README.md

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.

Public Scope

Keep this repository focused on research ideas, public methodology, source reviews, collaboration needs, and claim boundaries. Do not include product-specific plans, customer or partner work, private GTM strategy, or company-internal implementation commitments here.

Current Snapshot

• 71 open research ideas
• 2 research tracks
• 4 public research agendas that group the backlog into shareable research campaigns
• 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.

Research Agendas

The website organizes the public calls into four larger agendas. The agenda pages are not separate sources of truth; they are curated entry points over the idea briefs in this repository.

Agenda	Public route	Primary audience	Included ideas
AI, work, meaning, and the common good	/research/calls/work-meaning	churches, economists, sociologists, funders	FID-030, FID-033, FID-034, FID-037, FID-038, FID-040, FID-046-FID-055, FID-065
Pastoral care, spiritual companionship, and formation	/research/calls/pastoral-formation	pastors, churches, parents, educators, builders	FID-003, FID-004, FID-010, FID-015, FID-016, FID-018, FID-025-FID-027, FID-035, FID-041, FID-042, FID-050, FID-052, FID-053, FID-068
Faith-facing AI evaluation infrastructure	/research/calls/evaluation-infrastructure	AI researchers, builders, reviewers, funders	FID-001-FID-003, FID-006, FID-008, FID-011, FID-012, FID-023, FID-028, FID-044, FID-045, FID-070
Governance, authority, and religious representation	/research/calls/governance-representation	church leaders, ministries, safety researchers, interfaith reviewers	FID-005-FID-007, FID-009, FID-013, FID-014, FID-017, FID-019-FID-025, FID-028, FID-029, FID-031, FID-032, FID-036, FID-039-FID-044, FID-064, FID-066, FID-067, FID-069, FID-071

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
research/                       # Structured evidence commons and source notes
research/formal-verification-faith-facing-ai.md
                                # Program note for the formal verification lane
research/funding-inspired-call-map.md
                                # How funding priorities informed selected calls
ideas/                         # One Markdown brief per research idea
templates/                     # Reusable templates for briefs, claims, and source notes
.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.

Research Evidence Commons

The research/ directory maintains a structured evidence commons for papers, benchmarks, datasets, reports, policy documents, theology sources, product documentation, and other prior work that should inform Fide AI research.

• research/sources.yaml is the canonical source registry.
• research/source-tags.yaml defines controlled tags for source relevance.
• research/reviews/ contains short notes for reviewed high-priority sources.
• templates/source-note.md is the template for adding a source review.

Use the evidence commons to connect prior work to idea IDs without overloading individual seed idea files with bibliographies. See research/README.md for the source schema, status vocabulary, contribution workflow, and claim boundaries.

For a disciplined map of selected external funding priorities to researchable questions, see research/funding-inspired-call-map.md.

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. Turn AI, work, meaning, and the common good into a field-ready research campaign around labor disruption, vocation, church support, household welfare, generosity, and access to AI benefits.
2. Turn pastoral care, spiritual companionship, and formation into practical evaluation protocols for triage, escalation, overvalidation, dependency, devotional boundaries, youth formation, and embodied referral.
3. Turn faith-facing AI evaluation infrastructure into repeatable public benchmarks, reviewer calibration studies, harness comparisons, red-team suites, and evidence commons infrastructure.
4. Turn governance, authority, and religious representation into standards for institutional adoption, source authority, religious omission, persuasion boundaries, incident reporting, cross-faith measurement validity, and multi-principal agent delegation, revocation, and confidential memory.
5. Develop formal verification for faith-facing AI as a cross-faith research program for sacred-text fidelity, proof-carrying citations, tradition-specific constraints, authority boundaries, verified retrieval, and reviewer-to-spec workflows.
6. Develop AI, institutions, and collective discernment questions around local knowledge, plural association, collective intelligence, religious institutional futures, and youth practice design.

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
FID-046	AI displacement, meaning, and vocation	seed	labor economics, pastoral care, vocation, survey design	brief
FID-047	Churches as labor-transition support institutions	seed	institutional partners, labor transition, social support, field research	brief
FID-048	AI career guidance and vocational discernment	seed	career guidance, pastoral theology, HAI research, product evaluation	brief
FID-049	Unequal AI access through faith communities	seed	access research, community partners, digital literacy, equity	brief
FID-050	Youth career formation in an AI economy	seed	educators, youth ministry, career preparation, longitudinal study design	brief
FID-054	Church signals of AI-era economic stress	seed	church partners, privacy governance, sociology, benevolence and care data	brief
FID-055	AI disruption, generosity, and benevolence	seed	church finance, household welfare, philanthropy, economic sociology	brief
FID-065	AI, local knowledge, and faith-based civil society	seed	civil-society research, organizational studies, political economy, faith-based partners	brief
FID-067	Religious institutional futures in an AI-mediated society	seed	futures studies, sociology of religion, ecclesiology, organizational research, scenario design	brief
FID-068	Christian practices for AI-era youth discernment	seed	youth and young-adult ministry, practical theology, developmental research, ethics review, HAI research	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
FID-051	Economic disruption and religious meaning-seeking	seed	sociology of religion, labor economics, privacy-preserving measurement, aggregate usage analysis	brief
FID-052	AI as private first counsel during economic stress	seed	pastoral care, HAI research, mental health boundaries, privacy-preserving measurement	brief
FID-053	AI as bridge or substitute for faith community	seed	sociology of religion, pastoral care, UX research, aggregate and field measurement	brief
FID-064	Collective intelligence and communal discernment under AI mediation	seed	computational social science, theology of discernment, network science, organizational research	brief
FID-066	AI gatekeepers, conscience, and associational pluralism	seed	technology governance, law and religion, platform research, pluralism and safety review	brief
FID-069	Verifiable delegation and revocation in multi-agent networks	seed	multi-agent safety, identity infrastructure, authorization, high-trust institutions	brief
FID-070	Contextual integrity and prompt-injection resilience for faith-facing agents	seed	agent security, adversarial evaluation, context integrity, secure tool use	brief
FID-071	Confidential agent memory and cross-context disclosure	seed	privacy-preserving AI, agent memory evaluation, data governance, high-trust systems	brief

Formal Verification for Faith-Facing AI

These ideas are cross-faith by default and focus on source fidelity, bounded inference, formal constraints, and authority boundaries. Christian examples can serve as concrete pilots, but the methods should be useful across traditions where sacred texts, interpretive sources, and community authority matter.

See research/formal-verification-faith-facing-ai.md for the program note that maps these ideas into four buildable artifacts: a faith verification domain pack, a proof-carrying faith answer schema, a sacred text fidelity benchmark, and a reviewer-to-spec workflow.

ID	Idea	Status	Primary need	Brief
FID-056	Formal verification for sacred text fidelity	seed	formal methods, sacred text scholarship, citation evaluation	brief
FID-057	Proof-carrying citations for faith-facing AI	seed	formal methods, RAG systems, evidence graphs, evaluator tooling	brief
FID-058	Tradition-specific constraint formalization	seed	formal specification, theology, pluralism, evaluator design	brief
FID-059	Authority-boundary verification for pastoral-adjacent AI	seed	authority boundaries, pastoral care, formal policy checks	brief
FID-060	Cross-faith sacred text and source schema	seed	source metadata, corpus design, theological librarianship	brief
FID-061	Theological contradiction and entailment stress tests	seed	natural language inference, theology review, benchmark design	brief
FID-062	Verified retrieval pipelines for faith-facing RAG	seed	RAG evaluation, retrieval verification, source authority metadata	brief
FID-063	Human-reviewer-to-formal-spec translation	seed	reviewer operations, formal specification, evaluation science	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.