Artificial intelligence can provide both "great opportunities" and "great dangers" —as well as "an evangelical opportunity" for the church, a moral theologian and ethicist advised the nation's Catholic bishops.

Paul Scherz, professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame, shared his insights at the of U.S. Catholic Bishops' meetingin Baltimore earlier this month.

Scherz—whose work focuses on the nexus among theology, science, medicine and technology -- is a member of the AI Research Group, an initiative of the Vatican Center for Digital Culture under the Dicastery for Culture and Education.

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Pope Leo XIV has prioritized the issue of AI, which broadly encompasses various forms of technology by which machines can mimic human learning, problem-solving and creativity.

Scherz noted "it's especially appropriate for the church to speak" about a technology the Pope—echoing the concerns of his predecessor, Pope Francis -- has said could spark a new "industrial revolution."

AI pundits tend to predict the technology will yield either "a paradise of unlimited resources and new power" or "an apocalyptic vision of the miseries of mass unemployment due to automation, or even human extinction at the hands of a rogue AI," he said.

"Our actual future will likely lie at neither of these extremes."

Rather, "AI offers both a promise to better the human condition" while also posing "danger to human work, relationships and social justice" that must be addressed.

"Prudent judgment" is required "to ensure that “the Catholic vision of the person in society might help guide our use of AI" since understandings of the technology are often marred by "false analogies to human capacities," said Scherz.

At its core, he said, AI is—as a researcher once told him—"just statistics."

Machine learning systems dominating AI—which use algorithms to recognize patterns in data, and then inferentially apply that information to new data without formal coding instructions draw on "all the writing on the Internet, millions of pictures of faces, millions of health records," he said.

The programs then process the data to assess patterns "far too subtle for human analysis to detect," and can then "make probabilistic predictions," Scherz said.

Trained on vast quantities of text from books, articles, websites and other sources, Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate text based on detected patterns in language.

The techniques "can also be used in domains like science," said Scherz, pointing to the AlphaFold server, which produces three-dimensional predictions of protein structures that can then be verified.

Such AI applications are "tremendous products of human creativity," with "great potential" to enhance human flourishing and the common good, yet  "it would be a mistake to describe these programs as 'intelligent' in the same way that humans are." 

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Humans "don't think through statistical inference, (or) by predicting the next most likely word," said Scherz.

"AI applications functioning at a logical and computational level (do not) grasp the truth because they don't understand the meaning of the symbols they manipulate." 

As Pope Francis and Pope Leo have repeatedly stressed, "AI applications should not be confused with the attributes of persons," who in contrast have consciousness as divinely created beings.

He identified "three domains of ethical problems that emerge from AI" arising from confusion about the technology and about the nature of the person—"justice, encounter and work."

In all three areas, AI applications have "effects on our relationships"—with broad social institutions, with others and with ourselves, he said.

While it can serve the common good, he said, AI can "accentuate preexisting relationships of injustice," yielding results that are biased. 

"Only by opening our hearts to others can we fight against a reductionist, technocratic paradigm, a throwaway culture, a culture of death that sees others only in terms of efficiency or utility," Scherz said.

Although "technology offers itself as a solution," it remains "a false comfort," and "only a simulacrum of encounter."

Scherz note "companies are producing relational AIs…that offer friendship, advice, even romance," and "people are responding to these products."

But relational AIs "lack a personal presence or true ability to be concerned about the user (and) become "a reflection of the user" leading to "grave problems" since real-life loved ones "push back against us when we are in error" and "spur us to be better." 

While such cases are still rare, said Scherz, AI dependence also threatens daily interactions that "build the habits of solidarity that bind society together." 

Increased AI implementation across multiple sectors presents "the potential loss of work (that) endangers widespread flourishing," he said, citing Catholic teaching on the Divine gift of labor and its significance for human development, the cultivation of virtue and advancement of the common good.

"AI may reproduce the threat to workers' dignity that Catholic social teaching identified in the factories of the early 20th century," he said.

Scherz highlighted three Catholic ministries in which AI may be implemented: health care, education and religious resources.

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But "the algorithm cannot substitute a gesture of closeness or a word of consolation" in healthcare, the "relationship of encounter at the heart of a true education," or the role of human clergy as religious authorities and spiritual directors.

"This is actually a moment of opportunity (because) people are asking basic questions of what it means to be human for the first time in a long time," he said.