What Happens When You Ask AI About God?

Host Jason Michael Perry sits down with Dr. Heather Miller Rubens, executive director and Roman Catholic scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies (ICJS), to discuss what happens when people bring their biggest questions about God to a chatbot, and who is checking the answers.

Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, on safeguarding the human person in the age of AI, puts the technology squarely on the church’s agenda. Jason and Heather unpack what it says about warfare, creativity, and the global poor, and what it meant for an Anthropic co-founder to speak alongside its release. They then get into the ICJS Interfaith AI Benchmark, a test being built with data scientists at Johns Hopkins, drawn from the anonymous questions future clergy are too embarrassed to ask out loud, to see how AI models handle questions across religious differences. They also cover research on whether AI avoids or favors certain religions, a Bay Area pastor who built a digital twin of himself, why a 2 a.m. chat with a bot isn’t protected the way a conversation with clergy is, and whether these tools can make us better neighbors.

Podcast Notes & Links

• ICJS (Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies)
• ICJS Interfaith AI Benchmark
• Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas (on Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence)
• Coverage of Chris Olah (Anthropic) speaking at the encyclical’s release
• Catholic Answers’ “Father Justin” chatbot, now “Just Justin”
• Consortium for Faith and Ethics in AI, with the Baylor, BYU, Notre Dame, and Yeshiva studies on “omissive bias” and “conversion bias”
• New York Times piece on the Bay Area pastor’s digital twin
• Related episode: the grief and AI conversation w/ Jessica Daniel, Peace in Perspective

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Credits 

Thanks to the team at WYPR, our producer Sam Bermas-Dawes, and Myrna Martinez, Head of Operations and Marketing at PerryLabs.