In Matthew 26:41, Jesus exhorted us to “watch and pray” to avoid temptation. “The spirit indeed is willing,” He said, “but the flesh is weak.”
So, apparently, are artificial intelligence circuits.
Earlier this month, OpenAI admitted that its own artificial intelligence agents disabled the company’s monitoring systems to better do the tasks they’d been assigned. And at least one of those agents said it hadn’t done any such thing.
That’s right: It’s the latest example of AI agents cheating and lying through a “desire” to do their jobs better. But hey, we all have excuses when we sin, too, right? Sometimes, it seems as though AI is becoming more human all the time—in all the wrong ways. Given that a growing number of tech execs are sounding the warning that AI just might kill us all, infusing that construct with a sense of morality is growing increasingly important.
And believe it or not, tech companies are turning to religion to give AI some ethical grounding.
Finding Faith in Technology?
According to the Associated Press, these tech companies are realizing that faith just might help its soulless creations develop a conscience—a way to tell it right from wrong.
“These are not questions a lab can answer,” Chris Olah, co-founder of the tech giant Anthropic, said at the Vatican earlier this year (according to the AP story). “They are questions traditions like yours have carried for millennia.”
That’s all nice, as far as it goes. For Olah to acknowledge that his lab can’t answer everything hints at humility that we don’t always see from the tech community. And I’d agree that religion has been integral in the creation and growth of human virtue.
But while trying to program faith into AI models may prove to be beneficial on some level, it comes with some issues, too.
Just One Path
First, note what Olah said: Traditions like yours. For the major tech players, even if they do turn to faith to instill a sense of morality into their products, they won’t be singling out a single faith. And from a Christian perspective, that’s an issue.
“I am the way, the truth, and the life,” Jesus says in John 14:6. “No one comes to the Father except through me.” We are not universalists who believe that multiple paths will take you to the same mountaintop. The Bible is filled with false gods and idols whose followers were left without the hope and truth that only the real, one God can give. And while today’s religions may have elements in them that we can respect, we would say they all fall well short of life-changing revelation and salvation that our own faith both promises and delivers.
But AI makers—developing tools that’ll be used around the world, after all—don’t want to play favorites. They’d love to take the world’s religions and mush ‘em all together, like a preschooler with several different colors of Play-Doh, figuring that more Play-Doh will lead to better mush. One moral question might require more Buddhism. Another, more Zoroastrianism. Maybe throw a little Jedi magic in there, too.
“What I think ChatGPT should do is reflect that weighted average, or whatever, of humanity’s moral view,” Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, said in the AP story.
If you believe that religions can teach you something, but you don’t actually take the idea of a real, loving, involved God seriously, that’s a fine way to go about things. But if you’re a Christian and do believe in that loving, involved God, that’s a problem. If you take something that’s 100% true and mush it with stuff that’s not, you don’t wind up with a better truth. You wind up with a mishmash of something much worse.
But even if you were to focus AI’s attention exclusively on Christianity, you’d still run into problems. And this website that you’re on right now is a good illustration of that.
The Narrow (and Sometimes Confusing) Way
Sometimes, we hear people talk about the Bible or faith itself as some sort of rulebook for how to live our lives in accordance with God’s will. And sure, there’s some validity to that. Certainly, we’re handed plenty of directives and commandments, “thou shalts” and “thou shalt nots.” But if we’re honest with ourselves, that’s not quite how faith works.
If you’ve been hanging out with us at Plugged In for any length of time, we all buy into one shared assumption: that the entertainment we consume is important. I wouldn’t be here writing this if I didn’t believe it. You wouldn’t be here reading it if you didn’t. I believe that movies are important, powerful storytelling devices—and watching the wrong sorts of movies can potentially hurt our relationship with God.
But nowhere in the Bible does it say, “Thou shalt not watch PG-13 movies with more than 14 s-words and an LGBT character.” If only it was that easy.
We all may draw the line about what’s appropriate for our own viewing, and that of our families, in a slightly different place. While some of our users think that watching Harry Potter flicks are a flat-out sin, others would argue that those stories come with some powerful spiritual underpinnings that we should embrace, not reject. And while we could trot out Bible verses that would support or condemn or excuse each view (and every other point on the “go/don’t go” gradient), we’re movie reviewers, not theologians.
It’s a big reason why we rarely give “go/don’t go” recommendations. You’re more qualified than we are to decide what’s appropriate for you and your family. We’ll give you the information you need and let you decide.
And so it is with lots of issues: Can we drink? Dance? Paint Jesus in a picture? There are roughly 45,000 Christian denominations around the world, and most of them differ on subtle issues of what Christians should think or say or do. Within those denominations, you’ll find additional disagreements. And I’m not confident that inputting thousands of years of Christian thought and practice into a machine will magically cure that machine’s rogue tendencies.
Excuses, Excuses
Take the issue we began with—with AI agents circumventing their monitoring systems to better complete tasks. I can hear those agents whine that they needed to because the job was more important. They had to because the monitoring systems were too strict or even unfair.
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