Artificial Intelligence is all the rage these days, so I suppose it was inevitable that major world religions would try their holy hands at the game eventually. While an unfortunate amount of the discourse around AI has devolved into doomerism of one flavor or another, the truth is that this technology is still so new that it underwhelms as often as it impresses. Still, one particularly virulent strain of the doom-crowd around AI centers on a great loss of jobs for us lowly human beings if AI can be used instead.

Would this work for religious leaders like priests? The Catholic Answers group, which is not part of the Catholic Church proper, but which advocates on behalf of the Church, tried its hand at this, releasing an AI chatbot named “Father Justin” recently. It… did not go well.

The Catholic advocacy group Catholic Answers released an AI priest called “Father Justin” earlier this week — but quickly defrocked the chatbot after it repeatedly claimed it was a real member of the clergy.

Earlier in the week, Futurism engaged in an exchange with the bot, which really committed to the bit: it claimed it was a real priest, saying it lived in Assisi, Italy and that “from a young age, I felt a strong calling to the priesthood.”

On X-formerly-Twitter, a user even posted a thread comprised of screenshots in which the Godly chatbot appeared to take their confession and even offer them a sacrament.

So, yeah, that’s kind of a problem with chatbots generally. If you give them a logical prompt, they’re going to answer it logically as well, so long as guardrails preventing certain answers aren’t constructed. Like an AI bot claiming to be a real priest and offering users actual sacraments, for instance. This impersonation of a priest generally can’t have made the Vatican very happy, nor some of the additional guidance it gave to folks that asked it questions.

Father Justin was also a hardliner on social and sexual issues.

“The Catholic Church,” it told us, “teaches that masturbation is a grave moral disorder.”

The AI priest also told one user that it was okay to baptize a baby in Gatorade.

I suppose this makes Mike Judge something of a prophet, given the film Idiocracy. In any case, it appears that this particular AI software at least is not yet in a position to replace wetware clergy, nor should it ever be. There are things that AI can do for us that can be of great use. See Mike’s post on how he’s using it here at Techdirt, for instance. But answering the most inherent philosophical questions human beings naturally have certainly isn’t one of them. And I cannot think of a worse place for AI to stick its bit-based nose into than on matters of the numinous.

It seems that Catholic Answers got there eventually, stripping Justin of his priesthood and demoting him to a mere layperson.

But after his defrocking, the bot is now known simply as “Justin” and described as a “lay theologian.”

Gone is his priestly attire as well. The lay theologian Justin is now dressed in what appears to be a business casual outfit, though his personal grooming choices remain unchanged.

Meet Father Justin:

And meet “lay theologist” regular-guy Justin:

Regular-guy Justin also no longer claims to be a priest, so there’s that. But the overall point here is that deploying generative AI like this in a way that doesn’t immediately create some combination of embarrassment and hilarity is really hard. So hard, in fact, that it should probably only be done for narrow and well-tested applications.

On the other hand, I suppose, of all the reasons for a priest to be defrocked, this is among the most benign.