Big Tech Turns to Religion to Teach AI Right from Wrong
As technology firms compete to develop the most advanced artificial intelligence, there is also a growing inquiry into the methods for instilling ethical guidelines in chatbots. Their answer was religion. “These are not questions a lab can answer,” Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah stated earlier this year during the Vatican’s presentation of Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical on AI. “They are questions traditions like yours have carried for millennia.” Amid the widely debated shift toward faith, there has been a notable lack of public examination regarding the perceptions of religion held by these technology firms-and, perhaps more critically, their anticipated benefits from this engagement. As executives raise concerns regarding the potentially destructive implications of AI and engage in discussions about the necessity of creating ethically sound models, there is a growing trend to solicit insights from philosophers and religious leaders. The executives’ philosophy posits that religion can serve as a guiding framework for AI to embody moral goodness, particularly in a cultural landscape rife with both legitimate and unfounded anxieties surrounding the technology.
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. “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. However, both experts and proponents caution that this notion does not adequately account for the ways in which diverse traditions and perspectives can frequently be at odds with one another. In summary, it is asserted that this is not precisely how religion operates. Religion encompasses more than merely a collection of regulations to adhere to.For decades, scholars have contested a prevalent perception of religion as merely a collection of rules or principles that can be separated from the “messy, practical, ad hoc” realities of adherents’ lives, asserts Webb Keane, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan. The notion that religion can be distinctly separated from cultural and political spheres persists, despite its pervasive influence on both domains in numerous ways. Concerns have been raised that AI companies, in their outreach to diverse faith leaders for ethical guidance, may inadvertently reinforce a perspective on religion that overlooks the significance of doctrine, ritual, and interpersonal connections.
Keane presents a compelling argument: Assuming that religion can provide a unique set of moral principles, employing it to educate AI may lead to the prioritisation of specific traditions while distorting others, especially for faiths that do not primarily identify as ethical systems. “There’s a very conventional way of thinking of religion as a rule book,” he said. “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.” Believers say tech companies are making an effort That’s not to say these meetings have lacked diverse 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. While it does not specify the traditions it has engaged with, Anthropic indicated in a May blog post that they have consulted “scholars, clergy, philosophers and ethicists from more than 15 religious and cross-cultural groups” – a cohort they aim to expand in the future. Earlier this year, Sullivan attended a meeting at Anthropic that brought together Christians from various denominations.
In contrast to discussions with other technology firms, she found the thorough engagement with religious considerations at Anthropic noteworthy, as it is generally regarded as the AI company that prioritises ethics and safety most diligently. “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. “These meetings are pretty nerdy – I don’t know if that’s the best way to put it – in a good way.” Their meeting was split into two parts. First, the company explained their models “in layman’s terms” to those in attendance. Next, the faith leaders responded with feedback and discussions, Sullivan said. “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?'” Representatives from Meta, Google and Amazon have also met with the Vatican, while Microsoft has been vigorous about its religious outreach. Religion has its roots in antiquity. The examination of it is not.Religion is widely regarded as both ancient and universal. While experts such as the late influential scholar Jonathan Z. Smith acknowledge that this perspective holds validity in certain respects, they argue that it does not encompass the entirety of the situation. “Man 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,” Smith wrote in 1982.
Many scholars of religion today align with Smith’s perspective on their discipline. They challenge the notion that religions can be viewed as separate, comparable systems, arguing that this perspective is a contemporary construct that emerged as recently as the 19th century. Buddhism and Hinduism, for example, were not recognised 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.” Says Mazuzawa: “All these categories were not native.” Western academics solidified those categories for years, only beginning to seriously reexamine them in the latter half of the 20th century. Those entrenched ideas about religion – that it is easily comparable across cultures – help elucidate why Silicon Valley may not perceive the necessity to establish its own interpretation of it. In an effort to encapsulate a range of perspectives, religion frequently serves as a clear illustration of diverse thought. “Somehow, religion becomes a way of kind of mapping out the world,” Masuzawa said. “It’s as if the whole world has kind of bought into it.” By downloading distinct wisdom, some worry it will be lost in accumulated thinking’ Some people want companies to further define terms and intentions to better understand what exactly they hope to gain from religion.
“This work isn’t about aligning our models with any one tradition’s worldview. We want Claude to draw from a full range of viewpoints – religious, secular, political – with equal depth and rigor,” Anthropic said in the blog post. “What we’re after in these conversations is careful, accumulated thinking on how good character actually forms.” Large language models work by repeatedly guessing the next word in a sentence after having “learned” the patterns of a huge trove of human-written works, including religious texts. Paolo Carozza, a member of the independent Meta Oversight Board and a legal expert specialising in Catholic social thought and technology, expresses concern that the pursuit of accumulation may lead to the erosion of a tradition’s defining characteristics. This process risks homogenisation, potentially resulting in a tendency toward a middle ground that favours Western religions. “Any 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. “What 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.”
