Can LLMs accurately recall the Bible?

Why?

Why do you put a weird computer model between you and a computer and errr Your Faith? Do bear in mind that hallucinations might correspond to something demonic (just saying)

I'm a bit of a rubbish Christian but I know a synoptic gospel when I see it and can quote quite a lot of scripture. I am also an IT consultant.

What exactly is the point of Faith if you start typing questions into a ... computational model ... and trusting the outputs? Surely you should have a decent handle on the literature: It's just one big physical book these days - The Bible. Two Testaments and a slack handful of books and that for each. I'm not sure exactly but it looks about the same size as the Lord of the Rings.

I've just checked: Bible: 600k LotR: 480K - so not too far off.

I get that you might want to ask "what if" types of questions about the scriptures but why would you ask a computer? Faith is not embedded in an Intel Core i7 or an Nvidia A100.

Faith is Faith. ChatGPT is odd.

I can speak to a couple of perspectives I have seen other people use it for, ranging from valid to somewhat scary.

1. Preparing a sermon for Church, I don't advocate for this, but it's definitely being done out there. Here, the pastor may know the topic they are speaking on, but want the LLM to help them plan out the message and structure it. 2. Preparing lesson plans for Sunday School. This seems reasonably fine to me, but I would still err on the side of not trusting the raw scriptures output as evidence, and instead look them up separately before reading them out.

The above examples may particularly come into play when English is not a first language, since although they can understand and express their faith easily in their native language, ChatGPT can help them represent it in English well.

Personally, I think the use cases are many, but mostly for discussion / personal reflection. These include things like asking for perspectives that other Christians take on certain passages, helping understand how some scriptures link to other scriptures in the Bible, and sometimes even exploring some of the history of the Christian faith through the last ~2 millennia since it was written. Anything meaningful you can manually research further / reference before taking it at face value, but it can work as a great starting point for your search.

I had a similar reaction myself -- I'm an escaped fundamentalist and don't personally have the same convictions about stuff like this, but even if it's on a level that amuses me a little, there's something that feels just a bit heretical about it...

Not necessarily in a way where I would judge it though, and I certainly see how that could have use cases. It just feels a little bit like water gun baptisms, conceptually.

One question of a less spiritual nature -- are we strictly talking about recall from within the models themselves? I've never gotten deep enough into this kind of thing to mess with RAG pipelines, but I wonder if direct access to a translation or several would have any impact on its overall effectiveness for this.