One feature of the app is that all scripture is verified and what’s show to the user doesn’t come from the LLM at all and instead a trusted source.
I think exploring scripture this way does not alleviate you from struggling to learn and apply it. It hasn’t for me.
But there are ways to control and constrain the LLMs and what the user is presented with.
These are all top of mind for me and why I felt there could be a better option than asking ChatGPT directly.
I think it depends, Catholics wouldn't be able to use this because the Magisterium is the ultimate authority on interpreting Scripture, so the personal interpretation isn't really needed. This is not to say that Catholics don't read the Bible, they are encouraged to do so since it deepens their faith
On the other hand, for Protestant it varies, the High Church denominations are closer to Catholics (though none of them accept the Magisterium) in terms of scripture interpretation, but the Low Church ones (like Baptists or Non-Denominational ) are more open to personal interpenetration.
Disclaimer: I'm a Catholic, so if I made a mistake here fellow Protestants, please correct me.
What's difficult and doesn't have to be with philosophy/ spirituality is to find relevant bits off situation, theme etc.
This app does that very well, LLMs are good at entity recognition.
I'm on a team that develops a Bible study app, and we're all relatively content with how the basic models converse regarding scripture. Even as far back as GPT-4 was excellent. They occasionally have minor hallucinations (a dealbreaker for a production app), but they do an excellent job with theology and Bible scholarship, given reasonable guardrails.
I'll admit I'm coming from the perspective of "should we be implementing this?" It seems, on the surface, that a strong embedding-based verse retrieval covers the bases at a microfraction of the cost.
If you're interested, check out the development server where we're working on this. You navigate to the search (magnifying glass) and then hit "Meaning". Sorry for the confusing route; we're still deciding on back-end details and haven't focused on the front yet.
So it’s less about model choice and more about governance of scripture.
I will check out the link you sent for sure!
Anyways, impressive app! We haven't tackled such an ambitious project just for it being daunting.
flash is suitable only for a toy apps, not for production environments :)