of-faith.html","og_site_name":"Christ News Today","article_published_time":"2024-11-07T14:36:23+00:00","article_modified_time":"2024-11-07T15:20:13+00:00","og_image":[{"width":1200,"height":900,"url":"https:\/\/wp-media.beliefnet.com\/sites\/409\/2024\/11\/ask-cathy_credit-Adobe-Stock_Inset-askcathy.ai_.jpg","type":"image\/jpeg"}],"author":"Cecilia 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