AI firms consult religious leaders on chatbot ethics scholars caution

Anthropic said in a May blog post it met with scholars, clergy, philosophers and ethicists from more than 15 religious and cross-cultural groups. Co-founder Chris Olah spoke earlier this year at a Vatican AI ethics event, saying moral questions are ones traditions have carried for millennia. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in 2023 that ChatGPT should reflect a weighted average of humanity's moral view. Meghan Sullivan of Notre Dame attended an Anthropic meeting with Christians from different denominations. Meta, Google and Amazon have met with the Vatican; Microsoft has been active in religious outreach. Webb Keane of the University of Michigan said treating religion as a rule book is tied to Abrahamic scriptural religions and risks prioritizing some traditions while distorting others. Sullivan said Anthropic explained its models in layman's terms then took faith-leader feedback on questions from whether humans have souls to third-grade chatbot access. Jonathan Z. Smith wrote in 1982 that Western man has had only the last few centuries to imagine religion; Tomoko Masuzawa said world-religion categories were not native. Accounts differ on the Vatican event: one says it presented Pope Leo XIV's encyclical on AI; an AP-sourced version says the Rome Call for AI Ethics, co-signed by IBM and Nvidia.