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Two brothers from Texas are bridging the gap between the Bible and artificial intelligence (AI), creating a new platform designed to give families a safe alternative to Silicon Valley’s secular chatbots.
Peter and Thomas Cooney created Acutis AI, a faith-based AI chatbot grounded in 2,000 years of Catholic teaching. The pair said the idea arose when they began questioning the source of modern chatbots’ moral frameworks, turning to their Catholic faith and its centuries of scholarly work on ethics as the answer.
“When we were using a lot of these mainstream platforms, we really realized that you couldn’t trace the moral framework back to what it really was,” Thomas Cooney said Saturday on “Fox & Friends Weekend.”
“Growing up in a Catholic family, we kind of just realized that the best place to get [morals] is not from some tech CEO or even some ethics team,” he added.
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Acutis AI is named after the first millennial saint, Blessed Carlo Acutis, who died at age 15. He was nicknamed “God’s Influencer” for his work creating a website to document Eucharistic miracles.
Peter Cooney said the goal is to ensure families have a safe place in the AI sphere to receive moral responses and advice.
“The biggest danger is for kids and teenagers who can become addicted to these big platforms, these AI chatbots. And they’re feeding them incorrect information,” Peter said.
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Acutis AI includes several features for parents designed to ensure their children’s safety online. The platform offers tools like time limits, parental monitoring and restricted use during user-designated homework hours.
“We put parental controls so parents can see exactly what their kids are saying. They can get alerted if their kids ask about dangerous topics,” Peter said.
“We’ll make sure that it’s always answering through Catholic perspectives, no matter what the question is about.”
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The website also notes that when young people ask difficult questions, the AI is trained to respond with moral grounding rather than trying to keep the user “addicted” to the chat.
The creation of Acutis AI comes as many members of Gen Z find their way back to religion. A Gallup poll released Wednesday found that 42% of men under 30 said religion is “very important” to them, a 14% increase from 2023.
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