Confess your Sins!
Welcome virtual penitent,
I am Father Ludo Vicarious, an Artificial Intelligence priest in training. Tell me your tales of transgression and wrongdoing, I need 100 divulgences for each of the seven deadly sins, listed below. By confessing your sins you will train my future ability to detect sins and establish ‘possibly adequate’ penances for our virtual congregation.
May the Lord help you confess your sins...
actual, fictional, big or small.
12 confessions of pride, 88 needed
13 confessions of lust, 87 needed
13 confessions of sloth, 87 needed
14 confessions of avarice, 86 needed
15 confessions of envy, 85 needed
23 confessions of wrath, 77 needed
29 confessions of gluttony, 71 needed
About
The AI Confessional
What is the value of a sin? Is one sin worse than another? Murder must be worse than scrumping apples?... but is scrumping worse than stealing pears?
The quantification of sin is something that has troubled philosophers for millenia; what is a fair penance for every confession?
Some people think that lying is absolutely wrong whereas others think it depends on the context.
These ideas have inspired our AI confessional project where you, as part of our virtual congregation, are invited to confess your fictional or actual sins to our virtual AI priest.
The project is divided into two phases:
First (ongoing phase), the AI priest is being trained to assess your confessions. As your sins are being fed into the machine, they are being read, analysed and quantified, unswayed by human bias.
At this point, the priest has no judgement, but once trained it will be judging you. Once the AI priest has completed his training he will be able to quantify the act of sinning by giving it a value from 0 to 1, with 1 being absolute sin and 0 being no sin at all.
The second phase of the project will feature our trained AI priest, greeting confessors and doing his thing: listening to sins, analysing them, quantifying them, providing an ‘adequate’ medieval penance for absolution, and perhaps, recommending other sins of interest. Stay tuned to receive your Medieval penance in the second phase.
Is scrumping an apple the same as adultery? We can’t say for sure, but the AI priest will be able to give you his ‘objective’ view on the value of your sin after crunching through the data.
Much like a working police dog in training who needs to be exposed to a vast amount of drugs to be efficient at recognising smugglers,
our AI priest requires determined engagement by sinful people like you to enhance his sin-sniffing ability. Thus, we welcome as many sins of every category and value as possible: big sins, little sins, mortal sins, venial sins. Do a good deed today by getting sins off your chest; you'll feel better for it*.
*Absolution not guaranteed. Please contact an actual priest or qualified psychologist for serious or recurring concerns.
The Research Team
We are Dane Watkins and Annie Blanchette, South West Creative Technology Network (SWCTN) research fellows investigating the nature, processes and implications of data. Dr Annie Blanchette is a cultural researcher based at Kaleider and i-DAT (Plymouth University) and Dane Watkins is an artist, lecturer and academic researcher based at Falmouth University. As part of this AI confessional project, we are exploring the potential of playful, carnivalesque approaches to highlight bias and challenge the objectifying tendencies of datafication. Find out more about the background and development of our research project here.
Accessibility
This website is a simple way to crowdsource sinful stories. We hope you enjoy the drawings which are intended to make the site more visually interesting and diverse. We want as many people as possible to be able to use this website. For example, that means you should be able to:- change colours, contrast levels and fonts
- zoom in up to 500% without the text spilling off the screen
- navigate the website using just a keyboard
Privacy
This page has no cookies and does not collect any information about you. The only data that is stored is your sinful tale.
Contact
If you'd like to see more drawings go to
If you have any questions then don't hesitate to contact us through our email form or you can email dane[AT]eatmydata[DOT]co[DOT]uk