Blessed Trinity Parish is welcoming a cybersecurity specialist to help parishioners interested in harnessing AI’s unique benefits while staying ever-vigilant against its growing dangers.  

Even before any professional insights are shared with attendees, Brandon Lau revealed to The Catholic Register that the world of artificial intelligence, and its role in cybercrime by natural extension, is unlike anything he’s seen in the field before.  

“ I joke about my work making for sleepless nights, but it really is a constant watch, looking for things that are abnormal and with the onset of AI, it's making it a lot more challenging as our human brains can only process so much. It’s starting to make a huge impact,” Lau said, who on Feb. 28 will deliver “AI: Promise, Power and Pitfalls" at Blessed Trinity.  

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With more than 25 years of experience in the field, Lau said a large part of his role is cybersecurity awareness presentations where he shares the growing dangers of artificial intelligence’s use in criminal activity, such as in infiltrating systems, compromising dating, attempts to extort money and even blackmail unsuspecting victims. 

“In the last 10 to 15 years, there has been a complete change in the environment where criminal organizations that we thought had faded in the background are starting to come up into the future because they believe there is free money to be made with digital crime,” he said. “ There are principles that you follow in which people are to be informed so they can better protect themselves, their parents, grandparents and children.” 

Lau's invitation came from Kathleen Keslick, a friend who contacted him with the idea. Now, Blessed Trinity is set to become a parish that is visibly increasing its interest in such topics as AI and cybersecurity-related risks becoming more visible in faith communities. 

Lau shared similar findings David Finnegan, director of the Archdiocese of Toronto’s Management Information Services, has with the Register. Both say virtual criminal operations now resemble structured companies with specialized departments, complete with compromise specialists, data valuators, extortionists and even finance-specific roles. The increase in AI’s prevalence has democratized tools, making it easier for less-skilled actors to target smaller, soft victims such as seniors, non-profits, lawyers and even parishes directly. 

Lau added that while most scams involve multiple attempts at small amounts to avoid suspicion, various specific AI-powered threats remain, as does the education needed around them. 

“If you and I were having a conversation, and we worked together for five years, criminals can now use AI to analyze how we convey our messages to each other, and will draft the message to you as if it were me,” he said. “I've seen this where a person was having a conversation with a scammer for a week who had thought it was her friend instead.”

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Going even further than purely text-based scams, artificial intelligence has allowed for photos, videos and even audio recreation to be used in extortive manners such as sextortion and deepfake media. 

It is perhaps issues like these that have caused church leaders to become increasingly weary of artificial intelligence's role in society. Last year at the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops' Plenary Assembly, the bishops discussed the Church’s engagement with AI as a moral and social concern that has grown in recent years. And Pope Leo XIV has spoken on the topic with concern, including at December's  “Artificial Intelligence and Care for Our Common Home” conference.

While all of those pitfalls and more will be covered, Lau is also using the opportunity to shed light on some of the benefits of AI. To do that, one must first understand the things that AI cannot replace — at least not yet. 

“ AI cannot give you love. Even if it can tell you everything about it, it cannot give it to you, and part of the Catholic faith is love. You've got to love yourself, and you've got to love others.  In my lifetime, I don't believe that AI will truly replace that type of human connection, that human touch,” Lau said. 

AI instead is being identified as excelling at mundane and repetitive tasks, with ideas for automation, parcel delivery and packaging surfacing as example possibilities, but with human supervision to ensure correct implementation and accountability. 

“ AI is not here to replace what you do, but is here to enhance what you do. We are actually becoming supervisors of AI to an extent,” he said. 

On Feb. 17, the Vatican unveiled plans for AI-powered translation services at St. Peter’s Basilica later this year. The AI translations will feature real-time audio and text translations through visitors' web browsers, using the AI developed by the language solutions company “Translated.”

For Lau, it’s a prime opportunity to practice the supervision that may be our best-served role in a future moving ever-closer to daily AI-implementation, suggesting that faithful from different language backgrounds could ensure the translations are being conveyed accurately.  

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Lau hopes parishioners leave not fearful of the technology, but empowered by its benefits and alerted to its misuses. Above all, perhaps, he hopes the audience can walk away with a clear conviction about preserving what makes us all uniquely human.  

“We have to preserve human judgment, empathy and creativity that AI cannot take over. We don't want AI to take out. We must be the creators of AI, not AI being our creator, and that comes from being confident but also curious,” he said.