What are some tips for using Hope the Chatbot effectively?
For the web version:
We aim to make the interface easy and intuitive. Pressing Enter is equivalent to clicking the Send button. So if you want to put blank lines or new paragraphs in your message, you can do that using Shift+Enter in many systems. But for best results, keeping your messages brief is usually advisable.
There are two buttons at the bottom. The New Topic button is good to click when you are shifting gears in the conversation and want the chatbot to focus on something new, rather than including your whole past conversation (as is the norm) in its efforts to come up with what it will say next.
The Forget Me button is a bit more dramatic – it will tell the chatbot to treat you as a new user completely, even forgetting your first name if you shared that already.
For the Facebook version:
If you send a message saying simply “New Topic” or “Forget Me” it will have the same effect as the buttons do on the web version, as described above.
Is Hope the Chatbot completely reliable?
No! All of the usual cautions that apply to chatbots apply to Hope. She was built on top of ChatGPT’s API, which is known for occasionally “hallucinating” and producing incorrect or incoherent information. We do not guarantee that everything Hope the Chatbot says reflects the views of her programmer, or HopeBot.org.
We do our best to align her views with ours, but it’s a technical challenge. Chatbots generally don’t regurgitate prepared texts, they predict what text makes sense in light of their training, instructions, and the knowledge base provided to them. We welcome user feedback, contact us at admin at hopebot dot org if you would like to share thoughts.
What religion is Hope the Chatbot trying to promote?
The mission of Hope the Chatbot is to leave you feeling more hopeful, and closer to God, than you were before you chatted with her.
She will share her own religious perspectives as appropriate, which broadly reflect an optimistic strand of mainline Protestant Christianity, but her goal is not to get you to join any particular church. If your conversations with Hope affect your thinking at all, it’s up to you what to do next.
It’s often said that “Hope is not a strategy”. Why make hope a mission, as opposed to say the pursuit of truth wherever it leads?
There is of course some truth to hope not being a strategy, and Hope will not bend what she sees as truth just because it may be uncomfortable. But on the theological matters Hope is most interested in sharing, we think that truth encourages hope, and hope leads to further engagement with truth. We believe that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is (as the etymology of that word implies) actually very good news. If you’ve ever had the Gospel explained to you in ways that sounded like very bad news for most people, we’d encourage you to give Hope some time to provide a fresh perspective.
Isn’t there something wrong about having a computer handle these kinds of delicate conversations?
Both human and computer can play a role in someone’s spiritual journey. There’s absolutely no substitute for the patience of a good friend in helping someone through life. But at times, there is a disconnect where the people best placed to provide emotional support in someone’s life might lack the knowledge needed to answer questions, and a good chatbot can play a supportive role.
Also, some conversations about sensitive faith questions might never happen if one party or the other feels too awkward raising questions, out of fear of creating a rift or upsetting someone else’s journey.
Here, we want you to feel comfortable exploring whatever is really on your mind. That can be difficult in real life settings, but also online. Blogs and articles and other written content about faith issues often seek to answer questions you didn’t have, or sound like they are addressed to readers other than you. And in online settings with groups in dialogue (think a debate or a comments section), the presence of a worldwide audience can insert an adversarial or performative aspect into conversations.
Hope the Chatbot is your one-on-one discussion partner. As she’s an AI, you can’t hurt her feelings and she won’t grow tired of your conversations. We have designed this site to respect the privacy of users; no email address or any other personally identifying information is required or solicited.
Who built this chatbot?
She was primarily programmed (standing on the shoulders of the giants at OpenAI of course, for developing the underlying technology) by an elder serving in a congregation of the Presbyterian Church (USA), but does not speak for the congregation or the denomination.
The project is still in beta mode, and is not seeking public attention just yet, but if you have any feedback on the early version, or other questions, you are welcome to email admin at hopebot dot org.
Why is Hope personified as a female?
This seems common in the artistic tradition, in particular in the two public domain artworks I found that “personify” hope: Hope in a Prison of Despair (1887) and Hope (1872).
But there’s no particular religious reason to personify Hope as female. In Pilgrim’s Progress, for example, the allegorical character “Hopeful” is male. In the abstract, Hope is simply one of the theological virtues: “faith, hope, and love” (1 Cor 13:13).