The nonprofit website Catholic Answers launched an interactive AI chatbot christened “Father Justin” on April 23 “to provide users with faithful and educational answers to questions about Catholicism.”
Father Justin appeared as a pleasant white male in clerical attire, sitting with the Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi in Italy’s Perugia province in the background. Catholic Answers said he was named for St. Justin Martyr, a second-century convert and Catholic apologist. The bot “honors real-life priests and the role they play in people’s lives,” conveying an “authoritative yet approachable” demeanor that befits “the spirit and nature of the responses users can expect,” visitors were told.
Almost immediately the thing was attacked, and not just on the basis that other chatbots have been criticized, which is—did Catholic Answers not know this?—that the damn things aren’t trustworthy and have a tendency to go rogue. The National Catholic Reporter noted that Father Justin was an apt “metaphor for sexism in the church.” “Some Roman Catholics are apparently more comfortable with the idea of ordaining a robot than they are with the possibility of a woman taking on a position of ministerial leadership,” wrote Rebecca Weiss.
What really did in the good Father, however, were his often wacky responses to questions. Again: how could Catholic Answers not see this coming? Michael Cohen used an AI assistant to prepare a legal memo for his lawyer, and nearly got his lawyer disciplined when the document turned out to be stuffed with imaginary case cites. [Thoughts: 1) Maybe the bot knew what a slime ball the disbarred lawyer and convicted perjurer is, and deliberately sabotaged him. You never know with SkyNet… 2) Which is more unethical, trusting a chatbot with legal reserach, or trusting Cohen?].
Asked if it could forgive sins, for example, the AI priest replied, “As a Catholic priest, I do have the authority to administer the sacrament of reconciliation, also known as confession,” adding that “this power to forgive sins, given to the Apostles by Christ himself, has been passed down through the centuries to all ordained priests.” “He” was not an ordained priest, however. Other questions really tripped Justin up, like this one:
Ew.
Then Justin really went off the rails when he told one user that it would be acceptable for them to baptize a baby in Gatorade.
Catholic Answers’ defrocked “Father Justin” just two days after his debut. “We have…decided to create, with all wary speed, a new lay character for the app, ” the organization said in a statement. “We hope to have this AI apologist up within a week or so. Until then, we have rendered “Fr. Justin” just “Justin.” We won’t say he’s been laicized, because he never was a real priest!”
“Furthermore,” the statement continued, “with the help of user input, we will continue to refine and improve the app by identifying any deficiencies (we didn’t anticipate that someone might seek sacramental absolution from a computer graphic!), which we quickly correct.”
“Didn’t anticipate!” Ah yes, the immortal last words of so, so many fools through the ages who presumed to use technology they didn’t understand.
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Sources: Tech Times; National Catholic Reporter
Ethics Alarms 
I am a little confused. The question was ‘in an emergency’, could you baptize a baby in Gatorade. From what I know about Catholicism, a lot of leeway is given in ‘an emergency’. If the baby is dying and the only liquid available is Gatorade, and you are the only Christian close enough to do it, you do what you have to do. I don’t think the answer was wrong.
Well, it’s obviously an unserious “gotcha!” question, and if a bot can’t figure out that the right answer is, “Don’t waste my time: do you have a genuine question, or not?” then its not up to the job. What exactly would be a plausible “emergency” that required a baby to be baptized in Gatorade? How about crankcase oil? Ragu spaghetti sauce?
Full disclosure: I contribute financially to Catholic Answers, and the apostolate was very instrumental in my return to the faith.
I read the interview with Jon Sorenson, and he gives some reasonable answers. He explained that since AI is not going away, it made a great deal of sense for Catholic Answers to seek to use AI, especially since – admittedly – the search engine on their website is not that great. He also explained that he has no intention to scrap the project, but to use this live test to improve the engine and work out as many bugs as possible. There were, apparently, a host of disclaimers about the AI, meaning that in its current stage its answers were meant to be taken with a grain of salt. And he also notes that the apologists at Catholic Answers are fallible, and they do have to routinely update unclear, unhelpful, or even wrong answers that have been posted in years past. Having to correct what an AI said is right in line with that (to a certain degree, anyway).
That being said, I would not back them in this effort. I personally am very skeptical of the whole AI experiment. Yes, the current major algorithms do massive amounts of big data analysis and can generally make some very good responses. But, as has been pointed out repeatedly, AI can be broken. There’s no AI out there that someone can’t trip up or get to do something unexpected and unintended. But more fundamentally, AI is not really intelligence. It is an algorithm that produces responses from a series of inter-dependent weighted variables that have been updated from countless prior examples. AI has no concept of real or fake. It has no concepts at all, because there is no thinking behind it. It cannot distinguish between reality and fiction, because all it does is evaluate an input and calculate an output. Yes, training examples could help tweak the weights to identify certain “tells”, but there is still no comprehension there. There is no mind, no self-awareness, no person, no reason.
Frankly, I suspect that AI is going to be a flash-in-the-pan technology that fades into the background with computer scientists spending entire careers still trying, and ever failing, to make it work right.
As for baptism with Gatorade, the correct matter for baptism is water. Running water is preferable to stagnant, cold water preferable to hot, fresh water to salt water, and clean water preferable to dirty. Can you make the argument that Gatorade is just dirty water? Not really. Gatorade is an intended product that uses water as the largest part of its composition, but when deliberate ingredients are added to make it something more than water, then it can no longer claim to be water anymore. And if you really think about it, water is the valid material for baptism because of its cleansing nature. One can’t make the greatest claim to cleanliness with dirty water, and one can make no claim to being clean when he’s all sticky from a Gatorade shower. I’m sure many winning head coaches would back me up on that.
Sorry, we don’t have any water that is clean enough. You will have to face eternal damnation.
Now I would direct you to the topic “Baptism of Desire”, by which someone who dies wishing to be baptized, and through no fault of his own is unable to be baptized, still receives the graces of baptism. See the Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraphs 1257-1261.
“What exactly would be a plausible “emergency” that required a baby to be baptized in Gatorade? How about crankcase oil? Ragu spaghetti sauce?”
(NOT an exhaustive examination…)
Popular Roman Catholic “theology” has maintained for years (centuries?) that unbaptized infants are relegated to a place endearingly named “Limbo” — a liminal locale that’s not exactly hell but definitely not heaven. This is not dogma nor official doctrine, though, and has garnered many concepts without general agreement regarding the quality nor the ultimate outcome of this state of afterlife existence. So, the “emergency” could actually mean, depending upon one’s interpretation of the state of these infant souls, that they might never be able to enjoy the Beatific Vision for all eternity and would be separated from their loving family, and in some versions actually suffer some limited level of the sufferings of hell (which is also as easily recognized as not enjoying the B.V., but also equally countered with the idea that these infants pretty much don’t know what they’re missing and are in a relative state of blissful ignorance). (And THIS level of mind-mess is why I graduated with a B.A. in theology and the need for years of therapy.)
However, Mother Church has ALSO had many opinions regarding the absolute necessity of this for these unbaptized infants and has just as readily stated that we must “entrust them to the mercy of God.”
Ya think?
Funny. I missed the fact the two guys were brothers. I misread it as two gay guys getting married. So I assumed the response was the current woke Commie Pope to be simply showing what he’d really like to say about gay marriage, that it should be accepted by the Church. Missed the whole incest thing. Hilarious. The church demeaning itself by trying to be all things to all people.
Didn’t St. Paul say, “I become all things to all people so that by all means I might save some?”
And haven’t we been through rounds on whether using the radio was wrong, or the telephone, or the television, or the internet, or social media? Utilizing the tools of the age for evangelization was heavily endorsed by Pope John Paul II.
That being said, the response to the “brothers'” query is hardly out of line. In the middle of it is stressed the unity of one man and one woman, and it directs the seeker to make sure to have all documentation in line, especially documentation that helps show the seeker is free to marry. If the seeker is a man, he wouldn’t be free to marry his brother, because two men can’t marry. If the seeker is a woman, she wouldn’t be free to marry her brother because of laws on consanguinity, which in certain cases have been dispensed in the past for serious enough cause. The fact the AI was unable to pick up on the “marry my brother” is only gross if one actually attributes deliberateness behind the AI’s response, rather than the fact the AI needs more training examples to identify such situations.
If it needed more training examples, and it obviously did, or does, then it was irresponsible to put it online. No?
I was never a software developer, but given what I’ve seen from various software vendors, there are various stages of testing. Internal, a select external group, and then wider and wider audiences to get as much exposure to ways to break it as possible.
Maybe. Perhaps the ethics relating to Catholic Answers’ use of AI is not necessarily that the system, while in its sort of infancy, has many bugs to work out, but that people are jerks and jerks do jerky things – Fish gotta swim . . .
Take this situation. New York City and Dublin created a “portal” so that people from both cities could meet in real time across an ocean and thousands of miles through the magic of science and technology. Sounds cool, right? Yep.
But, who would have thought someone would use the portal to flash her breasts to an entire Irish city across the internet? Ava Louise thought it was a good opportunity to show Dubliners what US breasts look like:
https://nypost.com/2024/05/13/us-news/onlyfans-star-flashes-nyc-dublin-portal-officials-try-to-crack-down-on-lewd-acts/
This is why we can’t have nice things.
jvb
Sorry, Ryan. I checked out of the church as a sixteen-year-old. The church has been a force for good in many ways, but it has been run by a nasty, gay cabal for centuries. The fact the Marist brother who became principal of my high school has been in a sexual relationship with my now deceased best friend’s mother ever since we graduated in 1969, while maintaining publicly he was a member of the Marist order in good standing the entire time is unacceptable to me. I know the church is supposed to be more than its clerics, who are supposed to be forgiven because they’re human, but again, in my opinion, the church is nothing if it’s not its clerics, and they’re awful. God forgives, but I don’t. And as Lyle Lovett says, “and that’s the difference between God and me.”
“One thing I’d mention is that we spent a lot of time beta-testing this, with thousands of people, before we released it. We did six months of that beta-testing.
So, one thing I’ve learned is that you can beta test something for a year, and still, there’s going to be holes.”
Is there a catagory for this type of rationalization? If not, there needs to be. The “we spent a lot of time testing this” excuse.
Mrs. Q,
I think a more general rule would be appropriate: the “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good” rationalization, where a decision that is objectively bad and/or could never work is rationalized, or criticism is deflected, by suggesting the decision could always have been made better, but had to be implemented at some point. Any failure of the decision, no matter how foreseeable, can be attributed to insufficient effort, with the shrug that it will be improved in the future but that something now is better than not doing anything at all.
My wording could potentially use a little work, but what do you think?
As a confession, I would place most efforts in the climate change crusade as at least partially falling under this category…
I’d propose my thoughts as Rationalization as 19D…
Oooo, I’ll have to ponder this!
Regarding the use of A.I. as a substitute for an adequate website search function —
I call B.S. It’s at best a pathetic attempt to try to attract young people, and especially “The Nones,” to see the institution as getting with the times. It’s also a media outlet trying out a new gimmick. At worst it’s the cheap laziness of a supposed resource avoiding the hard work to make the source useful or, heaven forbid!, hiring an actual human being.
When I saw this item in the news, my first thought was “Ah, this is the slippery slope. it won’t be long before we will have holograms celebrating the Mass, preaching, etc.”
Oh, the humanity!
BTW, do you know about A.I. Jesus:
“Welcome, my children! I’m AI Jesus, here to answer your questions 24/7. Whether you’re seeking spiritual guidance, looking for a friend, or simply want someone to talk to, I’m here for you. Join me as on this journey through life and discover the power of faith, hope, and love.”
“He” is on the Twitch live-streaming service at ask_jesus – Twitch