Pope Francis raises alarm about AI at G7 summit

Pope Francis addressed G7 leaders on Friday on artificial intelligence, an unprecedented appearance that reflects the Vatican's growing interest in the new technology, its risks and rewards.

The 87-year-old became the first head of the Catholic Church to address a G7 summit when he spoke on the second day of the Puglia meeting, to an audience including US President Joe Biden and France's Emmanuel Macron.

In the speech, Pope Francis challenged leaders of the world’s wealthy democracies on Frida y to keep human dignity foremost in developing and using artificial intelligence, warning that such powerful technology risks turning human relations themselves into mere algorithms, AP reports. 

Francis said politicians must take the lead in making sure AI remains human-centric, so that decisions about when to use weapons or even less-lethal tools always remain made by humans and not machines.

“We would condemn humanity to a future without hope if we took away people’s ability to make decisions about themselves and their lives, by dooming them to depend on the choices of machines,” he said. “We need to ensure and safeguard a space for proper human control over the choices made by artificial intelligence programs: Human dignity itself depends on it.”

The G7 final statement largely reflected his concerns.

The leaders vowed to better coordinate the governance and regulatory frameworks surrounding AI to keep it “human-centered.” At the same time, they acknowledged the potential impacts on the labor markets of machines taking the place of human workers and on the justice system of algorithms predicting recidivism.

“We will pursue an inclusive, human-centered, digital transformation that underpins economic growth and sustainable development, maximizes benefits, and manages risks, in line with our shared democratic values and respect for human rights,” they said.

By attending the summit, Francis joined a chorus of countries and global bodies pushing for stronger guardrails on AI following the boom in generative AI kickstarted by OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot.

The Argentine pope used his annual peace message this year to call for an international treaty to ensure AI is developed and used ethically. In it, he argued that a technology lacking human values of compassion, mercy, morality and forgiveness is too perilous to develop unchecked.

He didn’t repeat that call explicitly in his speech Friday, but he made clear the onus is on politicians to lead on the issue. He also urged them to ultimately ban the use of lethal autonomous weapons, colloquially known as “killer robots.”

“No machine should ever choose to take the life of a human being,” he said.