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<\/p>\nAs tech companies race to build the most powerful artificial intelligence, some are also asking how to teach a chatbot right from wrong. Their answer? Religion.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese are not questions a lab can answer,\u201d Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah said earlier this year at the Vatican\u2019s presentation of Pope Leo XIV\u2019s encyclical on AI. <\/p>\n
\u201cThey are questions traditions like yours have carried for millennia.\u201d<\/p>\n
Amid this much-discussed turn to faith, there has been little public scrutiny surrounding what exactly these technology companies think religion is \u2014 and, perhaps more important, what they hope to get out of it.<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Open AI CEO Sam Altman speaks at the OpenAI DevDay 2026 conference (Source: Associated Press)<\/p>\n
The executives’ philosophy goes something like this: that religion can help inform AI to be morally good in an environment where fears about it \u2014 founded and unfounded \u2014 are hopscotching across the culture.<\/p>\n
Because these companies are not bound to a particular religion, the goal is often quite broad \u2014 an aggregate of moral ideas that can inform their models. \u201cWhat I think ChatGPT should do is reflect that weighted average, or whatever, of humanity\u2019s moral view,\u201d OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said last year.<\/p>\n
But experts and adherents alike warn that this idea fails to reckon with how different traditions and worldviews can often contradict one another. In short, they say, it’s not exactly how religion works.<\/p>\n
Religion is more than a set of rules to follow<\/p>\n
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 \u201cmessy, practical, ad hoc\u201d ways adherents live, argues Webb Keane, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan.<\/p>\n
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Dario Amodei, CEO and co-founder of Anthropic, attends the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. (Source: Associated Press)<\/p>\n
The idea that religion can be separated from things like culture and politics remains entrenched, even though it suffuses both in many ways. <\/p>\n
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 recognise the importance of doctrine, ritual and relationships.<\/p>\n
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 prioritising certain traditions and distorting others \u2014 particularly when it comes to faiths that do not see themselves primarily as a system of ethics.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a very conventional way of thinking of religion as a rule book,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Believers say tech companies are making an effort<\/p>\n
That\u2019s not to say these meetings have lacked diverse representation. <\/p>\n
Nor does it suggest that their engagement with religion hasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
AI apps on a phone screen (file image). (Source: istock.com)<\/p>\n
Though it doesn’t enumerate the traditions it has consulted, Anthropic said in a May blog post that they\u2019d met with \u201cscholars, clergy, philosophers and ethicists from more than 15 religious and cross-cultural groups\u201d \u2014 a pool they hope to broaden in the future.<\/p>\n
Earlier this year, Sullivan went to Anthropic for one of their meetings, which included Christians from different denominations. <\/p>\n
In contrast to conversations she\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe culture inside the company is similar to that on a good college campus in the sense that you\u2019ve got a collection of very intellectually curious people,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n
\u201cThese meetings are pretty nerdy \u2014 I don\u2019t know if that\u2019s the best way to put it \u2014 in a good way.\u201d<\/p>\n
Their meeting was split into two parts. First, the company explained their models \u201cin layman\u2019s terms\u201d to those in attendance. Next, the faith leaders responded with feedback and discussions, Sullivan said. <\/p>\n
\u201cEvery kind of moral question that this technology raises \u2014 everything from, \u2018Do humans have souls?\u2019 to \u2018Should third graders be able to access a chatbot for literacy education?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Representatives from Meta, Google and Amazon have also met with the Vatican, while Microsoft has been vigorous about its religious outreach.<\/p>\n
Religion is ancient. The study of it is not<\/p>\n
Religion is generally considered both ancient and universal. 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cMan has had his entire history in which to imagine deities and modes of interaction with them. But man, more precisely Western man, has had only the last few centuries in which to imagine religion,\u201d Smith wrote in 1982.<\/p>\n
Many scholars of religion today share Smith’s view of their field. <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Buddhism and Hinduism, for example, were not recognised as clearly bounded traditions by the people who practised them prior to the arrival of European scholars, says Tomoko Masuzawa, a religious studies scholar who wrote \u201cThe Invention of World Religions.\u201d <\/p>\n
Says Mazuzawa: \u201cAll these categories were not native.”<\/p>\n
Western academics solidified those categories for years, only beginning to seriously re-examine them in the latter half of the 20th century.<\/p>\n
Those entrenched ideas about religion \u2014 that it is easily comparable across cultures \u2014 help explain why Silicon Valley might not feel the need to define its own understanding of it. In an effort to represent various viewpoints, religion is often an obvious way to showcase diversity of thought.<\/p>\n
\u201cSomehow, religion becomes a way of kind of mapping out the world,” Masuzawa said. \u201cIt\u2019s as if the whole world has kind of bought into it.\u201d<\/p>\n
By downloading distinct wisdom, some worry it will be lost in ‘accumulated thinking’<\/p>\n
Some people want companies to further define terms and intentions to better understand what exactly they hope to gain from religion.<\/p>\n
“This work isn\u2019t about aligning our models with any one tradition\u2019s worldview. We want Claude to draw from a full range of viewpoints \u2014 religious, secular, political \u2014 with equal depth and rigor,\u201d Anthropic said in the blog post. <\/p>\n
\u201cWhat we\u2019re after in these conversations is careful, accumulated thinking on how good character actually forms.\u201d<\/p>\n
Large language models work by repeatedly guessing the next word in a sentence after having \u201clearned\u201d the patterns of a huge trove of human-written works, including religious texts.<\/p>\n
Paolo Carozza, a member of the independent Meta Oversight Board and a legal expert who studies Catholic social thought and technology, worries that in the quest for accumulation, there is potential for a given tradition’s defining characteristics to be lost \u2014 in effect, homogenised into something that pulls toward the middle or even favours Western religions.<\/p>\n
\u201cAny living, sophisticated tradition over time is capable of interacting with others outside of it and absorbing some new knowledge and growing. But it does so in this organic way,” he said. <\/p>\n
\u201cWhat AI, I think, often does and potentially does, is not in an organic way, but in a way that just throws it all together, mixes it all up, and therefore makes sense of none of it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As tech companies race to build the most powerful artificial intelligence, some are also asking how to teach…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":648092,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,363,364,111,139,64,69,12477,145,1745],"class_list":["post-648091","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-north-america","tag-nz","tag-religion","tag-technology","tag-uk-europe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/648091","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=648091"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/648091\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/648092"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=648091"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=648091"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=648091"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}