As tech companies race to build the most powerful artificial intelligence, some are also asking how to teach a chatbot right from wrong.
asserted
some → race → wrong
“These are not questions a lab can answer,” Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah said earlier this year at the Vatican’s presentation of Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical on AI.
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Olah → answer → AI
“They are questions traditions like yours have carried for millennia.”
asserted
traditions → carry → millennia
Amid this much-discussed turn to faith, there has been little public scrutiny surrounding what exactly these technology companies think religion is — and, perhaps more important, what they hope to get out of it.
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they → discuss → it
As executives sound the alarm about AI’s destructive potential and debate the need to develop morally good models, they are increasingly seeking input from philosophers and faith leaders.
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they → sound → philosophers
The executives’ philosophy goes something like this: that religion can help inform AI to be morally good in an environment where fears about it — founded and unfounded — are hopscotching across the culture.
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fears → go → culture
Because these companies are not bound to a particular religion, the goal is often quite broad — an aggregate of moral ideas that can inform their models.
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that → bind → models
“What I think ChatGPT should do is reflect that weighted average, or whatever, of humanity’s moral view,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said last year.
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Altman → think → view
But experts and adherents alike warn that this idea fails to reckon with how different traditions and worldviews can often contradict one another.
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traditions → warn → one
In short, they say, it’s not exactly how religion works.
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religion → say → ?
Religion is more than a set of rules to follow
For decades, scholars have pushed back against a widespread view of religion as a set of rules or principles that can be divorced from the “messy, practical, ad hoc” ways adherents live, argues Webb Keane, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan.
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Keane → follow → Michigan
The idea that religion can be separated from things like culture and politics remains entrenched, even though it suffuses both in many ways.
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it → separate → ways
Some worry that AI companies, as they ask various faith leaders to answer ethical questions, will further perpetuate a theory of religion that fails to recognize the importance of doctrine, ritual and relationships.
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that → worry → doctrine
Here’s the issue, Keane argues: If you assume that religion overall can offer a distinct set of extractable moral principles, using it to train AI risks prioritizing certain traditions and distorting others — particularly when it comes to faiths that do not see themselves primarily as a system of ethics.
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that → ’ → ethics
“There’s a very conventional way of thinking of religion as a rule book,” he said.
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he → ’ → book
“It is certainly very tied to scriptural religion, and the scriptural religions at the end of the day really turn out to be the Abrahamic religions.
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religions → tie → day
Believers say tech companies are making an effort
That’s not to say these meetings have lacked diverse representation.
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meetings → say → representation
Nor does it suggest that their engagement with religion hasn’t been thoughtful from the perspective of those in attendance, like Meghan Sullivan, a philosopher of religion who leads an initiative on ethics and AI at the University of Notre Dame.
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who → suggest → Dame
Though it doesn’t enumerate the traditions it has consulted, Anthropic said in a May blog post that they’d met with “scholars, clergy, philosophers and ethicists from more than 15 religious and cross-cultural groups” — a pool they hope to broaden in the future.
uncertain
they → enumerate → future
Earlier this year, Sullivan went to Anthropic for one of their meetings, which included Christians from different denominations.
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which → go → denominations
In contrast to conversations she’d had with other tech companies, she was impressed by the rigorous engagement with religion at Anthropic, which is widely seen as the AI company taking ethics and safety most seriously.
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which → have → ethics
“The culture inside the company is similar to that on a good college campus in the sense that you’ve got a collection of very intellectually curious people,” she said.
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she → get → people
“These meetings are pretty nerdy — I don’t know if that’s the best way to put it — in a good way.”
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that → know → way
Their meeting was split into two parts.
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meeting → split → parts
First, the company explained their models “in layman’s terms” to those in attendance.
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company → explain → attendance
Next, the faith leaders responded with feedback and discussions, Sullivan said.
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Sullivan → respond → feedback
“Every kind of moral question that this technology raises — everything from, ‘Do humans have souls?’ to ‘Should third graders be able to access a chatbot for literacy education?’”
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graders → raise → education
Representatives from Meta, Google and Amazon have also met with the Vatican, while Microsoft has been vigorous about its religious outreach.
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Microsoft → meet → outreach
The study of it is not
Religion is generally considered both ancient and universal.
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Religion → consider → it
And while experts like the late influential scholar of Jonathan Z. Smith concede that is true in some ways, they say it’s also not the full picture.
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it → concede → ways
“Man has had his entire history in which to imagine deities and modes of interaction with them.
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Man → imagine → them
But man, more precisely Western man, has had only the last few centuries in which to imagine religion,” Smith wrote in 1982.
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Smith → have → 1982
Many scholars of religion today share Smith’s view of their field.
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scholars → share → field
They call into question the idea that religions are a set of distinct, comparable systems, saying it’s a modern notion that can be traced to as late as the 19th century.
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that → call → century
Buddhism and Hinduism, for example, were not recognized as clearly bounded traditions by the people who practiced them prior to the arrival of European scholars, says Tomoko Masuzawa, a religious studies scholar who wrote “The Invention of World Religions.”
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who → recognize → Religions
Says Mazuzawa: “All these categories were not native.”
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categories → say → ?
Western academics solidified those categories for years, only beginning to seriously reexamine them in the latter half of the 20th century.
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academics → solidify → century
Those entrenched ideas about religion — that it is easily comparable across cultures — help explain why Silicon Valley might not feel the need to define its own understanding of it.
uncertain
Valley → entrench → it
In an effort to represent various viewpoints, religion is often an obvious way to showcase diversity of thought.
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religion → represent → thought
“Somehow, religion becomes a way of kind of mapping out the world,” Masuzawa said.
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Masuzawa → become → world
…and 11 more, not listed.
The Aporia
