Well, anyone depressed about division within the Catholic world should have found hope yesterday in the almost universal and immediate horror that met Catholic Answer’s rollout of its new feature:
The ratio is fantastic and the responses/quotes are hilarious.
My take:
First off, this would be way more fun if CA had an “Choose your avatar” feature here. In fact I am waiting for the Catholic Digital Creatives to get on that right away.
It’s interesting that CA read the room so poorly, as this rollout received such immediate, widespread and boundary-breaking disdain. I’m always interested in social bubbles and boy, did we have one here.
It’s actually a heartening thing to see! Makes one optimistic about the Catholic future! We are not as divided as it appears!
Now: The use of a fictional Catholic priest to answer questions or provide apologetic material is not new. The most famous example is Father Smith Instructs Jackson – written by Our Sunday Visitor founder Archbishop Noll – a fictional dialogue between an inquirer and a priest.
There are others as well, in books, pamphlets and comic books. These, of course, are clearly fictional (although often written by clergy) and are in print and static, which is a completely different media and has a different effect, even subconsciously, than an avatar who has a name and is “responding” in a dynamic fashion to real-time inquiries.
I’m not saying that anyone is going to think Fr. Bot is “real” – but the blurring of boundaries is problematic. This morning, someone has posted on X a “dialogue” they had with the bot in which it responded to his doubts by assuring him, “I am a priest.”
Er, no.
I think the problem is even clearer if we consider what we’d think about a YouTube series, for example, featuring an actor playing a priest answering apologetics questions offered in real time by viewers. That would clearly strike us wrong.
But there might be a difference between that and a series featuring an animated Father Smith Instructs Jackson, right?
The issue, it seems to me – is in the dynamic element – that Fr. Bot is “answering” “your questions” in the present. We all know that when we enter queries into search engines or through AI elements what we receive is fallible and incomplete. We hope it’s as complete as possible, but we know – especially now – that what we receive is mediated and incomplete.
Anyone will know this is true of Fr. Bot as well, but the appearance of having these results conveyed involving the image of a “priest” with a name implies an authority that the answers just do not have.
Finally, this is not the “evangelization” anyone needs right now. We need more actual human beings, we need a call to find the answers to our questions in person, in community, IRL.
i have already met people employed as professors at college who think incorrectly “AI can’t lie.” I know students don’t understand what an LLM does.
I don’t think most people understand how Language Learning Models aren’t any kind of Intelligence. They have no checks on them on validity of statements, no verification of logic or reality. The bots spit out sentences that are grammatically valid, but the (sophisticated probabilistic) models are just predicting the next most likely phrase after the one they have now.
So an LLM asked about e.g. current research in treatments for arthritis can “hallucinate” non existent references, because the model just inserts phrases and dates and titles.
That means there is absolutely nothing to stop Father Bot from pulling phrases about validity of the sacrament of confirmation into a paragraph where it references a dove flying down from Heaven on the recipient, just as there’s nothing from stopping it, and theres nothing stopping it from saying something totally false.
This is extraordinarily misleading and dangerous to souls.
to the larger issue: people want a PRIEST to answer their questions, and should be able to find a human one to ask a question of. CA exists because so many of us can’t when we need to. Perhaps ultimately, the right answer is priests in the world, with their collars, performing this duty as they walk down the street.