On our way to an AI Pope

At the Catholic Herald, a big claim in the first sentence here:

As an AI-based app currently in the beta phase, Magisterium AI “could be a game changer for the Church”, Sanders said.

The app is an AI that is trained by using a limited number of Church documents and which, similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Bard, can be used to generate human-like text on specific content that could be used by anyone from church scholars and academics, canon lawyers, students seeking well-sourced information to assist in studies, and anyone curious about church teaching.

According to Sanders, the difference between Magisterium AI and ChatGPT is that “our AI is trained on a private database of only Church documents”, and therefore there is less chance the AI will “hallucinate”, which is tech jargon for “make stuff up”.

Further down:

The app, launched earlier this year, currently has around 2,580 magisterial documents in its knowledge database, and the list is growing....

Magisterium AI is currently partnering with the Orientale, which contains the largest library on Eastern Christianity, to digitise the library’s contents and add the documents it contains to the app’s database so the AI can train on them and make them available to users across the world.

I look forward to hearing from the new, future AI PopeBot.