THE Archbishop of Canterbury has raised a series of “urgent new questions” about AI. Leading a debate on the subject in the House of Lords on Friday, she asked: “Does AI make human life more human?”
Archbishop Mullally, opening a debate on the impact of AI on human relationships and society, warned that power corrupted, chatbots were facilitating violence against women and girls, and that AI sometimes invented false information.
She also said that AI could become the “tool of the autocrat”, and that the potential for real harm was “still to be fully realised”.
The Archbishop told peers: “There is a serious risk this will lead to a fundamental breakdown in trust across society. The real danger is not our rising gullibility, but our rising cynicism — it’s not that we will believe anything, it is that we will believe nothing. If we cannot trust information we see online, then perhaps we cannot trust people we meet.”
Praising AI as a “remarkable product of human creativity” which had led to “extraordinary discoveries and breakthroughs”, she nonetheless asked: “What are the implications for our human relationships, for our connections with family and friends? How does it impact on our working lives — the existence of, or the quality of, our jobs?
“What are the implications for warfare, for climate change, for our engagement with information and democracy? Just because we could create something or deploy technology in a certain way, does that mean we should?”
Archbishop Mullally began her speech by quoting Hebrews 2.7: “You made them a little lower than the angels; you crowned them with glory and honour and put everything under their feet.”
She said: “God created human beings in his own image, with glory and honour. Each and every one of us, regardless of who we are or what we do.
“We carry an inherent dignity and immeasurable value. This is not in spite of our weakness, vulnerabilities, and limitations, but in many ways because of and through them. God made us to be relational beings, in need of him and in need of others, not sufficient on our own. I start here because, fundamentally, our vision of what it is to be human, of our glorious humanity, must inform the rest of our debate about technology and AI.”
The Archbishop referred several times to Pope Leo’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, launched at the Vatican on 25 May (News, 26 May; Analysis, 5 June).
In it, the Pope condemned the culture of power surrounding AI, and called for urgent moves to safeguard humanity from new and emerging threats.
“Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together,” he wrote.
“Each generation inherits the task of shaping its own era, of guiding history to become a place where the dignity of every person is safeguarded, justice is promoted and fraternity made possible. Yet every era also runs the risk of creating an inhumane and more unjust world.”
The Archbishop said that the question of whether AI made human life more human “matters for those designing, developing, and building the technology, as they think about what ideologies and belief systems should underpin the models — for there is no such thing as values-neutral technology.
“It matters for governments and policymakers, as they determine what should and should not be permitted and regulated. And it matters for those using the technology.”
She warned: “Humans are at risk of being eroded, devalued and replaced by AI, as people turn to chatbots rather than other human beings for comfort or wisdom in moments of loneliness, loss, anxiety or pain.”
What it meant to be human formed the first of three “fundamental questions” posed by the Archbishop “to help us work out what a pro-human framework for AI would look like, and how it informs practice”.
She asked: “If God crowned humans with glory and honour, how will AI respect — indeed cultivate — that sort of dignity and value?” Acknowledging that there were many ways in which AI was helping “to enhance human dignity, to protect and uphold life,” she said that nursing and medical care were areas “where the value for human dignity is visible in some of the most tangible, practical ways”. She also said that there were many ways in which AI was having “a hugely positive impact on healthcare”.
But, she said: “I don’t believe that a robot or AI model will or should ever replace human beings in some of these settings. Sitting at the bedside of a patient to deliver very difficult news or supporting a woman through the delivery of her baby are deeply vulnerable moments where human touch, human eye contact, human emotional intelligence, are invaluable.”
Archbishop Mullally went on to say that there were other uses of AI today which, rather than enhancing human dignity, were “providing new ways of degrading it or violating it”. She cited a recent report from Durham University which presented evidence that chatbots are facilitating violence against women and girls by allowing “role-plays of incest, child sexual abuse and rape”, which risked the normalisation and the legitimisation of such abuse.
“These harms are not simply the result of user misuse — AI platforms design choices, policies, and governance failures are encouraging and enabling them, and existing regulation is wholly inadequate to prevent them.”
Her second question was: “What are we here for and what gives our lives meaning and purpose?” She said: “The Christian faith teaches that we are designed for relationship, relationship with God and with others, and with the created world around us. We find meaning and purpose in these relationships, and in dignified work.”
Purpose and work were profoundly linked, but, she said, “We are already seeing record numbers of 18 to 24-year-olds neither in education, training, nor employment, and this is only set to worsen as agentic AI starts to come online. One of the areas of greatest gravity that this debate must address is how we, as the political class, are going to help young people navigate a rapidly changing world.”
AI was also negatively impacting people’s ability to think independently, she said.
Her third question echoed that of Pontius Pilate to Jesus: “What is truth?”
She said: “According to the Christian faith, truth is not something we define ourselves or alter to suit our own personal, political or commercial ends. Truth is embodied in the person of Jesus Christ — and expressed in loving God and loving others. Truth is a fundamental foundation on which our personal lives and societies are built. . .
“Generative AI cannot tell right from wrong, fact from fiction. Instead of truth it produces a statistical echo of what has been said before, in material it has been trained on. It reinforces biases inherent in the way that it has been coded, as well as social biases present in the material it has been fed.
“It also simply invents information — one study found that chatbots did this at least three per cent of the time, some as much as 27 per cent.”
She continued: “Even more concerning is that AI can be weaponised by malign actors — it is the perfect tool for someone wanting to create fake news. Its ability to disperse disinformation, discredit legitimate information, censor other information, and game algorithms has the potential to distort and rewrite reality, to present fiction as fact, and all with the veneer of objective truth.”
Un-inventing AI was not an option, she said; nor would society want to be without its positive contributions. But, she asked: “What are we to do with a technology which places great power in the hands of those who own, control, and use it?
“Power is not inherently wrong — but it carries great responsibility and, often, great risks for human beings, as we have seen repeatedly through history. Power corrupts, and it takes people of great virtue and moral strength to withstand its temptations.”
She quoted her predecessor Archbishop William Temple, who described a central occupation of Christian social thought as being “man’s dignity, tragedy, and destiny”.
“I have spoken today of humanity’s inherent dignity, but it is our fallenness, the tragedy, which makes technology’s power so seductive and the risk of its abuse so often our story. In the Christian tradition, there is a call that overrides the lust for power – it is the call to service. The distinctly Christian version of service is sacrifice, and Jesus’ life, death and resurrection is the perfect example.”
The Archbishop concluded: “Technology this revolutionary must not simply be unleashed on our societies: it must be developed with us and for us — at a human pace, with human objectives.
“Above all, we must put people — our common, glorious humanity — ahead of profit, convenience or technological progress at all costs. To ensure that we harness AI to serve humanity, to be an extraordinary tool in the creation of a more just, abundant and hope-filled world.”
Later in the debate, the Bishop of Oxford, Dr Steven Croft, the lead bishop on AI and technology, raised the issue of those profiting from AI.
“The primary risk of AI in the present moment is that the technology is being developed primarily for profit, financial gain, and shareholder benefit. . . rather than for the benefit of humanity and our common home,” he said. “Those commercial gains are mind-boggling for the few. But as profits rise, the very concept of what it means to be human is being reduced.”
The Bishop of Leicester, the Rt Revd Martyn Snow, offered two suggestions to help ensure AI worked “for the good of relationships and our shared life in this nation”.
The first was to “require social media platforms to change their structural incentives so that they algorithmically deprioritise content damaging to public debate”. Secondly, he said: “Following the EU, we should mandate a crisis protocol, a set of obligations that come into force when a platform’s content begins to threaten public order or social cohesion in a measurable way, as it did in Leicester in 2022, when false claims about attacks on Muslims and Hindus fuelled unrest.”
The Bishop of Portsmouth, Dr Jonathan Frost, the lead bishop on education, raised the importance of human agency in the face of AI advances. “I believe that flourishing children in flourishing schools offer society the best long-term opportunity to enact social change and community transformation,” he said.
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