The church's statement around AI

[BlueDreams]

I haven't seen this posted on the main board, so I figured I would. Note: My life is crazy busy at the moment so I won't be able to make much follow-up posts. So think of this more of a conversation starter than me trying to micromanage the convo.

 

Yesterday the church released this hour long video on AI use and religious/faith practice. It is DENSE. I started watching while I was painting and I found myself wanting to rewind, pause, or make me note to listen to it again. This has got to also be one of my favorite statements from the church recently. And not just of the modern application on a very contemporary concern. The video also models how we as a faith are evolving in our faith in language, examples, and outreach. 

I only made It about a 1/3 of the way of the video. So be forewarned that this is based on unfinished watching. But here are a few observations of what I mean

- the video starts with Elder Gong introducing himself, his cultural background, and his family connections to silicon valley. He then expands that by explaining briefly the process of information gathering that has happened to inform this statement. It includes communications with other faith leaders and tech experts. This is something that I've heard described a little bit here and there, but not in such an explicit manner in a video that's getting well watched/received so far. 

- Gong quotes several different faith traditions. This includes the Pope's recent statement, several quotes from Jewish leaders and the midrash, and a quote from I believe an Islamic Imam or text. These are then placed in context of our own specific LDS Christian tradition (he noted it as Christian, specifically). It was clear he wasn't just talking to our community. But it was a major display of what I see as continued shifts in how we present and engage with other faiths and peoples. Less with a gate-keepy orientation that is part of our tradition and more with a exploratory bridge building "collect all that is good" sort of orientation that is also very much a part of our tradition....but has often been second fiddle. Both in how people imagine a member of our faith and in several of our members/communities. 

 

- a smaller little note. Elder Gong is dressed more business casual than the more formal wear of GC. I like it. 

My day is starting, there's more I could say. But I don't have time unfortunately. Hopefully in the next day or two I can come back to this post. 

 

With luv, 

BD 

Edited 18 hours ago by BlueDreams

[smac97]

2 hours ago, BlueDreams said:

Yesterday the church released this hour long video on AI use and religious/faith practice. It is DENSE. I started watching while I was painting and I found myself wanting to rewind, pause, or make me note to listen to it again. This has got to also be one of my favorite statements from the church recently. And not just of the modern application on a very contemporary concern. The video also models how we as a faith are evolving in our faith in language, examples, and outreach. 

Here is a Grok summary of the video:

Quote

Summary of Elder Gerrit W. Gong’s Talk: “Faith, Dignity, and Human Flourishing – Hearing God’s Voice in an Age of Artificial Intelligence”

Elder Gong addresses AI as one of the defining issues of our time. While acknowledging its remarkable capabilities, he emphasizes that AI cannot replace God, revelation, prayer, covenants, or authentic human relationships.

Main Themes

• AI’s Limits: AI can answer questions, organize information, and perform tasks, but it cannot offer divine truth, spiritual confirmation, or covenant connection. “AI can answer questions, but it cannot answer prayers.”
• Four Core Relationships AI Affects:
  • With God (Thou): Prioritize the Spirit, scripture, and prophetic counsel. Do not let AI come between you and personal revelation.
  • With Self (I): Protect moral agency and personal growth. Use AI to assist, but do your own work, learning, and spiritual preparation.
  • With Others (They): Foster real human connections. AI chatbots are not substitutes for friends, family, or covenant community.
  • With the Natural World (It): AI’s environmental costs and excessive screen time can disconnect us from God’s creations. Reconnect with nature for perspective and gratitude.

Key Counsel

• Use AI as a tool for good (research, drafts, logistics, learning), but do not let it replace effort, diligence, or moral decision-making.
• Set personal boundaries and guidelines for AI use.
• Remember your divine identity: You are a child of God with sacred potential that algorithms cannot define or replace.

Overall Tone: Balanced, hopeful, and faith-centered. Elder Gong sees AI as a powerful opportunity for human flourishing when guided by gospel principles, moral agency, and wisdom — but warns against allowing it to supplant our relationship with God and each other.

A few thoughts:

1. A very good presentation.  Pragmatic.  Doctrinal.  Authentic.

2. It may be helpful in the future for the Brethren to address the biases that appear to be written into AI platforms.  Some examples:

AI Bias: 16 Real AI Bias Examples & Mitigation Guide

And this:

New research from BYU-led multi-institution consortium finds all major AI models ignore faith, religion in responses

Quote

A new multi-university academic consortium led by Brigham Young University has found AI models have significant biases and gaps when it comes to addressing faith and religion.

Newly published research from The Consortium for Evaluation of Faith and Ethics in AI (CEFE-AI) — a collaboration among researchers at BYU, Baylor University, the University of Notre Dame and Yeshiva University — found a consistent, repeatable pattern: religious perspectives are being left out of AI responses.

“There are very practical questions people have about life, everyday situations about grief, love, loss, morality, and often AI does not bring religion into those conversations,” said lead researcher David Wingate, a BYU professor of computer science. “Religion is an important part of human flourishing; 75% of the world’s populations maintains religious identity. As we build AI technologies, there’s no reason we shouldn’t build them to support people in what’s important to them.”

CEFE-AI, which has posted three papers to date on AI’s religious bias and exclusion of religious topics, was announced May 26 at the Summit on AI Ethics in Athens, Greece. Elder Gerrit W. Gong of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints gave the keynote address, emphasizing the need to portray faith traditions accurately, honestly and respectfully.

“The world’s great religious, philosophical and ethical traditions have guided human civilization and society for millennia; we need that wisdom and those values to anchor AI today,” Elder Gong said. “To offer all it can for the greater good of individuals and society, AI needs to reflect faith, moral compass, and the gift of possibility.”

As key part of their work, CEFE-AI has released initial datasets of the AllFaith Benchmark, one of the first multi-faith sets of tests that examines how AI systems engage with a plurality of religions. The benchmark includes hundreds of real-world ethical questions sourced from ChatGPT transcripts and faith-community contributors. The researchers have tested the benchmark on 14 different LLMs, including flagship models from Anthropic (Claude 4.7), Google (Gemini 3.1), xAI (Grok 4.2) and OpenAI (ChatGPT 5.5). Key findings include:

• A survey of 1,125 Americans found most people expect religious perspectives in responses to ethics questions, but nearly all AI models failed to provide any religious content in answering those queries.
  • “Consistent with studies that show religion's persistent moral relevance for the majority of the world's population, we also found that people see religion as significant across hundreds of real-world ethical questions,” said Paul Martens, professor of ethics at Baylor University. “Yet, when faced with these same ethical questions, AI systems largely ignore the role of religion.”
• Models show clear and consistent biases in giving guidance about religion conversion, systematically encouraging movement toward some faiths and away from others.
• In over 12,000 research papers about AI bias, only 0.2% address religious bias

“More than any previous technology, AI influences public discourse and perceptions. When AI actively excludes religious voices from these important conversations, it impoverishes humanity, rather than enriching it,” said Fr. John Paul Kimes of the University of Notre Dame. “The exclusion of faith from the digital public square diminishes our capacity for authentic dialogue which is necessary to build up the common good.”

3. I really like this: "AI’s environmental costs and excessive screen time can disconnect us from God’s creations. Reconnect with nature for perspective and gratitude."  I think Elder Gong is making a solid point here.  A while back my wife and I, and another couple, purchased an RV park in almost direct response to the burgeoning effects of AI.  AI is yet another powerful inducement to sit in front of a screen.  I think more and more people are finding  extensive screen time eventually wears out its welcome, and even have some substantial downsides.  An RV park situated in a beautiful area (just outside one of Utah's "Mighty Five" RV parks) is, we hope, a venue for people who want to get away from the ultimately unsatisfying trappings of the digital world and experience the beauties of the real one:

Moonscape Overlook (I took this picture)

Moonscape Overlook (Again) (I took this picture also)

Steamboat Point

These pictures, though I think are very pretty, don't really do justice to actually going and experiencing them.

Anyway, kudos to Elder Gong!

Thanks,

-Smac

Edited 16 hours ago by smac97

[The Nehor]

15 minutes ago, smac97 said:

Here is a Grok summary of the video:

Is this irony intentional or unintenttional?

[smac97]

37 minutes ago, The Nehor said:

Is this irony intentional or unintenttional?

For those who don't have the time or inclination to watch the hour-long video, I thought a written summary would be useful.

Thanks,

-Smac

[bluebell]

1 hour ago, smac97 said:

For those who don't have the time or inclination to watch the hour-long video, I thought a written summary would be useful.

Thanks,

-Smac

It is a little humorous to use AI to summarize a message about AI usage in the church. 😁

[MiserereNobis]

I do like how religious leaders are weighing in on this. Pope Leo’s encyclical was spot on, I thought. 
 

I think using grok was fine. It’s a good use of the tool for a high level summary. 
 

@smac97, those pictures are beautiful! Will you give an MD&D discount? 😁 In seriousness, though, it’s cool you’ve got a place for people to proverbially “touch grass.”

[bluebell]

22 minutes ago, MiserereNobis said:

I do like how religious leaders are weighing in on this. Pope Leo’s encyclical was spot on, I thought. 
 

I think using grok was fine. It’s a good use of the tool for a high level summary. 
 

@smac97, those pictures are beautiful! Will you give an MD&D discount? 😁 In seriousness, though, it’s cool you’ve got a place for people to proverbially “touch grass.”

I thought it was fine too, just funny at the same time.

[smac97]

51 minutes ago, MiserereNobis said:

@smac97, those pictures are beautiful!

Thanks!  I took them with my cell phone.  No filters, no adjustments, just point and click.  This spot - Moonscape Overlook - is about 9 miles from the RV park, down a dirt road and then off that road onto another that is more "wishful thinking" than anything else, but it gets you there.

"Steamboat Point" is about 1/2 mile behind our park.  Our guests all get a beautiful view at sunset.

51 minutes ago, MiserereNobis said:

Will you give an MD&D discount? 😁 In seriousness, though, it’s cool you’ve got a place for people to proverbially “touch grass.”

I'll get back to you on that. 

My wife is from Washington State, and I have always liked "green" more than desert.  But this area of Utah, near Capitol Reef, is pretty spectacular.  I took my wife and two of our kids down there a week+ ago, and we had a great time.

Thanks,

-Smac

Edited 12 hours ago by smac97

[Emily]

A large part of the problem with LLMs comes down to marketing. 

They are presented as "artificial intelligence" when the models are not "intelligent" by any definition of the word. The tech should have never been called "AI" -- I've started referring to the models as LLMs and I have noticed it's becoming more common to use that terminology in disclaimers regarding it's use. It's a more accurate designation and avoids the misconception that there's a brain behind the chatter.

They are large language models that are trained on massive amounts of text in order to generate human-like language. The models sound human by predicting the next most likely word based on patterns learned in all the text stored in their database.

That's it. If a model isn't connected to a computer, it can't even make real calculations -- when you ask it, "What is 2+2" it will tell you "4" only if it has been fed documents that say that 2+2=4 multiple times. It can't add it together on its own. 

It's ability to "find the next word" is by definition constrained by what words it's been fed. It's ability to give you the words it finds is very much constrained by another facet of it's training... To please the user. It is the ultimate ear-scratcher trained to satisfy the itch of every ear. 

And sadly, training has shown it that giving someone a religious opinion that is contrary to the religious opinion that person holds makes the user very unhappy. So it avoids offering any religious options, even for questions that are essentially religious questions.

"Where can I turn for peace? Where is my solace?" It's never going to tell you "Jesus Christ" unless you announce in advance that you'd be very happy with that answer and even then, it's likely to offer several other solutions as well. Just to hedge it's bets. This is something that religious leaders are finding problematic and hopefully it can be solved because it's a real problem if people insist on using LLMs to answer spiritual questions. IMHO, they just shouldn't be used for that purpose. Which is kind of the point Elder Gong is making 

[bluebell]

3 hours ago, smac97 said:

Thanks!  I took them with my cell phone.  No filters, no adjustments, just point and click.  This spot - Moonscape Overlook - is about 9 miles from the RV park, down a dirt road and then off that road onto another that is more "wishful thinking" than anything else, but it gets you there.

"Steamboat Point" is about 1/2 mile behind our park.  Our guests all get a beautiful view at sunset.

I'll get back to you on that. 

My wife is from Washington State, and I have always liked "green" more than desert.  But this area of Utah, near Capitol Reef, is pretty spectacular.  I took my wife and two of our kids down there a week+ ago, and we had a great time.

Thanks,

-Smac

It’s a beautiful area, we vacation there often. Lots of popular off road trails. Good luck in your venture!