NCS
—
Pope Leo XIV says tech firms creating synthetic intelligence ought to abide by an “ethical criterion” that respects human dignity.
AI should take “into account the well-being of the human person not only materially, but also intellectually and spiritually,” the pope stated in a message despatched Friday to a gathering on AI attended by Vatican officers and Silicon Valley executives.
“No generation has ever had such quick access to the amount of information now available through AI,” he stated. But “access to data — however extensive — must not be confused with intelligence.”
He additionally expressed concern about AI’s affect on youngsters’s “intellectual and neurological development,” writing that “society’s well-being depends upon their being given the ability to develop their God-given gifts and capabilities.”
That assertion from the Pope got here on the second of a two-day assembly for tech leaders in Rome to focus on the societal and ethical implications of synthetic intelligence. The second annual Rome Conference on AI was attended by representatives from AI leaders together with Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, IBM, Meta and Palantir together with teachers from Harvard and Stanford and representatives of the Holy See.
The occasion comes at a considerably fraught second for AI, with the quickly advancing know-how promising to enhance employee productiveness, speed up analysis and eradicate illness, but additionally threatening to take human jobs, produce misinformation, worsen the climate crisis and create even more powerful weapons and surveillance capabilities. Some tech leaders have pushed again in opposition to regulations supposed to be sure that AI is used responsibly, which they are saying may hinder innovation and world competitors.
“In some cases, AI has been used in positive and indeed noble ways to promote greater equality, but there is likewise the possibility of its misuse for selfish gain at the expense of others, or worse, to foment conflict and aggression,” Leo stated in his Friday assertion.
Although it doesn’t have any direct regulatory energy, the Vatican has been more and more vocal on AI coverage, searching for to use its affect to push for ethical technological developments.
In 2020, the Vatican hosted an occasion the place tech leaders, EU regulators and the late Pope Francis mentioned “human-centric” AI, which resulted in the Rome Call for AI Ethics, a doc outlining ethical issues for the improvement of AI algorithms. IBM, Microsoft and Qualcomm have been amongst the signatories who agreed to abide by the doc’s rules.
Two years later, Francis called for an international treaty to regulate the use of AI and forestall a “technological dictatorship” from rising. In that assertion — which got here months after an AI-generated image of Francis in a puffy coat went viral — he raised issues about AI weapons and surveillance programs, in addition to election interference and rising inequality. In 2024, he became the first pope to take part in the G7 summit, laying out the ethical framework for the improvement of AI that he hoped to get huge tech firms and governments on board with.
When Pope Leo XIV grew to become chief of the Catholic Church final month, he signaled that his papacy would observe in Francis’ footsteps on matters of church reform and fascinating with AI as a prime problem for working folks and “human dignity.”
The new pontiff selected to title himself after Pope Leo XIII who led the church throughout the industrial revolution and issued a landmark instructing doc which supported employees’ rights to a honest wage and to type commerce unions. With the improvement of AI posing a comparable revolution to the one throughout the nineteenth century, Leo has prompt that the church’s social instructing — which gives a framework on participating with politics and enterprise — be used when it comes to new tech developments.
“In our own day, the church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor,” Leo stated in that May deal with.
The Friday occasion, which came about inside the Vatican’s apostolic palace, included a roundtable dialogue on AI ethics and governance. Among these current from the Vatican facet have been Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, who has engaged with enterprise leaders on AI, and Archbishop Edgar Peña Parra, who holds the place of “sostituto” (substitute) in the Vatican, a papal chief of employees equal.
Earlier this week, Leo referenced AI throughout a speech to Italian bishops, speaking about “challenges” that “call into question” the respect for human dignity.
“Artificial intelligence, biotechnologies, data economy and social media are profoundly transforming our perception and our experience of life,” he told them. “In this scenario, human dignity risks becoming diminished or forgotten, substituted by functions, automatism, simulations. But the person is not a system of algorithms: he or she is a creature, relationship, mystery.”
A key concern at Friday’s occasion is AI governance, or how the firms constructing it ought to handle their want to generate revenue and duties to shareholders with the crucial not to create hurt in the world. That dialog is very urgent at a second when the United States is on the brink of kneecapping the enforcement of a lot of the restricted laws on AI that exist, with a provision in President Donald Trump’s proposed agenda invoice that may prohibit the enforcement of state legal guidelines on AI for 10 years.
In his assertion, Leo known as on tech leaders to acknowledge and respect “what is uniquely characteristic of the human person” as they search to develop an ethical framework for AI improvement.