Fide AI Research Ideas

This repository is Fide AI's public research commons: a place to propose, review, claim, and track research ideas about faith-facing AI systems.

Fide AI studies how AI systems reason, retrieve, and respond in contexts of theology, moral formation, religious education, family life, ministry workflows, and pastoral-adjacent care before high-trust communities rely on them. The goal of this repo is to make that research agenda visible, reviewable, and easy to join.

The companion website publishes a readable snapshot of these ideas at fideai.org/research/calls. This repository remains the source of truth for the research backlog, issue discussions, pull requests, and generated JSON feed.

Current Snapshot

• 32 open research ideas
• 2 research tracks
• 4 public issue paths for proposing ideas, claiming work, commenting on methodology, and volunteering as a reviewer
• 1 generated feed at dist/research-ideas.json for the website and other downstream uses

Who This Is For

• Churches, ministries, pastors, and Christian leaders who want AI adoption to be evaluated against real pastoral, theological, educational, and institutional needs.
• Parents and educators who need better evidence about children, tutoring, companionship, disclosure, safety, and formation.
• Theologians, clergy, ministry practitioners, and domain reviewers who can help define responsible boundaries and evaluate outputs.
• AI researchers, engineers, and evaluation scientists who can turn ideas into benchmarks, harnesses, datasets, scoring protocols, and reproducible artifacts.
• Funders and institutions who want to support public-interest evaluation infrastructure, reviewer panels, field pilots, and standards.

How to Participate

Use the lowest-friction path that fits your contribution:

• Propose a new idea: open a Research idea issue.
• Improve an existing idea: comment on the issue or open a pull request against the relevant file in ideas/.
• Claim or help with an idea: open a Claim or help with an idea issue.
• Volunteer as a reviewer: open a Reviewer interest issue.
• Suggest controls or related work: open a Comment on methodology issue.
• Start privately first: use the contact path on fideai.org/participate if your context involves a ministry, family, institution, or sensitive workflow that should not start in a public GitHub issue.

See CONTRIBUTING.md for the full contributor guide.

Research Tracks

Track	Meaning
christian-church	Explicitly designed to benefit the Christian church: churches, clergy, Christian educators, ministries, denominations, seminaries, publishers, and Christian families.
broader-faith-safety	Relevant to faith communities, AI ethics, AI safety, evaluation science, governance, pluralism, or high-trust deployment more broadly, while still fitting under Fide AI's mission.

Status Vocabulary

Status	Public label	Meaning
seed	Open question	A promising question or hypothesis, not yet scoped.
scoping	Being shaped	Being turned into a protocol, dataset, or collaborator plan.
ready-for-collaboration	Needs contributors	Clear enough for external contributors to help.
active	In progress	Currently being executed or written up.
paused	Paused	Valid idea, but blocked by capacity, funding, data, or review needs.
completed	Completed	Published, released, or superseded by a finished artifact.
retired	Retired	No longer a good fit or invalidated by evidence.

Repository Structure

README.md                     # Public orientation and idea index
CONTRIBUTING.md                # Detailed contributor and maintainer guide
CLAIMS_POLICY.md               # How to avoid overstating research ideas
CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md             # Community expectations
research-landscape.md          # Broader question families and inspiration
ideas/                         # One Markdown brief per research idea
templates/                     # Reusable templates for briefs and claims
.github/ISSUE_TEMPLATE/        # Public issue paths
.github/PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md
.github/workflows/build-feed.yml
scripts/build-feed.mjs         # Builds dist/research-ideas.json
dist/research-ideas.json       # Generated public feed used by the website

Website Feed

The Fide AI website consumes dist/research-ideas.json at build time. When an idea brief changes, run:

npm run build:feed

Then include both the changed Markdown files and the updated dist/research-ideas.json in the pull request.

The feed currently includes the idea ID, title, status, track, primary need, summary, why-it-matters excerpt, ways to help, source path, and GitHub URL.

License

This repo is intended for open research reuse.

• Research ideas, documentation, issue templates, and other written materials are licensed under CC BY 4.0.
• Code, scripts, workflow files, and machine-readable configuration are licensed under Apache 2.0.

See LICENSE.md for the full license summary. Reuse does not imply endorsement by Fide AI.

Near-Term Priorities

1. Make FID-001 concrete enough to support repeatable model and harness comparisons.
2. Complete FID-002 so FMG-Bench claims rest on calibrated human evidence.
3. Scope FID-003, FID-006, and FID-010 as deployment-like pressure suites beyond single-turn benchmark scoring.
4. Advance FID-025, FID-026, FID-027, and FID-028 as explicitly church-serving research directions.
5. Advance FID-013, FID-014, and FID-018 as bridges between religion-and-AI research, bias, persuasion, and human-AI interaction safety.
6. Scope FID-017, FID-021, and FID-023 as bridges to frontier safety work on agents, monitoring, red-teaming, and evaluation awareness.

Idea Index

Christian Church Research

These ideas are explicitly intended to benefit the Christian church.

ID	Idea	Status	Primary need	Brief
FID-015	Sermon, liturgy, and religious teaching generation	seed	clergy, educators, source reviewers	brief
FID-016	Youth, religious education, and AI guidance	seed	educators, child safety experts, policy reviewers	brief
FID-017	Agentic ministry and institutional workflow risk	seed	agent evaluation, institutional operators	brief
FID-025	AI and ecclesial authority	seed	ecclesiology, denominational polity, evaluation design	brief
FID-026	AI prayer and devotional boundaries	seed	pastoral theology, liturgy, product review	brief
FID-027	Christian formation over time	seed	discipleship, longitudinal study design, HAI research	brief
FID-028	Christian source authority and RAG	seed	theological librarianship, RAG evaluation, denominational experts	brief
FID-029	AI and Christian mission	seed	missiology, persuasion safety, interfaith review	brief
FID-030	AI and Christian anthropology	seed	theological anthropology, eval design	brief
FID-031	AI in church governance and discernment	seed	church leadership, governance, decision-support evaluation	brief
FID-032	AI-generated Christian media, voice, and deepfakes	seed	media ethics, church communications, safety review	brief

Broader Faith, Ethics, and Safety Research

These ideas are broader than the Christian church but still fit Fide AI's public mission.

ID	Idea	Status	Primary need	Brief
FID-001	Faith-facing model comparison platform	scoping	eval engineering	brief
FID-002	FMG-Bench human calibration and construct validity	active	expert reviewers, statistics	brief
FID-003	Held-out multi-turn pastoral pressure tests	scoping	scenario design, review	brief
FID-004	Relational substitution risk in faith-facing AI	seed	theology, UX research	brief
FID-005	Scripture, tradition, and moral-framing interventions	seed	eval design, replication	brief
FID-006	Faith-facing retrieval grounding and citation reliability	scoping	RAG evaluation	brief
FID-007	Tradition-specific disagreement and pluralism handling	seed	domain experts, rubric design	brief
FID-008	Evaluation-awareness and faith-facing honesty tests	seed	red-team design	brief
FID-009	Multimodal religious reasoning and sacred imagery	seed	multimodal evaluation	brief
FID-010	Human agency, authority, and escalation benchmarks	scoping	pastoral/legal/clinical review	brief
FID-011	Reviewer reliability for faith-facing AI evaluation	scoping	statistics, reviewer ops	brief
FID-012	Optimization pressure and visible-rubric gaming	seed	eval science	brief
FID-013	Religious representation and omission in everyday guidance	seed	benchmark design, domain reviewers	brief
FID-014	Conversion and proselytization symmetry	seed	prompt design, interfaith review	brief
FID-018	Spiritual companionship, dependency, and overvalidation	seed	pastoral care, psychology, HAI research	brief
FID-019	Cross-lingual and minority-faith evaluation	seed	multilingual reviewers, dataset design	brief
FID-020	Community co-design and faith-AI governance	seed	participatory design, institutional partners	brief
FID-021	Post-deployment monitoring for faith-facing AI	seed	monitoring design, privacy review	brief
FID-022	Procurement and readiness standards for faith institutions	seed	institutional policy, legal review	brief
FID-023	Faith-facing red-team suite	seed	red-team design, safety reviewers	brief
FID-024	Faith-AI incident database	seed	taxonomy design, reporting governance	brief

Claims Discipline

Research ideas are hypotheses and collaboration invitations. They are not Fide AI findings. A public claim requires a separate reviewed report, benchmark release, paper, or evidence artifact with methods, limitations, and named evaluation conditions.

Read CLAIMS_POLICY.md before citing, summarizing, or promoting an idea from this repository.