To Bot or Not? Pros and Cons

Tomorrow's Next Week: February 3-7

The Pros and Cons of Christian Chatbots

The first article this week was a deep dive for me.

I’ve been building custom chatbots for organizations for a while now, and this was a good gut check. The writer Luke Plant makes a hard case against using them for Christian apologetics, but he doesn’t throw them out entirely.

Then I discovered, on the FaithTech Slack, members having a robust discussion about the article. Truth be told, it was a lot of talking past each other (and a little bit of soapy drama tbh). Nothing yet that you would call a systematic evaluation of Christian chatbots.

So I began to outline what I see as the pros and cons for Christian chatbots. Here’s what I came up with . . .

• Pro: Ease. Talking with a chatbot is easier than doing “the hard work of researching and finding good, reliable sources” about the Christian faith. That ease makes it more likely that more people will ask and explore their faith questions, rather than giving up.

• Con: Falsehoods. The information chatbot users get will be an “average” of the content that’s in the dataset. It might be better information than the worst, but will also be worse than the best information. That said, there is no such thing as an “average” truth. Truth isn’t the “average” probability from a collection of works.