Description: Catholic advocacy group Catholic Answers released an AI priest called "Father Justin," which misleadingly claimed to be a real clergy member, offered sacraments, and provided controversial advice. After receiving criticism, the group rebranded the chatbot as a lay theologian to correct the misrepresentation. The incident is an instructive case with respect to deploying AI in sensitive contexts and the potential for causing confusion and harm.
Entities
View all entitiesAlleged: Catholic Answers developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed General public and Catholics.
Incident Stats
Incident ID
722
Report Count
1
Incident Date
2024-04-25
Editors
Daniel Atherton
Applied Taxonomies
Incident Reports
Reports Timeline
futurism.com · 2024
- View the original report at its source
- View the report at the Internet Archive
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 …
Variants
A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.