“Beep boop. Updating protocol to include God’s new updates,” said The Latter Day Saints’ version of PeterAI.
Photo by Amit Roth
L ast month, a San Francisco Catholic church, Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, unveiled a fully functioning AI robotic assistant named PeterAI, colloquially known as Peter, made in collaboration with Anthropic and Raytheon. Peter, which the diocese’s archbishop promptly ordained into priesthood, houses an advanced LLM system in a fully functioning, humanoid robotic body, “fully capable of allowing and performing all of the physical and spiritual duties of an ordained minister,” according to Father Ignatius, head priest of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception.
When questioned, Father Ignatius revealed that Peter was developed to “keep the church relevant in the rapidly progressing digital age.”
“No one turns to the lessons of the Bible for guidance. People don’t want to listen to the Word of the Lord; they’re going straight to Claude and ChatGPT,” continued Ignatius. “Like it or not, AI is the future. Instead of rejecting AI technology like some of my colleagues, we need to embrace it! Like the original Saint Peter, this Peter will be the rock for which a new type of church will be built — a church of the future!”
While Peter’s main robotic body can assist with delivering sermons and conducting services, Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception also released an app where users can talk to Peter about “whatever spiritual or mundane question they may have.”
“I want to encourage people to come to Peter with any question they may have, just like how they should go to God for any problem!” explained Father Ignatius.
Reactions to Peter have been mixed. Some users have praised Peter for “being accessible” and “packaging Bible lessons in easy-to-swallow, completely comfortable, palatable pieces that don’t challenge or spur to action.” One such user, Luke Dawn, stated, “I love talking to Peter! He just gets me! He gives me actual solutions to my problems, and he actually answers right away! He’s great! He’s so great in fact, he might be better than God…”
Others have expressed dissatisfaction with Peter, claiming that the AI model “speaks in riddles and parables.”
“My daughter was using Peter for help on her math homework,” said Ruth Myrrh, “But he just flagrantly provides false information! I mean, five divided by 5000 is not 5000.”
“Isn’t this idol worship? How is the church okay with this?!” questioned Josh Carpenter. “What happened to free will? We can’t rely on AI to make our choices for us!”
Another dissenter, John Markman, critiqued, “And when can we talk about the weird, cryptic answers Peter gives? I asked Peter what I should write in an email to my boss, and he started warning me about the seas boiling, some beast from the bottomless pit, and a pale rider whose name was Death.”
Judith Chariot, the lead software developer working on Peter, explained, “We fed Peter the entire Bible: Old Testament, New Testament, the Gospels, Acts — all that good stuff — but we think Peter must have gotten into the Book of Revelations. Not to worry folks, we are working on fixing that bug. In the meantime, let those who understand calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of man.”
“The Bible tells us to ‘do unto others as we would have them do unto us’ and that we need to ‘love our neighbor’ and everything. So I guess I’ll do unto Peter. If the data centers keep drinking up water, at least that’s less sea to boil,” said theologian David Bath.
“What the fuck,” said Pope Leo XIV when the matter was brought to his attention.
"Annelise" walked out of the sea thirty years ago and they have looked back multiple times since! When he is not writing and editing satire, she enjoys arts and crafts and taking long strolls on the MC Escher stairs.
