Good, Bad, Not Indifferent

I’m still slowly paging through Pope Leo’s encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, and am grateful to the Pope for providing this resource for how we (not just Catholics or Christians, but people who seek the common good) can think about the accelerating influence of AI on our culture.

One observation that he makes is about how the world’s power structures create unjust conditions for AI’s use. He points out that AI is a world-changing development that exists outside of traditional structures. The private ownership of AI means that the guardrails that come with it being a public good are not present, and that the imposition of ethical practices needs to come from within the ownership.

AI is already a big part of our everyday life, and will increasingly shape the world and how we engage with it. The impact that AI has on how we function as people, cultures, and world, will continue to change how we will live. AI produces responses based on data and information that it collects from the internet. AI is a tool, neither good nor bad, and it is in the application of the technology that the ethical dimensions unfold. Because the responses from AI utilize data from countless sources it can be easy to think that the responses are wholly objective, but I appreciate what the pope has to say about that fact:

The apparent objectivity of the responses and suggestions these systems provide can lead us to overlook the fact that they reflect the cultural assumptions of those who designed and trained them, with all their strengths and limitations.

…

The exclusion of the vulnerable becomes cloaked in a veneer of neutrality and objectivity, against which it becomes difficult to raise objections. In this way, injustice goes unnoticed, and compassion, mercy and forgiveness — understood not as mere appearances but as real political actions — gradually disappear from view.

The tools we use are created by people. These people come to their inventions with their own ideas, biases, and problems. These will seep into the ways these things are used and these biases will create unjust circumstances. Companies are largely using AI as a way of screening candidates for potential jobs. Could this help increase efficiency? Yes. But studies show that the AI hiring software has already led to racially discriminatory outcomes. We use the tool and assume that it works objectively. How can it be racist, it’s a machine?!

From this follows a simple but compelling consequence: we cannot consider AI to be morally neutral. In reality, every technical tool embodies choices and priorities through what it measures, ignores and optimizes, and how it classifies people and situations. If a system is designed or used in a way that treats some lives as less worthy, or excludes them without the possibility of appeal, then it is not merely a tool “to be used well,” since it has already introduced criteria that contradict the inalienable dignity of the human person. For this reason, ethical discernment cannot be limited to asking whether we are using a system for good or bad purposes; it must also examine how that system is designed and what vision of the human person and society is embedded in the data and models that guide it.

Peace,

Rev. Jeff Fox-Kline

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