Episcopal Church launches AI chatbot ‘AskCathy’

Michie said:

(I hope it okay to post this here).

An artificial intelligence chatbot meant to answer questions about The Episcopal Church called “AskCathy” was launched via a collaboration with a ministry group and a research organization.

Short for “Churchy Answers That Help You,” AskCathy was given a soft launch in June after being developed by the Toronto United Church Council’s Innovative Ministry Center and the TryTank Research Institute at Virginia Theological Seminary.

The Rev. Lorenzo Lebrija, executive director at TryTank Research, told The Christian Post that the goal of AskCathy was “to create a bot that could be accessed at any time from anywhere to provide basic answers about The Episcopal Church.”

Continued below.

Episcopal Church launches AI chatbot ‘AskCathy’

An artificial intelligence chatbot meant to answer questions about The Episcopal Church called AskCathy was launched via a collaboration with a ministry group and a research organization

www.christianpost.com

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I don't need any AI, cos I already run AI on my computer, and mine is private.

Michie said:

(I hope it okay to post this here).

An artificial intelligence chatbot meant to answer questions about The Episcopal Church called “AskCathy” was launched via a collaboration with a ministry group and a research organization.

Short for “Churchy Answers That Help You,” AskCathy was given a soft launch in June after being developed by the Toronto United Church Council’s Innovative Ministry Center and the TryTank Research Institute at Virginia Theological Seminary.

The Rev. Lorenzo Lebrija, executive director at TryTank Research, told The Christian Post that the goal of AskCathy was “to create a bot that could be accessed at any time from anywhere to provide basic answers about The Episcopal Church.”

Continued below.

Episcopal Church launches AI chatbot ‘AskCathy’

An artificial intelligence chatbot meant to answer questions about The Episcopal Church called AskCathy was launched via a collaboration with a ministry group and a research organization

www.christianpost.com

Click to expand...

What could go wrong? It could give bishop Sponge answers or Gene Robinson answers or, more probably answers that say it's entirely up to you.

Can't see how that would be better than speaking to a real live human, even if you have to wait until business hours to do it.

RileyG said:

It's my understanding that the Episcopal Church in the United States is the most liberal of the Anglican Communion?

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That is probably fair.

RileyG said:

Even the Church of England is considered "liberal" compared to some Anglicans throughout the continent of Africa?

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Not just Africa, by any means. But yes.

RileyG said:

So, no single Church can truly represent Anglicanism as a whole?

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There are supposed to be some basic fundamentals that we all have in common.

RileyG said:

Anglicanism is more based on province and a shared theology?

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I'm not sure I'd agree with that. I would say - and you'll probably get a diversity of views here, so I'm by no means suggesting that I am giving "the" definitive Anglican answer - that it is shared on common heritage, shared fundamentals and ongoing shared life. I can be an Anglican in (a more liberal part of) Australia, and still be just as Anglican as an Anglican in Sydney, or a conservative diocese in Asia, or a "liberal" Episcopalian in America, or Anglicans dealing with very different questions as they strive to live authentically Christian lives in majority-Muslim countries. We choose to walk together.

Paidiske said:

Can't see how that would be better than speaking to a real live human, even if you have to wait until business hours to do it.

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Indeed, I find this a bit of a gimmick.

Now, that being said I myself have found a lot of uses related to programming, translation and research for the new LLMs like chatGPT and Grok and various self-hosted systems such as those used by our friend @alexb24*

Basically what the Episcopal Church has is just a virtual agent system of the sort that have been used on websites of various businesses for years, albeit smarter since it is presumably powered by an LLM AI rather than the more rudimentary bots of yesteryear.

One of the first, and most universally disliked, of these systems was Clippy, the famously annoying animated paperclip that was supposed to provide users with helpful assistance with older versions of Microsoft Office, but which was really just fantastically annoying. I myself hated everything about Clippy - he would interrupt my work to make unwelcome suggestions, fail to find useful answers from the built-in help situation, and had a fabulously annoying name and animation and character design. He was more annoying than some of the most annoying animated shows from my youth, which was not exactly a golden age for animation, given the long run of mediocre animated movies Disney produced during my childhood, during the dark years of the 70s after Walt and Roy had reposed and those projects launched while Walt was alive were completed, and no one seemed to have any idea about what to do next, leading to such animated non-classics like The Great Mouse Detective and The Black Cauldron, so that by the time their quality improved with The Little Mermaid et cetera, I felt too old to enjoy it.

But I would trade any of those mediocre early 80s Disney films for Clippy, even The Black Hole with its psychotic villain and obnoxious R2-D2 ripoff floaty robot thingies.

*Being an open source guy I think is the best approach - I am planning a high end cluster for training my own AI system soon, which I think I might name SAL, after Dr. Chandra’s computer and the “sister” of HAL 9000 in 2010: Odyssey Two (I quite like that film; when I first saw it I was disappointed because obviously it was not as good as 2001, but there is no way it could have been - evaluated on its own merits I think it was one of the best SF films of the 1980s and probably the best SF space film outside of the action franchises like Star Wars, Star Trek and Aliens - Blade Runner fans should note that category does not extend to Blade Runner, which referenced space travel but was not primarily about space exploration, but was rather proto-cyberpunk dystopia.

I have played with askCathy a bit. One nice thing is that it gives the references that it is using for information. For answers to a lot of basic questions about the church it often cites Walk in Love: Episcopal Beliefs & Practices.

For someone like me who will likely move to the Episcopal Church I talk with a priest about the important stuff, but the ai can be helpful at getting an idea about some of the much less important facts about the church. Of course I could just read that book it cites all the time…

When will we ever learn. Remember those helpful shortcuts they put in place when you phoned companies to make things faster? Now you're pounding buttons or screaming in frustration to reach a human.

Change happens in phases. They debuted an A.I. sermon during the pandemic and gauged reception through the comments. Now we have Cathy answering questions and before you know it you'll have other help.

You're playing with fire on many levels. That's a job a human could have had but they gave it to a machine they don't have to pay. They'll find other ways to cut costs if you aren't careful and that's the goal.

This is nothing more than a worm on a hook devised to reel you in and get you comfortable with the technology. But the pastor is the plan. I would never let this in a church. The more you remove the human element the less control you have.

~bella

RileyG said:

That’s a great book I read on the kindle app. Very informative and well written.

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I might get a copy. I do know that ai lies some fraction of the time anyway, but I was mostly just using it for fun.

bèlla said:

You're playing with fire on many levels. That's a job a human could have had but they gave it to a machine they don't have to pay. They'll find other ways to cut costs if you aren't careful and that's the goal.

This is nothing more than a worm on a hook devised to reel you in and get you comfortable with the technology. But the pastor is the plan. I would never let this in a church. The more you remove the human element the less control you have.

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As someone in ministry, this is not really my concern. Ministry is not a "job," and if there are ways that we can be more effective in meeting people's needs at lower cost, that's not necessarily a bad thing, especially in places where there is not the money to pay someone whether this is in place or not.

But AI is not a person, indwelt by the Holy Spirit. It does not have the gifts given to real people to be and build up the church. It might become very smart, but it will not be able to function in the same way. It cannot love, cannot rejoice, is ultimately faithful only to its programming, rather than to God.

Paidiske said:

Can't see how that would be better than speaking to a real live human, even if you have to wait until business hours to do it.

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The thing humans can do that AI will not be able to do is just listen, like Jobs friends before they opened their mouths and started talking.

Paidiske said:

As someone in ministry, this is not really my concern. Ministry is not a "job," and if there are ways that we can be more effective in meeting people's needs at lower cost, that's not necessarily a bad thing, especially in places where there is not the money to pay someone whether this is in place or not.

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Indeed, ministry is a calling, a vocation. Sometimes I use shop terminology with regards to it, for example, praising clergy for their professionalism (which usually means skillful pastoral care and admirable qualities), or mentioning those denominations I personally would feel comfortable “working for”, but this should be understood as pure idiosyncratic rhetoric on my part, motivated by a certain cheerfulness I have about the work.

But AI is not a person, indwelt by the Holy Spirit. It does not have the gifts given to real people to be and build up the church. It might become very smart, but it will not be able to function in the same way. It cannot love, cannot rejoice, is ultimately faithful only to its programming, rather than to God.

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AI cannot do what clergy do in terms of caring for the faithful - I don’t think it could even if we had fully self-aware general AI like, say, C-3PO of Star Wars or Lt. Cdr. Data of Star Trek, the Next Generation, or what seems more likely to some, something like the sinister AIs of much of SF (among others, these include but are not limited to HAL-9000, Colossus and Guardian from the Colossus: The Forbin Project, the city computer in Logan’s Run, Alpha 60 from Alphaville, the Landru and M-5 computers and the Nomad space probe from the original Star Trek, the Terminator, or Agent Smith or the Architect or the other machine intelligence from The Matrix films. Part of the problem is because the inner workings of these hypothetical superintelligent AIs are black boxes, it becomes impossible to know how they would feel about computers, whether or not they have a soul would be a philosophical debate, and they would have the potential to be extremely dangerous, able to defeat the safety and alignment measures taken with current AI.

Additionally it seems clear that ministry of all forms should be done by humans and angels, in service to God, with the ministry of the latter normally invisible.