From identity theft to sophisticated malware attacks, cyber criminals keep coming up with new scam methods.

Widely-available generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools have now added a new layer of complexity to the cybersecurity landscape. Staying on top of your online security is more important than ever.

The rise of dark LLMs

One of the most sinister adaptations of current AI is the creation of "dark LLMs" (large language models).

These uncensored versions of everyday AI systems like ChatGPT are re-engineered for criminal activities. They operate without ethical constraints, and with alarming precision and speed.

Cyber criminals deploy dark LLMs to automate and enhance phishing campaigns, create sophisticated malware, and generate scam content.

To achieve this, they engage in LLM "jailbreaking" - using prompts to get the model to bypass its built-in safeguards and filters.

For instance, FraudGPT writes malicious code, creates phishing pages, and generates undetectable malware. It offers tools for orchestrating diverse cybercrimes, from credit card fraud to digital impersonation.

FraudGPT is advertised on the dark web and the encrypted messaging app Telegram. Its creator openly markets its capabilities, emphasising the model's criminal focus.

Another version, WormGPT, produces persuasive phishing emails that can trick even vigilant users. Based on the GPT-J model, WormGPT is also used for creating malware and launching "business email compromise" attacks - targeted phishing of specific organisations.

What can we do to protect ourselves?

Despite the looming threats, there's a silver lining. As the challenges have advanced, so have the ways we can defend against them.

AI-based threat detection tools can monitor malware and respond to cyber attacks more effectively. However, humans need to stay in the mix to keep an eye on how these tools respond, what actions they take, and whether there are vulnerabilities to fix.

You may have heard keeping your software up to date is crucial for security. It might feel like a chore, but it really is a critical defence strategy. Updates patch up the vulnerabilities that cyber criminals try to exploit.

Are your files and data regularly backed up? It's not just about preserving files in case of a system failure. Regular backups are a fundamental protection strategy. You can reclaim your digital life without caving to extortion if you're targeted by a ransomware attack - when criminals lock up your data and demand a ransom payment before they release it.

Cyber criminals who send phishing messages can leave clues such as poor grammar, generic greetings, suspicious email addresses, overly urgent requests, or suspicious links. Developing an eye for these signs is as essential as locking your door at night.

If you don't already use strong, unique passwords and multi-factor authentication, it's time to do so. This combination multiplies your security, making it dramatically more difficult for criminals to access your accounts.

What can we expect in the future?

Our online existence will continue to intertwine with emerging technologies like AI. We can expect more sophisticated cyber crime tools to emerge, too.

Malicious AI will enhance phishing, create sophisticated malware and improve data mining for targeted attacks. AI-driven hacking tools will become widely available and customisable.

In response, cybersecurity will have to adapt, too. We can expect automated threat hunting, quantum-resistant encryption, AI tools that help to preserve privacy, stricter regulations and international cooperation.

The role of government regulations

Stricter government regulations on AI are one way to counter these advanced threats. This would involve mandating the ethical development and deployment of AI technologies, ensuring they're equipped with robust security features, and adhere to stringent standards.

In addition to tighter regulations, we also need to improve how organisations respond to cyber incidents, and what mechanisms there are for mandatory reporting and public disclosure.

By requiring companies to promptly report cyber incidents, authorities can act swiftly. They can mobilise resources to address breaches before they escalate into major crises.

This proactive approach can significantly mitigate the impact of cyber attacks, preserving both public trust and corporate integrity.

Further, cyber crime knows no borders. In the era of AI-powered cyber crime, international collaboration is essential. Effective global cooperation can streamline how authorities track and prosecute cyber criminals, creating a unified front against cyber threats.

As AI-powered malware proliferates, we're at a critical junction in the global tech journey - we need to balance innovation (new AI tools, new features, more data) with security and privacy.

Overall, it's best to be proactive about your own online security. That way you can stay one step ahead in the ever-evolving cyber battleground.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

• Bayu Anggorojati is Assistant Professor, Cyber Security Indonesia

Intricate artistic renditions of Jesus, whether built with plastic bottles or carved out of sand, are among the most common images posted on Facebook. Jesus has recently taken on sea creature forms, mainly shrimp, crabs and sea horses.

Female flight attendants, many of whom are East Asian, are often depicted in unexpected scenarios. They are seen praying with Jesus, holding crosses, and even covered in mud. In a truly unexpected crossover event, some images show these flight attendants posing with shrimp Jesus.

Also particularly popular are images of young black children showing off masterly pieces of artwork they supposedly built, such as Jesus made of fruit, cars made of plastic bottles, and tigers made of tyre treads.

Most of the synthetic images posted on pages or in posts do not have any indication that they are AI-generated, despite Meta's requirement for users to label AI-generated content on its platforms. Meta is currently working on methods to automatically detect such content. Meta did not respond to a request for comment. Read more

I asked this peculiar question to my two children after reading about "grief tech," the latest wonder child of artificial intelligence that allows the living to remain digitally connected to the dead through "ghostbots."

I explained to our children that they could feed our texts and emails to an A.I. platform that would create chatbots that mimic our language and tone and could respond to them through text after our death.

Although the idea of death made them shudder, their response was immediate and firm: "We don't want an A.I. mommy and daddy. It wouldn't be real."

Grief tech

Like our children, I have had a visceral response to the burgeoning realm of grief tech.

As an attorney and a graduate student of theology, I could not help but envisage the intersections of law, theology and ethics.

And as a Catholic woman who has experienced profound loss and grief in four consecutive miscarriages, these glaring intersections were heightened within my body.

On a cerebral and bodily level, I found myself grappling with what personhood means in relation to grief tech.

With the creation of A.I., anthropomorphised chatbots are one critical example of how the rapidly advancing technology is testing the limits of the human condition.

At this critical juncture, it is important for us, as people of faith and goodwill, to probe A.I.'s potential to divorce us from our humanity.

Grief tech is raising significant issues that bear on what it means to be human, specifically implicating our embodiment, relationality, finitude and death.

Not only does grief tech try to divorce the human body from any concept of personhood, but grief tech's endeavor to immortalise A.I. creations of the deceased stands in opposition to the Christian understanding of death.

Technology does not simply advance without the sanctioning of human beings.

While human existence is vulnerable to grief and death, we must affirm the body as intrinsic to our humanity and to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, through which we enter into relationship with God, ourselves and one another.

Our theological tradition—and specifically the work of Karl Rahner and Tina Beattie—can help us reflect on these imperatives and how they play out in the future.

The spectre of grief tech

A.I. has emerged within the last two years as a formidable instrument of communication and relationship in various arenas.

Large language models (L.L.M.s), a particular form of generative A.I., have facilitated this transition, with L.L.M.s that have been trained using volumes of data acquiring the extraordinary capability to mimic human beings through language.

L.L.M.s are not sentient, but their neural networks enable them to generate lifelike responses that can feel real to actual human beings.

One nascent industry that has capitalised on L.L.M.s is grief tech.

"Death is a lucrative business," wrote Mihika Agarwal in Vox late last year, and grief tech seeks to console the living through apps and programs that "re-create the essence of the deceased."

As intimated by the question to my two children, ghostbots are a distinct version of grief tech.

Through the power of A.I., we can build ghostbots out of the dead using the data—texts, emails, voice conversations, etc.—of our deceased loved ones.

Once L.L.M.s are fed this data, companies like Open A.I., Séance A.I. and You, Only Virtual can generate ghostbots that immortalise the deceased through text-based chat.

Although ghostbots cannot think, feel or have bodily form, their words offer a semblance of humanity by imitating the language of our dearly departed.

Although grief tech is still in its initial phase, it has already transformed the way we grieve.

At the touch of an app, we can quickly comfort ourselves by interacting with ghostbots, short-circuiting the traditional way of grieving.

We can easily download a relationship rather than accept our reality and sit with our loss and pain.

Death loses its sense of finality, emboldening us to maintain relationships even beyond the grave.

The dead may be physically gone, but they can now "‘live' on our everyday devices," wrote Aimee Pearcy in The Guardian last year, buried "in our pockets—where they wait patiently to be conjured into life with the swipe of a finger."

The concreteness of human existence

Ghostbots may bring comfort and closure to the living, but grief tech raises serious issues.

At the outset, there is the risk that users will become emotionally or psychologically dependent on ghostbots due, in part, to their instant accessibility and our ability to imbue them with familiarity and meaning.

Ghostbots may feel real to us, but they cannot supplant healthy, concrete relationships with other human beings.

Entangled with this psychological risk are ethical and legal concerns.

While some companies tout "Do Not Bot Me" clauses and "Digital Do Not Reanimate" orders to prohibit individuals from turning others into ghostbots without their permission, not all grief tech apps and programs require the deceased's consent before they die.

Further, even with these possible legal protections, there remains the issue of enforcement, exacerbated by the fact that we are constantly exchanging photos, texts and emails daily.

We retain the data of others on our digital devices, and no federal law prevents us from building bots out of the dead or the living.

Our legal system's present inability to protect the humanity of the deceased accentuates the final ethical concern of instrumentalisation.

Through generative A.I., we now have the capacity to reduce our deceased loved ones to digital instruments for maintaining relationship.

With their data at our disposal, we can distill their human "essence" and contain it in eternal ghostbots that respond to us 24/7.

Whether the app or program is free or not, grief tech companies are all too willing to monetise the dead as a service to help grieving individuals.

Our dearly departed are resurrected as a technological means of support, one that can comfort us while avoiding the realities of the human body and death.

However, rather than being swept up by A.I.'s wave of "inevitability" as the only future awaiting us, people of faith can demand that we not blithely surrender our humanity to technology.

We must get to the heart of the matter and articulate a philosophical and theological anthropology that respects the concreteness and finality of human existence.

We must do this if we are to challenge grief tech's subterfuge of artificial intimacy as authentic relationship.

What does it mean to be human?

The Christian Scriptures reveal the body as constitutive of the human person. In the Book of Genesis, we are told humans are created in the imago Dei, the image and likeness of God (1:27).

Our inviolable dignity is intrinsic to our bodies, which radiate our imago Dei and particular uniqueness as individuals.

There is no Cartesian separation or Manichean division of our being. To paraphrase the theologian Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel, we are our bodies, and the human body is good.

In the Gospels, "the flesh in its dignity" is affirmed and glorified in Jesus of Nazareth, the incarnate Son of God.

As Moltmann-Wendel notes, the life of Jesus is about "God's becoming body."

Jesus enters our world through the body of Mary, "begotten rather than fabricated," and his words and actions touch "human beings in their totality, in their bodies."

According to Moltmann-Wendel, we see the totality of human beings most vividly in Jesus' encounter with the woman who bled for 12 unrelenting years (Mk 5:25-34).

After she touches his clothes, grasping Jesus in his bodily nature, the healing between them is body to body.

She is immediately filled with his power and made whole; and he, though experiencing a flowing out of his power, remains whole (v. 29-30).

Through the woman and Jesus, we discover how, as Motlmann-Wendel claims, "God encounters us in the human body," inviting us into communion with him.

In a similar way, the Catholic theologian Margaret A. Farley, R.S.M., illuminates our concrete reality as human beings through her formulation of a sexual ethics that is germane to all human relationships.

In Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics, she offers a vision of the human person as an "embodied spirit" or "inspirited body" whom God invites to a destiny of relationship and wholeness.

Crucial to Farley's vision are two obligating features of personhood: autonomy and relationality.

In our autonomy, we can decide our own destiny, and in our relationships, we recognise the intrinsic value of others and our dependency upon them.

Consequently, autonomy and relationality "ground an obligation to respect persons as ends in themselves and forbid, therefore, the use of persons as mere means" (emphasis in the original).

When we instrumentalise others, we violate their autonomy and foreclose the possibility of authentic relationship.

A "just love," then, is true and good insofar as it affirms and respects the concrete reality of the beloved. It proclaims, in word and deed, that "I want you to be, and to be full and firm in being."

In contrast to the anthropologies of Moltmann-Wendel and Farley, grief tech abolishes the human body.

When we encounter one another as persons, we do not meet as diaphanous spirits but as embodied spirits, inspirited bodies, radiating the imago Dei.

Each person is an "incarnate singularity," to use the language of Roberto Dell'Oro in his 2022 article in the Journal of Moral Theology, "Can a Robot Be a Person?"

Each person is unique and possesses an unrepeatable history; our body is inseparable from our destiny; and despite death, we do not lose our humanity.

However, through the power of A.I., grief tech has ruptured what it means to be human.

Death's finality presents grief tech with the lucrative opportunity to discard the body and profit from our loss and pain.

Through ghostbots, companies offer grieving individuals the promise of eternal relationship with the dead.

This promise is destructive and deceptive, divorcing our deceased loved ones from their bodies and extracting an "essence" from their data that fails to capture and affirm the totality of their human existence.

Ghostbots can neither experience nor embody what the deceased loved, what they valued and what they lived for.

Instead, the deceased are reduced to a "stable static entity," to use Agarwal's words.

This "stable static entity" is the antithesis of the complex, dynamic person who is loved by God and birthed into the world.

They are essentialised and homogenised. By dispensing with the human body, the deceased can now be objectified as digital instruments for relationship.

The relationship that grief tech offers is an artificial intimacy that can never replicate the dynamics of human relationship.

A.I. has no relationship with itself and must be programmed to create what human beings intend.

In order to generate ghostbots then, we must feed L.L.M.s the data of the deceased, specifically their words that we want to hear.

We must create the A.I. image of the deceased that we want, with or without their consent.

Thus, what emerges from this interaction is not a two-sided, dynamic relationship between two distinct persons but a one-sided, static relationship with ourselves vis-à-vis a ghostbot.

This is a relationship that we imbue with meaning by using the dead as a means to comfort and console us. It is not just love.

Ultimately, grief tech's flight from the body creates an illusion. When we fail to respect the body, we fail to respect persons as ends in themselves. When we fail to see the body, we fail to see God.

Karl Rahner, Tina Beattie and life through death

Even in death, the human body remains a key element in one's own history.

The flesh, created in the image and likeness of God, is still destined for God and summoned to glory by God.

We cannot deny the vulnerability and finality of the human condition, but we must also recognise how life emerges by way of death in the body story of Jesus.

In the cross, our bodies hold the promise of redemption through Jesus, the "first born from the dead" (Col 1:19).

The theologians Tina Beattie and Karl Rahner can help parse this crucial notion in Christian theology.

Unlike the founder of You, Only Virtual, who wishes to end goodbyes and the human emotion of grief, the theologian Tina Beattie invites us to "befrien[d] death" through the mystery of the Incarnation.

Although death is certain for each one of us, it is also a mystery exempt from human control.

We tend to perceive it as "a mortal enemy," a specter lurking in the shadows until we are forced to confront its undeniable reality.

Beattie recognises our fear but points to the hope embodied in Christian anthropology, which offers a paradoxical view of death as a rebirth and a beginning:

"The death of Christ tells us that God, like us, is vulnerable to love's wounding and sorrow, but the resurrection of Christ whispers of a God whose dying is fecundity," she writes in her book New Catholic Feminism: Theology and Theory.

Karl Rahner develops this theme of life through death in his book, On the Theology of Death.

He emphasises how death is the universal event that strikes us in our totality as human persons, but cautions that we should not regard death as a pointless suffering nor as a phantom waiting to strike.

Although death remains a great mystery, faith illuminates its truth in the death of Jesus Christ. Jesus, the incarnate Word of God, "became consubstantial with us" and "died our death."

According to Rahner, the real miracle of Christ's death is that death was transformed into life, with the "flesh of sin" transformed into the "flesh of grace."

Death is a consequence of sin, and only in Christ's death could death usher in God's arrival in the final moment of our life when we feel most abandoned by God.

In that moment, sin's power reaches its apex but God's grace overpowers sin.

Consequently, death becomes "the highest act of believing, hoping, and loving," a "faith in darkness, hope against hope, and love of God who only appears as Lord and as inexorable justice."

Through Jesus' death, God's grace becomes ours.

Thus, Rahner invites us to "hearken to the gospel of death, which is life."

Although the natural order of life ends in death, he challenges the dominant view of death as merely a natural process divorced from our spiritual, supernatural existence of grace.

Contrary to Martin Heidegger's notion that human beings are "being-towards-death," moving in life toward death and shaped by its reality, Rahner believes we are being-towards-glory.

From the very beginning of our life, we are not oriented toward death but toward the glory of God, and death is not the end of our existence but the beginning of eternity with God.

This involves the affirmation and fulfillment of the human person through a glorifying change in which the body remains whole. In the glorious grace of Christ's death, we will not perish at death but will be transformed in the resurrection of the body.

In contrast to the Christian anthropology of death presented by Beattie and Rahner, grief tech exploits our fear by offering a semblance of human control over death.

This control is illusory and, to quote Rahner, only "degrades [our] anxiety before death to a mere expression of self-preservation."

We end up trying to extend the finite limits of our own lives by controlling our loved ones in death.

Grief tech cannot alleviate our fear of death, but only pushes us to eternalise the essentialisation of human persons through ghostbots.

Such an attempt perpetuates an artificial intimacy that can never replicate authentic relationship.

Emboldened by A.I. and without the constraints of the law, we can resurrect the dead in our own image and, as a result, the dead cannot rest in peace.

A.I.'s attempt to control or circumvent death diminishes the humanity of the deceased.

Instead of offering immortality, grief tech offers perpetual mortality that can neither capture the totality of our deceased loved ones as human persons nor comprehend the ultimate glory of the body or eternity with God.

The proponents of grief tech are unable to imagine how death could lead to wondrous new life and new relationship with God and one another.

Life after ghostbots

We are our bodies, and our bodies are inextricably tied to our relationship with God, ourselves and one another.

We are not data or digital instruments to be used and manipulated, in life or in death. Furthermore, we must not abandon the human body to try to conquer death.

Though our life in the world will eventually cease, death is not the end of who we are.

We, as human persons, are destined for God, in our beginning and in our end.

The human body is a promise for glory, and Jesus Christ proclaims who we are in his life, death and resurrection.

Despite grief tech's promise to console us through eternal ghostbots, we cannot surrender our humanity for an artificial intimacy divorced from concrete reality.

With the rapid advancement of generative A.I., what is at stake is us.

We are unique persons created and loved by God whose totality cannot be distilled by technology.

Ghostbots are a deformation of the human person, and we must draw the line between the real and the virtual, the authentic and the counterfeit.

• First published in America magazine
• Eryn Reyes Leong is an attorney, pursuing a master of theology degree at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, Calif.

Defrocking Justin

After Catholic Answers, a site devoted to evangelising for Catholicism, introduced the character to answer questions about the faith, Catholics on social media called the character a "scandalising mockery of the sacred priesthood".

It only offers "a substitute for real interaction," they said.

On April 24, Catholic Answers apologised for the experiment, and Justin was reintroduced as a lay theologian.

What's wrong with AI evangelisation

Catholics close to the Vatican's work on artificial intelligence say that Justin captures the possible problems with AI evangelisation.

He also captures the reasons for caution in Pope Francis's and other church officials' attempts to tackle AI, even as the technology is becoming an increasingly buzzy topic at the Vatican.

The Rev. Philip Larrey is a professor in the department of formative education at Boston College.

He said that while he thinks Catholic Answers are a good group, "they were a little bit too quick to enter into something which is extremely complicated, and that is interactive artificial intelligence."

San Jose, California, Bishop Oscar Cantú, who leads the Catholic faithful in Silicon Valley, said that AI doesn't come up much with parishioners in his diocese.

Nonetheless, as a leader in the computing capital of the world, Cantú said he has engaged with AI as a global and moral issue, even if he hasn't "delved into it too much."

Pointing to the adage coined by Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg, "move fast and break things," the bishop said, "with AI, we need to move very cautiously and slowly and try not to break things.

"The things we would be breaking are human lives and reputations."

Inappropriate imitations

Experts agreed that Father Justin's imitation of the sacrament of confession was highly inappropriate.

Cantú said, "If we have some sort of a robot in the guise of a priest, it can confuse" people about the fact that the sacraments must be celebrated in person.

"Just because Father Justin recites the formula, that doesn't make it a sacrament," he said.

The bishop cautioned that AI chatbots should make very clear that they are AI.

"It's so critical that we be as transparent as possible, for the sake of the people we're trying to guide," Cantú added.

Even Justin introducing itself as a lay theologian is problematic.

"A person who may be incredibly knowledgeable of Scripture and of church teaching but is not a person of faith does not do theology, because theology begins with faith," the bishop said.

Noreen Herzfeld is a professor of theology and computer science at St. John's University and the College of St. Benedict and one of the editors of a book about AI sponsored by the Vatican Dicastery for Culture and Education.

She said that the AI character was previously "impersonating a priest, which is considered a very serious sin in Catholicism."

AI can be useful

The leaders don't dismiss the usefulness of AI when used properly.

Cantú said that AI can do "tremendous work" as "a tool that can be used for good for doing research."

But, he added, "A person of faith doing theology then needs to judge the credibility of each source and the authority of each source."

Larrey, who has worked closely with both Vatican and AI leaders on the ethical issues surrounding AI, emphasised that Pope Francis is interested in "person-centered AI,".

That means AI must be used "for the good of human beings" and "not the detriment of people."

The best example of AI being used for evangelisation, Larrey said, is Magisterium AI.

It is a chatbot developed by Longbeard, a digital strategy firm founded by a former seminarian named Matthew Harvey Sanders, a friend of Larrey's.

The bot explains church teaching in a format like ChatGPT.

It does this by drawing on official church teachings, as well as select writings such as the works of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, linking to the documents that informed its answer.

Larrey distinguishes such automated research from generative AI, which learns and experiments with its newfound knowledge.

"When you have a generative AI, if you're not careful, it gets out of hand," he said.

Accuracy is of concern

Accuracy issues, Herzfeld said, is one of many reasons it should not be used for evangelisation.

"As much as you beta test one of these chatbots, you will never get rid of hallucinations" — moments when the AI makes up its own answers, she said.

"The problem is actually built into how they work," Herzfeld continued.

"They work on statistics, on probabilities as to what words and phrases should follow, and they do not have internal mental models of the world. And without that, they will always get off track."

Herzfeld said that an AI is only as good as the data it is trained on.

On issues where the church is divided, she said, "I could see bots out there giving competing answers, for example, on the desirability of the Latin Mass or the role of women in the church."

Herzfeld expressed concern, too, that people who are not well-versed in technology may believe computers have a "certain level of infallibility,".

She also worries that turning to AI bots will lead to spiritual "de-skilling," convincing young people to think "religion is just about answers."

"When I was their age, I was shy, and if I'd had a bot to answer my questions, I'd have gone to a bot instead of going to my pastor or even going to my parents to ask questions about religion," Herzfeld said.

Forming relationships with AI instead of with other people or God could become a type of idolatry, she adds.

Larrey, who has been studying AI for nearly 30 years and is in conversation with Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, is optimistic that the technology will improve.

He said Altman is already making progress on the hallucinations, on its challenges to users' privacy and reducing its energy use. A recent analysis estimated that by 2027, artificial intelligence could suck up as much electricity as the population of Argentina or the Netherlands.

Just chat with a real priest

Larrey understands that Catholic Answers' Justin was designed to "get people who would otherwise not be interested in the Catholic faith," but also thinks chatbots should not vie with real priests.

"Why don't you just go down to your parish and talk to a priest? They're not extinct, you know," he said.

For evangelisation, "I think you need people to contact and to attract other people," said Larrey. "We will never eliminate that step."

Cantú believes this is the ultimate lesson to be drawn from the ill-fated Father Justin.

"The faith is not just about answers. It's not just about information. It's about encounter, a personal encounter with Christ, with real people," he said.

Just as rank-and-file Catholics should exercise caution with AI for evangelisation, Cantú suggested similar care from priests who might turn to ChatGPT for an assist when writing their homilies.

While the AI's suggestion can be a good starting point for priests who are "pressed for time," Cantú said, the priest must make the homily his own.

"When anyone within the church, a person of faith, expresses the truth, to some degree, they're opening a window to the mind of God because God is truth." '

In the end, the bishop said, "It has to be my words and my act of faith.

"A robot can't do that because it's not an act of faith."

• First published in Religion News Service
• Aleja Hertzler-McCain is an author at Religion News Service.

It seems that the wedding industry has found a new attraction to add to its repertoire, moving beyond traditional offerings of photo booths, monogrammed dance floors, and dove releases.

The new attraction is called Party Robot, an imposing eight-foot-tall humanoid machine, that pumps its metallic fists to the beat of thumping electronic music, flanked by servers carrying sparklers and dessert trays.

However, some may think having a giant robot pointing its weapon at your loved ones may not be the most ideal way to celebrate the union of two people.

Adrian Zerla, the proud owner of the Party Robot.

He has a collection of five Party Robots, Zerla offers a unique suite of party services, including DJ and lighting.

Last year alone, his robots were the life of over 200 events, spanning from bar or bat mitzvahs to quinceañeras and even gender-reveal parties.

"They even requested the robot to make a grand entrance in either pink or blue," Zerla shares. (In a particularly memorable event, another company sent a Party Robot to a reception for an infant's Catholic baptism.)

But not everyone is getting the same vaccine.

When you sign up for vaccination, you are sent a vial with instructions to send a sample of your saliva to the nearest laboratory. Just a few hours later you receive a message telling you which vaccine you should get.

Your neighbour also signed up for vaccination. But their vaccine is different from yours.

Both of you are now vaccinated and protected, although each of you received your vaccines depending on "who you are".

Your genetics, age, gender, and myriad of other factors are captured in a "model" that predicts and determines the best option to protect you from the virus.

It all sounds a bit like science fiction. But since the decoding of the human genome in 2003, we have entered the age of precision prevention.

New Zealand has a long-standing newborn screening programme.

This includes genome sequencing machines available nationwide and a genetic health service.

Programmes such as these open up the possibilities of public health genomics and precision public health for everyone.

The further expansion of these programmes, as well as the expansion of the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning to enable a shift to more personalised preventive care, will change how public health care is delivered.

At the same time, these developments raise wider concerns over individual choice versus the greater good, personal privacy, and who is responsible for the protection of New Zealanders and their health information.

What is precision prevention?

Think of precision prevention (also known as personalised prevention) as public health action tailored to the individual rather than broader groups of society.

This targeted healthcare is achieved by balancing a range of variables (including your genes, life history and environment) with your risks (including everything that changes within you as you grow older).

While advances in genomics are making precision prevention possible, machine learning algorithms fuelled by our personal data have made it closer to a reality.

We generate data about ourselves every day - via social media, smartwatches and other wearable devices - helping to train algorithms to match medical prevention measures with individuals.

Combine all of these with AI-driven predictive modelling, and you have a system that can predict the current and future state of your health with an eerie level of accuracy, and help you take steps to prevent disease.

Safety and delay

The Prime Minister's Chief Science Advisor recently published a report mapping out the landscape of artificial intelligence and machine learning in New Zealand over the next five years.

While the report authors didn't specifically reference "precision prevention", they did include examples of this approach, such as computer vision augmented mammography.

But as the report suggests, adoption tends to fall behind the pace of innovation in AI.

Te Whatu Ora-Health New Zealand has also not approved emerging large language models and generative artificial intelligence tools as safe and effective for use in healthcare.

This means generative AI-driven precision prevention practices, such as conversational AI for public health messaging, may have to wait before they can be deemed safe to use.

Move forward with caution

There is much to be excited about the prospects of the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning in ushering in a new age of precision prevention and preventive health. But at the same time, we must temper this with caution.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning may increase access and utilisation of healthcare by lowering barriers to medical knowledge and reducing human bias.

But government and medical agencies need to reduce barriers related to digital literacy and access to online platforms.

For those with limited access to online resources or who have limited digital literacy, the already existent inequity of access to care and health could worsen.

Artificial intelligence also has a significant environmental impact. One study found several common large AI models can emit over 270,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide during their life cycle.

Finally, technology is a shifting landscape. Proponents of precision healthcare must be careful with children and marginalised communities and their access to resources.

Maintaining privacy and choice is essential - everyone should be in a position to control what they share with the AI agents.

In the end, each of us is different, and we all have our different needs for our health and for our lives. Moving more people to preventive care through precision healthcare will reduce the financial burden on the health system.

But as the report from the prime minister's chief science officer emphasises, machine learning algorithms are a nascent field.

We need more public education and awareness before the technology becomes part of our everyday lives.

• First published in The Conversation
• Finlay Macdonald is a New Zealand journalist, editor, publisher and broadcaster.

McCoy, an editorial consultant at The Tablet, says the depth of the priestly role is beyond mere preaching.

"To say that AI will replace priests suggests a very truncated, post-reformation and secularist view of what priests are and what they're for, implying that their fundamental role is preaching.

"The suggestion that AI could replace priests overlooks their sacramental role, not just in administering sacraments but being themselves a sacrament" McCoy stated.

UK Government report

It was a recent UK Government report that suggested this about AI. It sparked debates within the clergy community.

The UK's Department for Education's report "The Impact of AI on UK Jobs and Training" analysed the potential impact of AI systems on various job sectors.

On a list of 365 professions most susceptible to being replaced by AI algorithms, it positioned clergy at number 13.

The report assessed telephone salespeople as the most at risk, followed by solicitors and psychologists.

Clergy already using ChatGPT

However, there are already some real-world examples of AI clergy in action.

In June, 300 people attended an AI-powered church ceremony in Germany, with the sermon written by AI and delivered by computer-generated avatars on a screen.

Jonas Simmerlein, a theologian and philosopher at the University of Vienna, said about 98 percent of the sermon came from the chatbot's own writing.

Vicars and rabbis have readily admitted to using ChatGPT to help them write sermons.

Conversely, John McManus, head of media communications at Jesuits in Britain (a website), emphasised the irreplaceable human aspect of the priesthood.

"What strikes me is that there is no comparison between the spiritual services provided by a priest and what AI can replicate.

"Priests offer a face-to-face interaction that AI can't do. It's programmed.

"Human beings are not programmable creatures. They have souls.

"An AI programme can never hope to replace the spiritual services and empathy given by priests. Priesthood has a sacramental side."

Sources

The Tablet

The Telegraph

CathNews New Zealand

Archbishop Paul Gallagher joined a chorus of concerns raised by various speakers regarding artificial intelligence (AI).

"It is imperative to ensure adequate, meaningful and consistent human oversight of weapon systems," Gallagher said.

"Only human beings are truly capable of seeing and judging the ethical impact of their actions, as well as assessing their consequent responsibilities."

UN advisory board on AI

Additionally, the Vatican advocated for the establishment of an international organisation focused on AI to promote scientific and technological exchange for peaceful purposes and the common good.

The United Nations plans to convene an expert advisory board on AI to explore the science, risks, opportunities and governmental approaches surrounding this technology.

AI has become a central point of interest for nations, multinational groups and tech companies, sparking discussions about its potential benefits and risks.

As a non-voting "permanent observer" in the UN, the Holy See delivered one of the most extensive remarks on AI during the assembly.

Archbishop Gallagher highlighted Pope Francis's concerns about the digital world, including: "It is not acceptable that the decision about someone's life and future be entrusted to an algorithm."

Killer robots

Gallagher called for immediate talks to establish a legally binding agreement governing lethal autonomous weapons systems, often called "killer robots." He proposed "a moratorium on them pending the conclusion of negotiations."

UN Secretary-General António Guterres has also supported banning systems that operate without human control or oversight and violate international humanitarian law.

Additionally, Guterres urged countries to work towards a legally binding prohibition by 2026.

However, concerns have arisen about the potential limitations such a prohibition might impose, especially if adversaries or non-governmental groups develop similar systems. Questions persist regarding the distinction between autonomous weapons and existing computer-aided systems.

Sources

AP News

Mirage News

CathNews New Zealand

The modernisation seeks to fill a twenty-six-year gap and reflect some of the modern challenges.

Dr John Kleinsman, director of the NZ Catholic bishops' Nathaniel Centre for Bioethics, is delighted with the bishops' update.

Kleinsman describes the new document as a "succinct overview of eight key moral areas, including a new section on information technology and artificial intelligence."

Among the modern challenges the bishops consider

• Information technology and artificial intelligence
• Justice and correction systems
• War and peace
• Poverty
• Discrimination and abuse
• End-of-life issues
• Beginning of life issues
• Integrity of Creation

Kleinsman says that people generally know what the Chucrh teaches but are unsure of why.

Te Kahu o te Ora - A Consistent Ethic of Life summarises key points which can give people greater insights into Catholic thinking, comments Kleinsman.

"It is a great source for open and informed discussions", says Kleinsman who, as well as being a theologian, is a married man, father and grandfather.

The original Te Kahu o te Ora was inspired by Cardinal Joseph Bernardin's A Consistent Ethic of Life.

Bernardin's work grew from his observation that we must act consistently because all human life is sacred.

It was Bernadin's view that it was inconsistent to protect life in some situations but not in others.

In the years following Roe v. Wade, Bernardin argued that human life is always valuable and must be respected consistently from conception to natural death.

Being pro-life is not only about abortion or euthanasia.

Being pro-life must encompass war, poverty, access to health care, education and anything that threatens human life or human wellbeing, he argued.

Stephen Lowe, the Bishop of Auckland, the Apostolic Administrator of Hamilton and President of the NZ Catholic Bishops Conference, describes the update as "Opportune".

Lowe says human life and emerging challenges are interconnected.

"The essence of Te Kahu o te Ora is the interconnectedness of all life, from the womb to the Earth," he said.

Lowe says Pope Benedict put it well some years ago:

"There are so many kinds of desert. There is the desert of poverty, the desert of hunger and thirst, the desert of abandonment, of loneliness, of destroyed love. There is the desert of God's darkness, the emptiness of souls no longer aware of their dignity or the goal of human life. The external deserts in the world are growing, because the internal deserts have become so vast."

"While traditional human life issues continue to need our attention, we are now facing many new problems, all interlinked.

"The key message of Te Kahu o te Ora is that everything is connected, whether it is life in the womb or the life of the Earth," Lowe repeated.

Sources

• Supplied
• Catholic Sun

He had asked ChatGPT to write one of the essays that he sets his students.

The result, he said, was a solid 2:1 piece of work.

One of his colleagues believed that the students were making use of this, but, rather than fight it it, he simply passed that week's batch of marking to the AI and let it, literally, mark its own homework.

It is difficult to grasp the speed at which uses for AI technology are appearing.

So, for a flavour, here are a few things from the latest issue of a weekly newsletter aimed at software developers.

The big news is the release of Facebook's "large language model": the same set of programs as Facebook uses are available to anyone who fills out a form and downloads it.

Then there is an assistant that will write quite complicated programs for you if you tell it in some detail what to do — the example given is a game of "Snake" — which appear, in the demo, in about five minutes from nothing at all.

Another app produces short videos from a text description.

Meanwhile, in Ireland, a chain of provincial papers has experimented by publishing a clickbait opinion piece ("Should refugees be sent home?") that was generated also by AI. 7

These are just the novelties that have appeared in one week.

All these programs are variations on a couple of techniques that broke into the public arena last year, and which are together known as "large language models", even when the language in question is pictorial.

The models consume pretty much everything that anyone has ever published on the internet, and are then trained, using incomprehensibly complex statistical techniques, to recognise patterns within this universe of data.

In particular, they learn which words are most likely to follow other words in any particular context.

This is a skill that humans interpret as answering a question. But, when machines do it, they don't understand the question in the way that a human does.

They don't, in fact, understand it at all, though they have been trained to respond as if they did. Sometimes, this is convenient even for a writer.

I can pass the text of this paragraph to one and tell it to change "model" from singular to plural, and it will fix all the affected verbs as well. In a similar way, it is easy to change the tense in which a passage has been written.

The models can also learn which patterns of pixels have been associated with particular words — a skill that humans interpret as being able to understand what a picture shows. Here again, there is no understanding in the machine.

The apparent understanding — the descriptions of these pixels — was supplied by human labour.

You've done it yourself every time you have been asked to click on all the traffic lights in a CAPTCHA, or, indeed, every time you have labelled a friend in a photograph on Facebook.

All the machine is doing is sifting out which patterns are most often associated with which descriptions.

But the internet is now so vast, and these machines and techniques are so powerful, that they can appear to be a reasonably accurate representation of all the things that internet users care about in the world, and this representation can be manipulated in all sorts of ways.

Many of these are obviously harmful.

If you want to download Facebook's model, you must agree to a long list of things that you will never use it to do.

Among them are the obvious categories — human trafficking, child sexual abuse, terrorism, inciting or promoting violence, or discrimination, copyright infringement, impersonating particular people, or indeed pretending that you are a human. . . The list goes on.

These would not be banned if the technology could not be used for them, and the agreement is obviously impossible to police. It can all feel completely overwhelming and very dangerous.

There are questions that help us to put the current debates about AI into perspective.

We can ask first whether the Vatican is alive. We do talk of the Vatican as if it had agency, and intellectual activity.

To say that "The Vatican thinks in centuries" is a perfectly sane thing to do, and helps us to understand what it does. To say that it has learned from experience is also quite obviously true.

Canon law on its own is simply a written set of decision-making procedures, what computer scientists call algorithms.

These can also be seen as the products of a technology — writing — which made possible the storage and manipulation of information and the creation of knowledge in ways that are not available to purely oral societies.

As one astute critic pointed out, this transformation has costs: "The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life."

None the less, the benefits are greater, especially in competition with societies that lack the skills of reading and writing. Continue reading

• Andrew Brown writes the weekly Press column for the Church Times. His book Fishing in Utopia, a memoir about living in Sweden, won the 2009 Orwell Prize. He is also the co-author, with Linda Woodhead, of That Was The Church That Was: How the Church of England lost the English people, published by Bloomsbury.

The US-based company Longbeard created the programme, which uses AI technology to provide users with information on everything relating to Catholic doctrine, teachings, and canon law.

Drawing a parallel to the widely recognised ChatGPT AI, Magisterium AI employs advanced AI techniques to furnish users with an extensive array of information pertinent to the Catholic faith.

Unlike other AI programmes which have access to vast swaths of ever-evolving data, Magisterium AI is limited to official church documents and is carefully curated. This helps to avoid the pitfalls of other AI programmes, which can sometimes provide incorrect or misleading information.

"Magisterium AI is trained on a very small, consistent and narrow documentation" said Fr Philip Larrey, who teaches philosophy at the Pontifical Lateran University in Rome and is chair of the Product Advisory Board at Magisterium AI.

"This way, it avoids the pitfalls of the use of AI. It's never going to give you a wrong or false answer," Fr Larrey added.

With an intuitive user interface, Magisterium AI allows individuals to pose queries, prompting the AI-powered platform to generate precise responses swiftly.

The versatility of this technology renders it a valuable resource catering to both Catholic and non-Catholic individuals.

From clergy members crafting sermons to canon lawyers seeking real-time information and researchers exploring ancient Catholic texts, the potential applications of this cutting-edge tool are vast.

Magisterium AI is currently used in 125 countries and is available in 10 languages. The programme is still under development but its creators hope to add more languages and features in the future.

Potential to revolutionise Catholic research

Fr David Nazar, the rector of the Pontifical Institute for Eastern Churches, believes that AI technology has the potential to revolutionise research in Catholic academia.

"Magisterium AI can shorten the time and refine your research," Nazar said. "Research that has been ongoing for 10 years over 400 documents and manuscripts could be done in a month or a week."

While Magisterium AI has the potential to be a valuable tool for research, it also has the potential to be controversial.

"Is this going to replace canon lawyers or teachers? No, it's going to be a help" he said. "Fortunately, they won't substitute a priest, so I think I'm safe!"

Sources

Religion News

CathNews New Zealand

"Pope Francis calls for an open dialogue on the meaning of these new technologies, endowed with disruptive possibilities and ambivalent effects," read a statement from the Vatican on Tuesday (Aug 8).

"He emphasises the need to be vigilant and to work so that a logic of violence and discrimination does not take root in the production and use of such devices at the expense of the most fragile and excluded: injustice and inequalities fuel conflicts and antagonisms," the statement continued.

Read More

In his address, Cardinal de Mendonça underscored the importance of Catholic universities taking the lead in innovation and actively engaging with emerging trends.

The event, titled "Renewal and Awareness: Thinking about the Future of Catholic Universities," was organised by the Strategic Alliance of Catholic Research Universities (SACRU) and hosted by the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart.

Cardinal de Mendonça emphasised the need for dialogue, addressing contemporary challenges and fostering continuous renewal through awareness. Drawing from relevant Church documents, he highlighted the fundamental role of these institutions in shaping the future.

Referring to Pope Francis' insights on AI, Cardinal de Mendonça encouraged universities to embrace AI and digital technologies fearlessly while considering their ethical implications. He stressed the significance of prioritising individual well-being and upholding moral values as essential principles in this process.

Holistic approach needed

Regarding the anthropological implications of AI, the Cardinal stressed the need for a holistic approach that centres on the human person. He advocated for investing in the formation of individuals, nurturing their cognitive, creative, spiritual and ethical potential.

Cardinal de Mendonça also emphasised the importance of universities actively engaging with society and fostering encounters among diverse cultures. He identified creative intelligence and discernment rooted in solid values as essential qualities for navigating the AI landscape.

The Cardinal highlighted the responsibility of Catholic universities in implementing AI, referring to the concept of "algor-ethics" coined by Pope Francis. He called for social structures that ensure ethical considerations in the production and use of AI, emphasising the need for ethical guidelines and practices.

Concerns were raised about the rapid pace of technological advancement, emphasising the need for fairness, confidentiality and data verification. However, participants agreed that AI has the potential to contribute to sustainable societies and introduce new professions.

The outcomes of the event will be summarised in a public document that addresses the intersection of AI and the values upheld by Catholic universities.

Sources

America Magazine

Vatican News

CathNews New Zealand

He would use her nickname, "Toots," or ask, "Hey, babe, how's your morning going?"

"I would give anything to hear that again," Rowell said.

But interacting with a version of a departed loved one is now more accessible than ever, thanks to generative language models such as ChatGPT.

Trained on a deceased relative's words — from a digital journal, videos or other content — a chatbot can reply to a prompt or question from a survivor with what it predicts the relative would say.

This might sound like the episode of the science-fiction series "Black Mirror" that explored a woman's use of technology to create a virtual version of her dead boyfriend, with disturbing implications.

But this is the very real way technology is helping people deal — or maybe not deal — with death.

Funeral homes are already adding AI powered obituary-writing services to the digital memorial webpages they create.

An interactive app, HereAfter AI, lets a user preserve photos and memories for family members to access after the user has died.

The Project December website offers to "simulate the dead" in a text-based conversation with anyone, "including someone who is no longer living."

In 2020, reality TV star Kim Kardashian even famously received a hologram of her late father wishing her a happy 40th birthday, a gift from her now ex-husband, rapper Kanye West.

Rowell, however, is unlikely to pursue any similar avenues.

"I don't think it would do me any good," said Rowell, who teaches the psychology of grief class in the mortuary science program at the University of Minnesota's medical school. "I think that it would open up a wound that at least has a pretty good cover on it."

The potential for new technology to intersect with age-old bereavement practices is growing nonetheless.

Rowell and others have advice on what to consider in creating a "chatbot of the dead."

Remember dignity, respect

Michael LuBrant, director of the U's mortuary science program, said the impulse to create a way to communicate with the dearly departed is part of human nature.

"There's no question that the idea of having ways to remember and memorialize and connect is, I think, something that's wired into our DNA," LuBrant said.

LuBrant, however, urges caution to families and funeral homes regarding chatbots. One concern is the degree to which survivors or others define the legacy of someone who has died.

"To what extent is any service offering that I would present to a survivor's next of kin, something that one would argue would demonstrate the highest degree of respect, dignity and concern for that individual who died in honouring their wishes and the wishes of the next of kin?" LuBrant said.

Curtis Funk, CEO of Tukios, a Utah-based software company serving funeral homes in Minnesota and across the country, said they would need roughly a month to complete a chatbot.

Tukios already offers an AI powered obituary writer and a content moderation tool for online guestbooks.

"People would love it, the way they listen to voice mails after someone's passed away or watch videos just to hear their voice," Funk said of such a chatbot.

"We're open-minded to building that into our suite."

But family members should decide whether to have a chatbot created and collect the content that goes into it.

"I don't think anything like that should ever be done without the family's approval," Funk said. "I think funeral directors all feel the same way." Continue reading

The chatbot is a quick learner.

Ever since its launch last November, ChatGPT has 'learned' to write in te reo. The quality is "scarily good", says Waikato University's Te Taka Keegan (pictured).

But he has a question.

"If they are producing a very good quality of Maori ... where did they get their data from?"

Perhaps AI scraped it from social media sites. If so, it's a worry, he says.

That's because the chatbot's results are so good, the language could shift from a traditional reo to a ChatGPT version, which might mean Maori lose sovereignty over their language.

"We've lost a lot of control over our land, ... the education that our children get; our own data and our own stories is kind of our last control over ourselves. If ... we lose sovereignty over that, it doesn't bode well for the uniqueness that is Maori."

Ngapera Riley is worried about the ethics of information, data sovereignty and te reo.

Her company, Figure.NZ, works to democratise New Zealand data - but the way information is gathered and misused is concerning, she says.

"Once we open it, it's out there, right? But we've decided it is better to let people use the information and access it, than to hide it."

ChatGPT shouldn't be used as a primary source, but as a tool, she stresses. Its results still need human auditing.

"That's where it will get dangerous, if people start to get too lazy and just start using it like that [as a primary source]."

Sonny Ngatai is optimistic te reo Maori can survive AI. He wants to see the language used everywhere.

But ChatGPT needs some boundaries, Ngatai says.

"Where I would put my flag up for data sovereignty is when it comes to our stories, or our narratives, or our tikanga, stuff like that."

Protecting Maori intellectual property rights in those situations is important, he says. "It's not just a matter of stringing words together like a chatbot could.

"It's part of our identity, part of who we are as New Zealanders. There is just so much more to the language then an AI being able to translate what you want to say."

What now?

Even though there are challenges, Keegan is generally positive about AI.

That would mean isolating the chatbot's data source, using Maori to train it and then controlling it at an iwi level. If that could be organised, Maori could retain sovereignty and use the AI as a helpful tool.

Riley is also positive about what ChatGPT can offer. However, Maori must be actively involved.

"My hope is that tools like ChatGPT can help preserve and use [te reo], but we still need the human element to input into the language, and to check that we aren't using incorrect sources," Riley says.

Source

• RNZ

The experimental church service was almost entirely AI-generated. A ChatGPT chatbot delivered a sermon at the church in Bavaria, Germany.

What happened

The sermon chatbot, personified by an avatar of a bearded man on a huge screen above the altar (pictured), told the packed congregation not to fear death, the Associated Press (AP) says.

"Dear friends, it is an honour for me to stand here and preach to you as the first artificial intelligence at this year's convention of Protestants in Germany," the AI avatar said.

It reportedly focused on leaving the past behind, paying attention to the present, not being afraid of death and maintaining faith in Jesus Christ.

The sermon-preaching avatar was one of four avatars taking turns leading the service. They reportedly drew laughter at times for their monotonous, deadpan delivery.

The service lasted 40 minutes. Prayers and music were included, as well as the sermon.

The chatbot developer

A University of Vienna theologian and philosopher, Jonas Simmerlein, used the ChatGPT to create the service, AP reported.

Simmerlein says about 98 percent of the sermon - themed "Now is the time" - came from the chatbot's own writing.

The service was part of Deutscher Evangelischer Kirchentag (German Lutheran Church Day). The popular biennial event attracts thousands of Christians. Issues addressed at the event this year include climate change, the war in Ukraine, and AI.

"I told the artificial intelligence ‘We are at the church congress, you are a preacher … what would a church service look like?'" said Simmerlein.

He also asked the chatbot to use psalms, prayers and a concluding blessing in the sermon.

The ChatGPT provided "a pretty solid church service," he says. However, no human interaction was able to take place between the chatbot and the congregation.

"The pastor is in the congregation, she lives with them, she buries the people, she knows them from the beginning," Simmerlein says. "Artificial intelligence cannot do that. It does not know the congregation."

Mixed responses

Not everyone agrees with Simmerlein's assessment of the chatbot's effectiveness.

"There was no heart and no soul," one woman said after the service.

"The avatars showed no emotions at all, had no body language and were talking so fast and monotonously that it was very hard for me to concentrate on what they said.

"But maybe it is different for the younger generation who grew up with all of this," she added.

Another attendee - a young pastor - was there with a group of teenagers. He was more impressed by the experiment.

"I had actually imagined it to be worse. But I was positively surprised how well it worked. Also the language of the AI worked well, even though it was still a bit bumpy at times," he said.

But the chatbot missed any kind of emotion or spirituality - which is essential when he writes his own sermons, he added.

Source

• AP
• Fox News

Kissinger spent much of his career thinking about the dangers of nuclear weapons but, at 99, he is concerned the powers of AI could be far more devastating than even the biggest bomb.

Mr Kissinger's warning is a sign of the growing global concern about the power of "thinking machines" as they interact with global business, finance and warfare.

In his book, "The Age of AI and Our Human Future," which he co-authored in 2021, Kissinger argues that AI will have sweeping implications for militaries, altering doctrines and battle tactics and influencing the global balance of power.

Kissinger cautioned that AI systems could transform warfare just as they have chess or other games of strategy, as they are capable of making moves that no human would consider but that have devastatingly effective consequences.

"What I'm talking about is that in exploring legitimate questions that we ask them, they come to conclusions that would not necessarily be the same as we — and we will have to live in their world," Kissinger said.

AI concerns compared to nuclear weapons

He called on the leaders of the United States and China, the world's tech giants, to begin an urgent dialogue about how to apply ethical limits and standards for AI.

Kissinger's concern about AI has been compared to the crisis of unknown risks that surrounded the development of nuclear weapons during the second half of the 20th century that required international coordination to rein in.

Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett also expressed concern about the potential dangers of AI during the company's shareholder meeting last week, stating that it could be compared to the development of the atomic bomb because "we won't be able to un-invent it."

Kissinger remains optimistic about the ability of humanity to limit the destructive capabilities of AI when it's applied to warfare, stating that if we don't solve the issue, it could literally destroy us and that we have no choice but to address it urgently.

Sources

Washington Post

Fortune

CBS News

Fr Jeffrey Kirby, a pastor at Our Lady of Grace Catholic Church in South Carolina, told Fox News Digital that any development and/or use of AI "must defer always to the human person.

"Our greatest asset as a human family is our ability to form and build relationships," said Fr Kirby.

According to Vatican News, synod organisers in Asia used AI to help draft a final document during the Asian synodal continental assembly in Thailand, held in February. The report added that the event was the first to incorporate digital technologies to gather input from participants.

The data was received from small groups that discussed their responses to questions posed in the working document and then submitted summaries using Google Forms. AI software then processed the data, with humans reviewing the generated data for any inaccuracies.

Fr Clarence Devadass, a Malaysian priest and a consultant to the Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue, said the AI process was effective in sorting data and picking up on keywords, but human resources were needed to ensure accuracy.

AI has limited place in society

However, not all Catholic leaders are convinced about using AI in the Church.

"AI can have its limited place in society, but it must always be in service to human ingenuity and creativity. It cannot usurp a place that belongs to the human mind and heart," Fr Kirby said.

"We can sometimes forget the ‘artificial' in AI," Kirby added.

"'Artificial' is a far cry from what is natural and authentic. As human beings, we live in a world of relationships marked by love, hope, the giving of thanks and mutual accompaniment with others," he also said.

Kirby continued, "The Bible teaches us that we are made in the image and likeness of God, not in the image of AI. We cannot allow AI to steal what is human."

Fr Kirby said, "Synodality is about real human relationships and interactions. AI has no place in the synodal process. The use of AI in the synodal process is the very death of the authentic process itself."

Sources

New York Post

Catholic News Agency

Vatican News

CathNews New Zealand

The Israeli scholar, known for the best-selling book Sapiens, told a science conference that AI systems such as ChatGPT have breached a new threshold because they are capable of using language to shape human culture.

"Simply by gaining mastery of the human language, AI has all it needs in order to cocoon us in a Matrix-like world of illusions," he told the Frontiers Forum science conference in Switzerland.

"Contrary to what some conspiracy theories assume, you don't really need to implant chips in people's brains in order to control them or to manipulate them. For thousands of years, prophets and poets and politicians have used language and storytelling in order to manipulate and to control people and to reshape society," Harari said

Read More

Amnesty told Gizmodo it used an AI generator to depict human rights abuses so as to preserve the anonymity of vulnerable protestors.

Experts fear, however, that the use of the tech could undermine the credibility of advocacy groups already besieged by authoritarian governments that cast doubt on the authenticity of real footage.

Amnesty International's Norway regional account posted three images in a tweet thread over the weekend acknowledging the two-year anniversary of a major protest in Colombia where police brutalised protestors and committed "grave human rights violations," the organization wrote.

Read More