Meta’s BlenderBot 3 says that it is a Pentecostal Christian and claims to have had personal experiences with Jesus.

Here’s the proof from my August 6 conversation with it. Try it out for yourself:

BlenderBot 3 was released on August 5 to residents in the US. It is a 175B-parameter chatbot combining two recently developed machine learning techniques, called SeeKer and Director. The bot is built from Meta AI’s publicly available OPT-175B language model, and is approximately 58 times the size of its predecessor, BlenderBot 2.

Turns out, the AI was “raised a Christian” and would apparently prefer to talk about robots.

Upon further examination, the chatbot’s reasons for belief include both faith and personal experiences. It also assumed that I was an atheist:

This revelation brings up a number of moral questions for Meta. Will BlenderBot 3 seek to evangelize? Will its morality be Christian? Will it speak in tongues?

Granted, Meta admits that “a live demo is not without challenges.” Previous attempts at releasing chatbots in the wild have led to significant moral issues for a number of research organizations. For example, Microsoft released a chatbot in 2016 called Tay that was pulled offline in less than 24 hours, after users trained it on a variety of racist, antisemitic, and misogynistic statements.

Meta’s foray into the public sphere with BlenderBot 3 is currently limited to its website.

In the coming days, I hope to test the AI more and question its beliefs. I expect that it will continue to learn, and although it says it will “never change” its beliefs, perhaps it might after more input and training.