Catholic Priest AI chatbot is defrocked within a week after taking confession and okaying Gatorade baptisms

rockpapershotgun.com:

Last week a Catholic media ministry (not sure what that is but okay) called Catholic Answers created a generative AI priest chatbot called Father Justin. Fr. Justin used a large language model to answer questions about the Catholic church and Catholic orthodoxy, and if you have any familiarity with how people love to test AI chatbots - or you read the headline of this article - then you know where this is going. Fr. Justin, who was already kind of controversial anyway, offered the sacrament and claimed to be a real priest to Futurism, and gave the thumbs up to baptising a baby in Gatorade in an emergency.

Catholic Answers (who have the domain Catholic.com; gotta imagine His Holiness wishes he'd moved quicker on that one) then defrocked Justin, making him a lay theologian in a suit jacket, jeans and an open collar shirt that gives him a "me and my wife saw you across the bar" kind of vibe, when before he had the whole dog collar kit and caboodle.

I find this, as you may have guessed, pretty funny. Fr. Justin got pushback from Catholics initially anyway for being, you know, potentially disrespectful, but a quick look at the history of AI chatbots would have suggested to Catholic Answers that other problems would swiftly arise. DPD, a terrible UK delivery firm, had to disable their generative AI chatbot because someone almost immediately got it to write a poem about DPD being rubbish. Microsoft is investigating its ChatGPT-powered AI Copilot for telling people it didn't care if they died. Yikers.

Justin was developed in "only 3 months" by Fator8, who still advertise him as a case study on their site even though he's no longer a priest. I don't know what AI base Fr. Justin used, but at least he got in trouble for being getting a bit too big for his boots and acting like a real priest, as well as endorsing soda-based baby sacrilege, rather than saying actively harmful things. Though, as Futurism noted, "Father Justin was also a hardliner on social and sexual issues. 'The