bullish

They tried it, but it didn't go well: https://www.ncronline.org/news/ai-priest-sparks-more-backlash-belief

@TimothyJohnson5c16 Even if that has worked perfectly, the effort want driven by the Vatican and the step to getting it endorsed by the Vatican as doctrinally sound is IMO the real hurdle hear. The Catholic church is a very slow-moving organization and obviously quite conservative.

@Enlil yea but the point is they tried, with a barebones tech that overall works poorly unless you know what you are doing... chances are they try again by 2027, the real bet here is, there will be an AI model that works for their use case by then? :)

@Choms The article doesn't read to me though like this wasn't an official effort sanctioned by the Vatican but a effort by some Catholic nonprofit. But I'm not 100% certain I understand in detail what a "Catholic teaching apostolate" is and isn't.

@Enlil me neither tbh haha but regardless, definitely not like a deepfake priest, but I could see them releasing a natural language search engine at some point in the future, mostly if they can do that cost effective and not totally hallucinate

@Choms Yeah, I could see some Catholic organization so that. It being officially endorsed as doctrinally sound my the actual Catholic church itself is quite a different matter though, especially if we are referring to it as "PopeGPT" which implies a significant level of authoritative correctness on doctrinal matters.

@Enlil Paul wrote below it doesn't have to have magisterial authority and I'm guessing "PopeGPT" is a figure of speech, I'd say a NLAI engine which is officially released/hosted by the Catholic church (for example inside their APP) would meet the resolution criteria but please @PaulHan confirm

@Choms @PaulHan What level of endorsement and authority this thing is supposed to have really seems to be the key issue here.

@Choms @Enlil Choms is correct, PopeGPT is a figure of speech. (sorry if confusing!!)

• it’s trained and released through official church channels using their own funds.

• Doctrinally sound is not an official authority level like magisterial authority, but to capture that such a NLAI engine is released specifically as a reliable spiritual tool for Catholic believers and not as a curiosity.

Yeah Catholic Answers is highly admired among Catholics but it’s just a nonprofit. So ppl can point to it as having good answers but if they get something wrong no warranty implied. It’s a pretty big jump to get to the official Church releasing something similar

to be clear PopeGPT doesn’t have to have magisterial authority (like what priests and the Pope has)

I hope this will happen and be publicly accessible