Would you let an AI priest PREACH to you? Reverend launches chatbot to offer prayers and 'save time'

An Episcopal church has launched an AI chatbot that will give members prayers and religious texts at the touch of a button. 

AskCathy is intended to help the church's clergy get answers on Episcopalian and Anglican beliefs and help lay leaders 'save time in getting to an answer.' 

'As we built Cathy, we realized that the tool could do much more than we originally thought,' said Reverend Lorenzo Lebrija. 'They can chat with Cathy and find out about church canons or appropriate hymns and even creating a specific prayer for a very specific occasion,' he told The Christian Post.

The program is built using the 'latest version of ChatGPT,' he said. However, unlike ChatGPT, which pulls from the internet, AskCathy has a 'specific bookcase' that is filled with a 'thousand sources of Episcopalian/Anglican beliefs.' 

The Episcopal Church soft launched AskCathy, an AI chatbot, in June that will help its clergy get answers on the Episcopalian/Anglican beliefs. 'As we built Cathy, we realized that the tool could do much more than we originally thought,' Reverend Lorenzo Lebrija (pictured) said

Lebrija said he expects that the tool will be especially helpful for laity-led congregations by allowing lay leaders to ask Cathy what to do in different scenarios, such as the death of a family member. 

The move will prove controversial among churchgoers. A recent poll by the Barna Group found that less than 25 percent of those surveyed believed AI would be 'good' for the church. A whopping 51 percent thought it would not be. 

A separate survey by Gloo found that 54 per cent of ministry leaders were 'extremely concerned' about about the ethical and moral issues relating to the use of AI. 

However, Lebrija doesn't believe AskCathy will replace 'human interaction' and won't replace those leading the church. 

'To be clear, AI should never be used in place of people, and that is not the intent of Cathy. Cathy regularly encourages people to seek further, deeper advice from local clergy or spiritual guides,' Lebrija, who use to run an orchestra in Miami, said. 

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.' It's modeled off ChaptGPT, but it only pulls from a specific 'bookcase' of religious texts instead of the entire internet 

The goal of AskCathy is to 'create a bot that could be accessed at any time from anywhere to provide basic answers about The Episcopal Church.' 

'Ideally, Cathy is a tool that can allow us to grow deeper into the Episcopal faith,' he said. 

The chatbot was developed through the Toronto United Church Council’s Innovative Ministry Center and the TryTank Research Institute at Virginia Theological Seminary, where Lebrija is the chief innovation officer. 

'It has documents from the church-wide Episcopal Church (mainly through its website). It has books from Forward Movement and documents related to our General Convention. Whenever possible, it will also cite the source for the user to find out more,' the reverend said.

The Roman Catholic Church launched a similar chatbot called Magisterium AI in July 2023 that would also provide answers on its faith. 

Within weeks of its launch, it had around 180,000 users, Matthew Harvey Sanders, the CEO of Longbeard, who helped launch the chatbot, said in an interview. 

The Roman Catholic Church developed their chatbot after ChapGPT launched and they 'became aware that Catholics were using it to answer questions on church teachings.' 

'Given the system's high likelihood to hallucinate and its lack of transparency as to what documents it references in generating responses, we felt we had to act.'