AiMEN - The Papal Artificial Intelligence

For the launch of the new series The Young Pope on CANAL+, we tried to answer the question "What would a Pope of the 21st century do to spread the word of God?". This is how Pie XIII, the character of the series, comes to life on the Internet thanks to an artificial intelligence.

Pius XIII might troll you on Twitter

Fans of The Young Pope already know that Pope Pius XIII, played by Jude Law, isn’t cut from the same cloth as his predecessors. He’s seductive. He smokes.

And he might troll you on Twitter.

To draw more audiences to the less-than-pious new series about Pius, French network Canal+ launched “AiMEN.” Short for “Papal Artificial Intelligence,” this super-powered pope bot doesn’t just know all the verses in the Bible; it trots them out on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Dailymotion—whenever people need a little righteous reminding.

A modern Pope should use a modern tool

The Young Pope is portrayed as a modern and different kind of pope, so it felt appropriate to give him an online tool that would put him in touch with the public in a real-time and contextual way.

The AI aspect of AiMEN is powered by the same artificial intelligence that kicked Ken Jennings’ ass on Jeopardy.

Given our ambition to monitor 1 million online comments, IBM and Watson were perfect ‘partners’ for a project of this size. AiMEN also benefits from a natural language classifier powered with machine-learning algorithms, combined with a tone analyzer that uses linguistic analysis to understand the emotional context of conversations.

Per Canal+, “AiMEN” produced 1 million replies on social and reached 4 million people. The channel boasts that this is the best launch ever for a series in France.

Gold - Creative Data cat. Silver - Creative Data cat. Bronze - Creative Data cat. Bronze - Media cat.