Jerzy Gołuchowski, Aleksandra Pethe, Dorota Marquardt

The detabooing of religious content in dialogues with a chatbot

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The potential of AI has also been recognized by the Catholic Church in relation to the use of new technologies in religious life, with full awareness of the need for moderation, especially when using AI in humanistic, religious, and spiritual domains. This raises the question of how this tool can be used by both clergy and the faithful in their spiritual lives. The proposed exploratory research will analyze the issue of detabuizing religious content in human-chatbot dialogues, where the chatbot is profiled as a Catholic clergyman. The research question is: Do people want to discuss religious and spiritual topics with AI? What topics do they address? Are there taboo subjects among them (social, spiritual, etc.)? The analysis of dialogues will be supported by in-depth interviews with study participants to gain insights into issues such as which problems respondents find easier to discuss with AI than with a clergyman (priest), and why.