“The danger isn’t that AI will suddenly wake up, it’s that we’ll forget that it hasn’t.”

Dr. Steven Umbrello foreshadowed the dangers of prescribing human traits to artificial intelligence during his keynote presentation to open the “A.I. Is Transforming Society: Are Catholics Ready?” symposium, hosted at St. Mary’s University in Calgary from Oct. 17 to 18.

The managing director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET) think tank and University of Turin senior research fellow said though this generative technology is becoming increasingly sophisticated at mimicking human behaviour, it will always remain a pattern recognition and probability contrivance devoid of an interior life.

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“From an ethical standpoint, AI is a tool — nothing more, nothing less,” said Umbrello. “And tools, no matter how complex, no matter how elegant or how beautiful, they do not have moral understanding. So, when we talk about responsible AI, we're really talking about responsible humans, about the moral framework and intentions of the people who create and who use those systems.”

All four presenters at this forum — co-organized by the university and the Diocese of Calgary — assembling tech experts, ethicists, theologians, clergy leaders and interested lay Catholics, acknowledged how already people are using large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and xAI for companionship and counselling. In fact, earlier this year the Harvard Business Review labelled it as the top use of AI systems.

In addition to Umbrello, the symposium featured Matthew Harvey Sanders, the creator of the most popular Catholic artificial intelligence tool Magisterium AI; Louisa Lodevole, a lecturer in philosophy of law, bio-law and legal informatics at the University of Rome; and Dr. Ed Tse, the founder and CEO of the educational company AI parenting.

Lodevole’s talk about AI from the perspective of Catholic doctrine echoed Umbrello in the respect that she touted how humans are created in the “Imago Dei” — the image of God, the ultimate differentiator from any AI system or humanoid robot.

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“He infused man with vital spirits. The breath by which every human life begins and continues. The inner light, that is the place of God’s presence in man,” said Lodevole. “The Almighty gives a spirit of wisdom and understanding, a spirit of counsel and of strength, a spirit of knowledge and fear of the Lord.”

Conversely, Tse accentuated that the AI “has not eaten from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It doesn’t know.” He stressed the “moment we let the AI make moral decisions, that’s when things go wrong. That is when people get hurt.”

Tse noted that since 2010, considered the year when kids en masse started getting outfitted with electronic devices at young ages, there has been a 338-per-cent increase in teen girl depression and a 70-per-cent rise in teen suicide.

Sanders, who describes himself as “bullish on Catholic AI," said the Catholic Church is the religious entity best equipped to be a leader in the field of AI alignment, the process of designing and training these systems to ensure its goals and behaviours coalesce with human flourishing.

“We might be the only organization on the planet that can do this,” said Sanders, the CEO of the Toronto-based Longbeard tech company. “And that's because Church teaching is so fundamentally consistent, and we have so much insight and so much data.

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“We can show the rest of the world that this is possible, and then maybe in some ways, perhaps share some insights, some technology to help others achieve the same thing.”

Sanders said that a golden path in a world with AI is possible if the Church is effective in its evangelization efforts, but there is also a dark path that could lead to existential crises and a rise in transhumanist ideology.