I Built an AI Bible

the Catholic Bible of course

On the most hallowed day in the United States, tax day, I released the (first ever?) AI Bible, Catholic AI, even though I didn’t want to. Let me be clear, I did want to release it, I’ve been eager to do that since the beginning, what I didn’t want to do was build it. For practical reasons, competitive reasons, and quite frankly laziness, I had little to no desire to finish the project I started last year.

OpenAI announced the release of their revolutionary artificial intelligence, ChatGPT, on November 30. In December, they announced several more upgrades to the model to which I was finally enticed to do something with it. The best idea I had was to help deal with a problem that I had been having, sourcing Catholic commentary to help with my bible studies. 

I love reading the bible, I went to a Christian high school where my favorite subject was (you guessed it!) Bible class. Imagine my joy when I reverted to Catholicism and realized the bible actually had more books! Regardless, I was constantly buying newer and newer study bibles, and newer and newer digital commentaries. Commentaries like Aquinas’ Catena Aurea, his own commentaries on several of the gospels, or the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Now I know all these items are available for free, but have you tried reading the CCC on the Vatican website?

Protestants are definitely winning the UI war.

I figured I could fine-tune OpenAI’s ChatGPT and build a Catholic AI model. An AI model that knew all the teachings of the Church, all the commentaries of the Church Fathers and other Catholic theologians and philosophers. A model that can receive objections to the faith and respond with Catholic apologetics. A model dense in Catholic philosophy, theology, faith and moral teachings, layered upon which are several Catholic personalities like (you guessed it again!) St. Thomas Aquinas who could also communicate the teachings of the faith in a clear and understandable way.

I built it in a weekend.

On Dec 14th I made my first commit (tech lingo for saving code in a repository) for the project and on Dec 16th I pushed a commit with the message, “finished”. Now what I had finished was the core of the app, the Catholic AI model, what was left to do was build the usability of the app like registrations, logins, UI designs, etc. 

In the commit history of the repository you’ll see a gap between January and March. At this time I hadn’t necessarily given up on the idea, I had given up on thinking I was going to be the one who built it for the masses. I was also being lazy. Surely someone, ANYONE, was working on this incredibly obvious idea and it would be released by someone who already had a large church following (let’s be honest, protestants are better at tech) or perhaps the world-famous bible app would announce that they were integrating AI into their platform.

A month went by…two months….nothing, not even upcoming announcements.

Was everyone asleep at the wheel? No, worse. What happened was what always happens whenever you mix new tech and religious fuddy duddies. I might do a whole substack article about this, but basically, they use it once (if at all), explain everything that’s wrong with it and tell everyone else not to use it. I remember when a youth group leader told us not to use Facebook. Eventually though someone crosses over, realizes the water’s fine if you know how to swim, and then everyone else jumps in.

There may also be technical difficulties when building a Protestant AI model, like which protestantism to choose. Imagine asking Protestant AI about baptism? I think there will be several specific AI models like Baptist AI, Charismatic AI, or (my favorite) Non-Denominational AI, and they’ll all be marketed as Christian AI but I digress.

So after a couple months I decided to fire up VSCode (a code editor) again and at least throw my hat in the ring. I don’t doubt there will be more Christian AI models, but what I had forgotten was the reason why I started building it in the first place:

For Catholics, like me.

Catholic biblical commentary is rich in history and philosophy and theology, but severely lacking in digital media and digital access. If you search “Thomas Aquinas” in the world-famous bible app, what you’ll get back is “Did you mean: Christmas at Greystone.” This isn’t a complaint against them, they’re serving their users, this is a condemnation against us. However, there has been improvements, there are several more Catholic YouTube channels and public commentators, and perhaps now we’re first in on the new tech endeavor, Artificial Intelligence. 

I don’t know what will become of the app, I don’t know how many people will use it, how much money it’ll make, or even how successful it’ll be. But that’s not the point. The point is we have our foot in the door and ours is 2,000 years old.

As Mother Teresa said, we’re not called to be successful, we’re called to be faithful.

P.S. Check out the app!