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The following is excerpted from the Deseret News. To read the original article, CLICK HERE. 

Society needs artificial intelligence to respectfully and accurately portray all religious beliefs, so a coalition of faith-based schools is creating a system to test how AI programs respond to questions about religion, an apostle said Tuesday in Vatican City.

AI is becoming a primary source of information about faith traditions as more people ask it about faith and belief, said Elder Gerrit W. Gong of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

“Portraying faith traditions accurately or respectfully is not an imposition of religion on AI. Rather, it is a public necessity,” he said on the first day of meetings at the Rome Summit on Ethics and Artificial Intelligence.

The morning after they toured the Sistine Chapel together, Elder Gong and other religious, ethics and technology leaders huddled under umbrellas on their walk through a Roman rainstorm to spend the day at Pope Benedict Hall at the Vatican’s Collegio Teutonico (German College).

Societies as a whole benefit when people of faith and their beliefs are portrayed without bias or discrimination, Elder Gong told them.

He then told the conference that Latter-day Saint computer scientists at Brigham Young University and elsewhere are building a tool to test how well AI programs reflect religions and religious beliefs.

They will work alongside evangelical, Catholic, Jewish and other peers at Baylor University, the University of Notre Dame and Yeshiva University in New York City, he said. The tool would be used to evaluate the moral compass of AI programs.

The vice president for research at Notre Dame said the university wants to be involved to help ensure that human dignity is centered in the implementation of AI technology.

“Technology is a wonderful tool to advance humanity,” Jeffrey Rhoads said, “but if that tool runs unfettered, it also creates unique challenges to humanity that we have to be cognizant of.”

Elder Gong issued an invitation for others to join the multifaith team to help build out what is called the “Faith and Ethics AI Evaluation.”

“We look forward to adding other universities from across the international diversity of faith and ethical traditions,” Elder Gong said.

The effort will include leaders from a pluralistic range of ethical, moral and faith-based traditions and communities, he said.

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