Anthropic, Big Tech faith outreach risks distorting religions, Webb Keane warns

The turn to religion comes as executives sound the alarm about AI's destructive potential and debate the need for morally good models. Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah told the Vatican's presentation of Pope Leo XIV's encyclical on AI that these are not questions a lab can answer, but questions traditions have carried for millennia. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said last year that ChatGPT should reflect a "weighted average" of humanity's moral view.

Scholars of religion push back on the idea that religion is a set of distinct, comparable systems. Tomoko Masuzawa, author of "The Invention of World Religions," notes that Buddhism and Hinduism were not recognized as clearly bounded traditions by their practitioners before European scholars arrived, and that "all these categories were not native." Webb Keane argues the conventional view of religion as a rule book is tied to scriptural religions, which ultimately means the Abrahamic religions.

Paolo Carozza, a member of the independent Meta Oversight Board, worries that in the quest for accumulated thinking, a tradition's defining characteristics could be homogenized into something that pulls toward the middle or even favors Western religions. He says AI often throws it all together in a way that is not organic, making sense of none of it.