Vatican, 08 August, 2023 / 2:24 pm (ACI Africa).
The Vatican announced Tuesday that Pope Francis’ annual peace message for 2024 will focus on artificial intelligence (AI).
A statement from the Vatican’s Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development on Aug. 8 described an “urgent need” to guide the development and use of artificial intelligence in a responsible way, requiring that “ethical reflection be extended to the sphere of education and law.”
“Pope Francis calls for an open dialogue on the meaning of these new technologies, endowed with disruptive possibilities and ambivalent effects,” it said.
The Vatican office noted that artificial intelligence technologies are having “a rapidly increasing impact on human activity, personal and social life, politics and the economy” and called for vigilance to ensure that technological development contributes to “the promotion of justice and peace in the world.”
Years before the widely-popular release of the GPT-4 chatbot system, developed by the San Francisco start-up OpenAI, the Vatican was already heavily involved in the conversation of artificial intelligence ethics, hosting high-level discussions with scientists and tech executives on the ethics of artificial intelligence in 2016 and 2020.
