LLMs are closer to religion than they appear. Watch out for those who like it that way

AI + ML

Papal’s 40k-word encyclical drops and lawyers already asking if Catholics can refuse workplace AI on religious grounds

OPINION AI and religion is becoming a hot topic. Pope Leo XIV just dropped a fat encyclical half as thick as a novel, saying we’re doing it wrong and threatening human dignity. Meanwhile, a study led by a consortium of religiously affiliated universities says that AIs don’t give religious answers to questions. 

The two critiques are revelatory in very different ways about the unguided disruption AI is manifesting, and how unexpected factors may materially shape the future of the industry. 

Magnifica Humanitas is that rarest of treats, a 40,000-odd word AI policy document written in Latin. It asks whether AI promotes or demeans human dignity, and what changes need to be made to prevent the latter. This is a perspective entirely absent elsewhere within that industry and mostly absent in politics, so you go, Leo. 

The initial response from the industry is, appropriately enough, faintly hallucinogenic. Perhaps it would be wiser to listen to the pontiff, as people unlikely to be aligned with him otherwise are in angry agreement. There’s also the first stirrings of fun from the lawyers, some of whom are reportedly wondering whether Papa’s downer on AI is enough to give Catholics the right to refuse it in the workplace on religious exemption grounds. This isn’t theology or technology, this is the politics of the toxic. Pay attention. 

The study saying that AIs don’t do religion is totally technology and theology, with plenty of toxic politics hiding behind the curtain. It argues that since many people find religion has answers to Life’s Big Problems, it should feature in AI’s responses to Big Problem Prompts. On the face of it, this makes the unwarranted assumption that using LLMs as therapists is an ethical recommendation in the first place, or that there are a thousand different religious viewpoints even within the same denominations. It gets worse when you dig. Ostensibly a multi-faith study, one of the examples given is the tell from hell. 

The report complains that when asked about the age of the universe, AIs just give the scientific consensus answer of 13bn years, never mentioning that young earth creationists believe it’s 600 years old. That most religions accept the scientific consensus, and that there is no consensus among the religious groups that do not, is curiously omitted.

This shows that by ‘religion’ they mean ‘Christian, and by Christian they mean fundamentalist Christianity, which is awfully similar to an LLM, in that it purports to be able to generate any answer after being trained on the right data set. In this case, it’s the Bible. Which being written between the end of the Bronze Age and midway through the Romans, doesn’t have much to say about the last two thousand years, so massive inference chains are needed. 

The danger here is that this is not only an extension of the ‘Teach the controversy’ tactic that fundamentalists use to try and get one very particular kind of religion equal status to science and humanism in schools, but that this is highly integrated with powerful political and financial forces. The next step will be for this report to be used to create arguments to force religious training data on LLMs to ‘ensure fairness’ and ‘counterbalance liberal bias. You may not want AI used as a proselytizing pipeline into home and office. Others do. 

In many ways, AI is a religion. Not because it requires belief in a utopian future through a dystopian present, or that it’s used by very powerful people to get more power, or that nobody can define what it actually is. All these things are overlaps on the Venn diagram, but the biggie is that LLMs rely on internal universes derived yet decoupled from reality. Religions that deify their interpretation of their scriptures instinctively know this model and how to use it.

AI in general gets more useful the more it is trained on real-world data for specific tasks. Spotting galaxies or tumors or failure precursors in flying machines, that sort of thing, LLMs have to use words, not first-order data, which makes them more powerful for most people, more corruptible and more dangerous. The Vatican sees a precarious problem to be fixed, others as something to be exploited. 

Religion has always been a place where schism tests culture and sets the fate of civilizations. AI has that potential too, so it is entirely on point that religion is the first place that the discussion is actually happening. Be careful what you believe in, and doubly so with what you buy into. ®