October 29th, 2024 // Did someone forward you this newsletter? Sign up to receive your own copy here.

The missing voices of faith in tech development

When you ask OpenAI’s ChatGPT what faith or religious traditions most influenced its development, it says that it was “built on principles that are broadly secular.” 

When you press the chatbot about if it had to choose one religious tradition that most shaped its worldview, it resists making that choice, instead saying, “The values and principles that most align with my development as a chatbot are broadly reflected in humanistic and ethical frameworks.”

The tech industry is known to generally be secular. In the HBO series “Silicon Valley,” one character tells another, “You can be openly polyamorous, and people here will call you brave. You can put microdoses of LSD in your cereal, and people will call you a pioneer, but the one thing you cannot be is a Christian.”

The truth is that many people of faith work in tech, and even ChatGPT admits that some of the ethics and values it sources originate in spiritual traditions like Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. 

But the technologies we use every day—from AI chatbots to social media platforms to smartphones—have been encoded with the biases and beliefs of their human developers.

Is anything lost when 85% of the world’s population identifies with a religious group, but the technologies they use have been encoded with principles of secularism? How might our technology look different if religious leaders have a say in its development and growth? And, as Paolo Benanti, a Franciscan Friar who advises the Pope on AI, posed earlier this year, “What is the difference between a man who exists and a machine that functions?”

There is growing activity and momentum by religious leaders, scholars, and technologists who are asking questions at the intersection of faith and tech.

Project Liberty is developing a project to bring in voices of faith around the future of the internet. The project is spearheaded by Neylan McBaine, whose unique background as a tech marketing executive, author, and women-in-faith advocate has shaped her work at the intersection of technology, faith, and underserved communities.

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“What is the difference between a man who exists and a machine that functions?”

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// How faith leaders are engaging with AI

The response to AI by religious leaders runs the full spectrum between using AI to write sermons to denouncing it as an “abomination.”

• Deepak Chopra, a leader in the New Age spiritual movement, wrote an article for Fast Company offering specific instructions for how to “make AI your guru.”
• The Pope urged tech leaders earlier this year to use AI ethically to serve humanity, while mitigating its risks. In 2020, the Vatican convened leaders and technologists to develop the Rome Call for AI Ethics, a document that cast a vision for new “algorethics,” a portmanteau of algorithm and ethics. The Rome Call advocated for the development of AI that “serves every person and humanity as a whole; that respects the dignity of the human person, so that every individual can benefit from the advances of technology; and that does not have as its sole goal greater profit or the gradual replacement of people in the workplace.”
• Two Pakistani scholars won a grant from Meta in 2020 to study how the ethical and legal principles of Islam can be used to regulate AI in Muslim countries. “There’s a lack of representation in AI for the two billion people who profess these beliefs,” Dr. Junaid Qadir told WIRED in 2021.
• Religions are even developing doctrine-specific technologies and robots trained on specific religious texts, such as an AI rabbi, an android Buddhist priest, and SanTo, an in-home Catholic robot.

Greg Epstein, a humanist chaplain for both Harvard and MIT, cautioned ascribing deity-like characteristics onto a commercial tool like an AI chatbot.

“There’s a danger in projecting divine goodness, or some transcendent intentions onto what is ultimately an extraordinarily large economic force that wants to become ever larger and evermore influential,” he said. “It wants to sell more products; it wants to dominate more markets; and there aren’t necessarily benign intentions behind that.”

In Techno-ideologies of the Twenty-first Century, one of the Digitalist Papers, authors Mona Hamdy, Johnnie Moore, and E. Glen Weyl, expressed something similar: “For Christians and many other faith traditions that reject the construction of God-like entities, the rhetoric around AGI (artificial general intelligence) may sound arrogant, if not idolatrous, recalling centuries of warnings about people playing God.”

// The values & ethics that built modern tech

The platforms and tech tools we use every day are anything but neutral. The ability of artificial intelligence to spit out answers is entirely dependent on its training data, and there have been notable examples (like how facial recognition software struggles to identify people with darker skin), where the omission of critical data skewed AI to generate biased results.

We live in a moment when the myth of neutrality is being debunked with evidence that our technologies reflect the beliefs, biases, and politics of those who run them.

This means we must not only demand better representation in tech, but also examine what those values are, and what ethics and worldviews might be left out.

In a 2021 article in The New York Times, journalist Linda Kinstler chronicled her attempt to determine exactly what those ethics were and whether they were connected to religious or spiritual beliefs. She found that there wasn’t a shared understanding of what ethics Big Tech was using when it talked about responsible, ethical development. 

She found that the spiritual or moral underpinnings of ethics could look quite different based on religious doctrine or worldview, and yet ethics in tech were often treated as obvious, universal, and untethered to spiritual or religious roots.

David Brenner, the board chair of AI & Faith, which “brings the wisdom of the world’s great religions to the discussion around the moral and ethical challenges of artificial intelligence,” expressed concern about using secular technology like AI to comment on religious texts.

“The biggest questions in life are the questions that AI is posing, but it's doing it mostly in isolation from the people who've been asking those questions for 4,000 years,” he said. What is lost when AI is pressed on spiritual questions like “What is the purpose of life?” 

For great reporting on the intersection of faith and tech, check out Rest of World’s new series: Digital Divinity.

// Convening faith leaders to shape the future of tech

There’s a growing need for interfaith spaces where religious leaders from different traditions can come together to explore the role of faith and spirituality in the development and use of technology.

• Earlier this year, the Vatican sponsored a two-day gathering of 150 religious leaders in Hiroshima, Japan—where the atomic bomb caused death and devastation—to explore how today’s technology could be used to benefit, not destroy, society.
• Earlier this month, the University of Notre Dame announced that it received a half-million-dollar grant to develop faith-based frameworks to encourage the ethical use of AI.

Project Liberty aims to convene faith leaders to ask major questions like:

• What can people of faith contribute to technologists?
• What do people of faith want in their technology?
• How would technology look different if it was built with faithful perspectives in mind?

McBaine is already in touch with 100+ faith leaders, but she’s seeking to broaden the conversation. Here are three ways you can help:

1. Do you know of faith leaders who are interested in these topics?
2. Do you know of organizations that are bringing together faith leaders?
3. If you are a faith or spiritual leader, we’d love you to fill out this short survey regarding your perspectives and experiences with social media.

Project Liberty news

// TechCrunch profiles Frank McCourt & The People's Bid

An article in TechCrunch highlighted Project Liberty Founder Frank McCourt’s plan to buy TikTok.

// Op-Ed in The Boston Globe on The People’s Bid

An Op-Ed by a journalist in the Boston Globe explained why he’s rooting for Frank McCourt to buy TikTok. He believes The People’s Bid may be our best shot at a new digital revolution.

Other notable headlines

// 💬 TikTok is changing how Gen Z speaks, according to an article in The Economist. On social media, new words spread far and fast.

// 😢 Can AI be blamed for a teen’s suicide? The mother of a 14-year-old Florida boy said he became obsessed with a chatbot on Character.AI before his death, according to an article in the New York Times.

// 🗳 AI is already making it easier to spread disinformation about the election. According to an article in Axios, many might not spot it before they cast their votes this year.

// 🤳 The Trump and Harris campaigns have built huge networks of influencers and content creators focused on getting people to vote, according to an article in WIRED.

// 💯 Grade-tracking apps on their parents’ phones are giving kids anxiety, according to an article in Vox.

// 📱 We’re all getting too many political texts, but it’s not too late to fight back, according to an article in the Washington Post.

Partner news & opportunities

// Governance pptions for generative AI

Florence G'Sell, a Project Liberty Institute grantee, has launched a report, Regulating Under Uncertainty: Governance Options for Generative AI. This report examines the challenges of regulating AI amid rapid advancements, weighing the risks of both premature regulation and inaction. It presents a comprehensive set of governance options to support global policymaker collaboration.

// New report on smartphone policies in schools: evidence & insights

The 5Rights Foundation and LSE's Digital Futures for Children have published a new report on smartphone restrictions in schools, drawing from UK, Singapore, and Colombia case studies. Findings show that bans may improve focus, particularly for students with learning challenges.  For more insights, listen to the latest episode of 5Rights' Tech This Out! Podcast.

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