Rome (CNS) — Artificial intelligence risks giving technology the status of a “pseudo-religion” by shaping the way people interact with information and reality, a leading artificial intelligence expert said.
Interacting with large-scale, artificially intelligent language models like OpenAI's ChatGPT “could tear us out of reality,” said Francis, an expert on artificial intelligence and professor of moral theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University. Father Paolo Benanti made this statement on March 7 at a conference hosted by the Pontifical Academy. of theology.
Relying on such models reduces the need for people to engage in the focused thinking required for tasks that can be completed by artificial intelligence technology, thereby increasing their ability to make “enhanced and more sophisticated inferences.” “It could go down,” he said.
He said artificial intelligence could change humanity's relationship with reality “to the point where[humanity's]desire for control, which satisfies the anxieties inherent in the human condition, takes on the tendencies of a pseudo-religion about machines.”
The theologian said that as machines become more and more “humanized,” humans also become more and more “mechanized.” As an example, he suggested considering a young boy performing a task on his phone. “Are his fingers controlling the screen or are the notifications on his phone controlling the boy's actions?” he asked.
“External factors, such as interactions with machines, can change our behavior,” he says.
By using algorithms that consume and process the vast amounts of data that humans generate, “machines can not only predict human behavior, but also generate human behavior,” he said.
But unlike laws enacted by governments that aim to influence human behavior, algorithms are developed by private companies whose primary purpose is financial gain rather than public interest, he said, for example. Referring to the world of e-commerce, he said: Suggest products to users based on collected data about their shopping history and interests.
Father Benanti said the “knowledge” produced by artificial intelligence could create data that would become the primary way people understand and control their reality, which is what religious thinking aims to do. He said that theology must confront such problems. The way people view the world around them is rapidly changing.
