How to build your own Talk To Jesus ‘A.I.’ at home

“Are You There, GodBot? It’s Me, Santi.” Santi Elijah Holley does a test-run on various autofill “A.I.” apps that purport to provide a virtual conversation with Jesus, God, various characters from the Bible, or even Satan.

The best part of that piece may be the disclaimer placed at the top by the editors of Religion Dispatches. I’m copying that here with its full linkiness intact:

That’s a good and true and wise warning about the problems, dangers, and shortcomings of these so-called “artificial intelligence” programs, which are basically just autofill algorithms programmed to talk like Clippy. The “conversational” aspect of these things is only slightly more impressive than chatting with ELIZA, and ELIZA is older than I am.

These apps also remind me of those old “random insult generators” we played with 20 years ago. There was one for Shakespeare and one for Martin Luther — two guys who had a flair for invective. Those bots made no claim to involve “artificial intelligence,” they just included long databases of delightful insults and provided examples to anybody who clicked the button.

Gussy that up with a little search-engine code to allow users to make a “conversational” inquiry rather than just clicking the “insult me” button, and then repackage the response so that it appears tailored to the inquiry and you’ve got these “Talk to Jesus” apps. The “Text With Jesus” app especially seems to work like that, just with a database of red-letter Bible verses instead of Shakespearean insults.

The laziness of that app’s structure may be its greatest virtue given that, based on Holley’s experience, when in doubt, it just regurgitates some variation of the Golden Rule and the greatest commandment.

I heartily endorse and share RD’s blanket contempt for “the use of ChatGPT or any other generative AI for any reason,” but among the many bad uses of this gimmicky tech, a chatbot that replies to almost every inquiry with “love your neighbor, that’s the whole of the law and the prophets” is probably the least bad version of this stuff.

If I were the one programming this thing’s biases, I’d make sure this was how “Text With Jesus” replied to every inquiry that tried to pin it down on any question of systematic or trinitarian theology. For example, I’d make sure that the only response it gave to any inquiry including the keywords homoousios or homoiousios was just “love your neighbor.” That wouldn’t be the answer they wanted, but it would be the answer they needed to get their heads and hearts back on track.

Heck, I’d make sure the thing responded to every form of every question with “love your neighbor.” Except, of course, for any form of the question “Who is my neighbor?” which would produce the response: “A certain man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho when he fell among thieves …”

Or maybe I’d have a bit more fun and program it to respond to any form of “But who is my neighbor?” by having “Jesus” say something like, “Whenever you ask me that it sounds like you’re asking who is NOT my neighbor, and you really don’t want to pull that weak nonsense with me.”

What dooms all of these apps is the fact that the people most likely to use such a thing have already been using similar technology and won’t see the need to replace it. If they want to ask “What would Jesus say?” they’ll just type some keywords into the search bar at Bible Gateway — or go old-school and use their analog concordance. They already know how to use that tech — how to artfully craft their “prompt” so as to ensure they get the answer they’re hoping to hear. That system works so well for them that I doubt they’ll ditch it for an updated interface with more high-tech-seeming bells and whistles.

After from concordance Christians using it to proof-text, the next biggest market for these apps will be people who are already half-way to Jerusalem Syndrome and who will be using this “tech” to push themselves off of that ledge. This seems like something these apps should anticipate and plan for: How will they handle it when their chatbot sends a customer a text saying “Hi, it’s Jesus” and the person responds “No, I’m Jesus!” Because that’s a thing that’s going to happen with these toys-posing-as-tools.

As you’ve already guessed from the image above, what Holley’s experience with these apps reminds me of the most is those origami “fortune-tellers” many of us learned to make and use in grade school. The lesson-plan site I snurched that image from talks about how learning to make these can teach young students both math and fine motor skills.

I’d add that it can also be a way to teach youngsters about the Forer Effect and the way we are all susceptible to being bamboozled by vague generalities and flattery.

In keeping with Religion Dispatch’s correct advice to avoid “generative A.I.” for any reason, let me suggest that all of these Talk To Jesus apps can — and should — be replaced with origami fortune-tellers. That image above provides instructions for how to make one. It’s easy, you just need a sheet of standard letter-sized paper, a pen, and eight “fortunes” to write in the blank spaces.

We could use “Love your neighbor” for all eight of them, but if you’re looking for a little more variety, maybe fill the other seven spaces with other ways of saying that same thing:

• “Do justice, love mercy, walk humbly with your God.”
• “Whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me.”
• “Do not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in Egypt.”
• “You cannot serve both God and money.”
• “Seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow.”
• “Loose the chains of injustice. Set the oppressed free and break every yoke.”
• “Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor.”

OK, now, pick a number.