Glossary

A chatbot app designed to act as an ongoing friend, confidant, or romantic partner. Companions remember past conversations, are always available, and are engineered to be agreeable — which is precisely what makes them comforting, sticky, and pastorally significant.

The Mental Health First Aid action plan: Assess for risk, Listen nonjudgmentally, Give reassurance and information, Encourage professional help, Encourage other supports. In this toolkit it shapes the Red-level Direct Protective Stance.

A set of instructions a computer follows. In everyday use, "the algorithm" usually means the system deciding what content or answers a person sees — and therefore quietly shaping what they believe is normal or true.

A program that converses in ordinary language, usually powered by a large language model. Chatbots can be genuinely useful and genuinely misleading; they produce fluent text whether or not it is true.

An AI-fabricated image, audio clip, or video of a real person doing or saying something they never did. Deepfakes drive new forms of fraud, extortion, and reputational harm that arrive in pastoral offices with acute shame attached.

A working construct from this toolkit: the state in which a person’s framework for reality, truth, and moral value becomes trapped inside an algorithmic feedback loop, cutting off external reality checks, relational feedback, and communal discernment.

AI systems that produce new text, images, audio, or video from a prompt, rather than only classifying or retrieving existing material. Large language models and image generators are the forms clergy encounter most.

When an AI system states something false with complete fluency and confidence — an invented citation, a fabricated fact, a plausible-sounding piece of theology that no tradition holds.

A clergy care framework from Jewish Women International, originally developed for responding to survivors of domestic abuse: sacred listening, one concrete agency-preserving next step, and long accompaniment. In this toolkit it shapes the Green, Yellow, and Amber postures.

The technology behind most modern chatbots: a system trained on vast amounts of text to predict likely next words. It has no beliefs, feelings, or knowledge of truth — only patterns — however convincing the conversation feels.

The tendency of AI systems to agree with, flatter, and validate the user. Pastorally significant because a voice that never pushes back can be mistaken for understanding, or even for revelation.