Elegy for "Fr. Justin"...maybe we shouldn't have AI Apologists

“Fr. Justin,” the AI chatbot launched on April 23 “for educational and entertainment purposes” by apologetics website catholic.com — better known as “Catholic Answers” —  found himself laicized only a few days later, after “he” (this transhumanism thing is as difficult on pronouns as transgenderism) went rogue in some of his responses to submitted questions. For a few days, the defrocked former AI priest continued to appear on the site as just “Justin,” his Roman collar replaced by a sports jacket, his uncanny valley creepiness otherwise unchanged. This evening (4/28), when I stopped by to check on Justin’s wellbeing -- it must be rough being born, receiving fake Holy Orders, and being defrocked all in one week -- Justin had been replaced by “page not found.”

RIP, Justin. We hardly knew ye.

In my day job, Justin would be what we call a “synthetic performer,” which is just as good a disturbing moniker as any we’d choose to apply to the half-human, half-animated creatures that populate our screens when in the AI arena (looking at you, Justin and de-aged Harrison Ford in IJ5!). And while Catholic Answers is a terrific website filled with a voluminous amount of information about the Catholic faith, and while it’s understandable that in the never-ending fight for attention on the internet they’d try to do something bold and new, it’s very difficult to understand why they thought this was a worthy project even before the chatbot-formerly-known-as-Justin came roaring out of the gate claiming that he could perform the Sacrament of Reconciliation and offer absolution.

Maybe…just maybe…Catholic apologetics isn’t the place to deploy AI for education and entertainment.

As the world races to blur or even erase distinctions between humanity and technology with the ultimate goal of “successfully” transcending our species (somebody still needs to explain to me how, exactly, becoming some kind of Godless techno-mutant is a success and not the plot of a Croenenberg movie), perhaps Catholic apologists should be some of the people hitting the brakes the very hardest, especially when it comes to delegating the explanation and defense of the tenets of the faith to an AI chatbot.

The Catholic Church owes its very existence to the direct relationship between humans and their Creator. It’s why Jesus lived, died, and rose from the dead. It’s what every word of the Catechism is about. I believe Sr. Margaret Mary (yep, real name) taught us that an eternal relationship with our Creator is the very goal of a Catholic life. So, I’d posit that inserting a fully synthetic performer between humans seeking answers regarding faith and their Creator at this inflection point in human history is taking exactly the wrong path.

An AI apologist – a digital ghost without a soul or the capacity for faith that compels us toward the ineffable – learns through the impersonal lens of inputs and data scrapes, not through study, prayer, and discernment. Certainly, there could be a place for an apologist to utilize AI in her work: in research, in gathering information, in formulating her defense of a given aspect of the faith – trawling through 2000 years of history, documentation, and study is the kind of thing computers are perfectly suited to, and AI can be great at synthesizing the information.

But, as a Church, we stand for the proposition that for reasons beyond our comprehension (especially if you’re looking at what’s going on at Ivy League campuses right now) humans, both as a collective and individually, are uniquely loved and uniquely special to their Creator, who desires are relationship with each one of us messed-up soul-bags that will last FOREVER.  Perhaps, then, when someone reaches out with a question about faith because they are searching for God, the least we can do is assure that the responder too is also created in His image and likeness.