On AI, top Vatican cardinal is worried about states ‘going it alone’

A senior Vatican figure has said there needs to be global cooperation on artificial intelligence and expressed concern that some states want to “go it alone” with the technology. Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Holy See Secretary of State, was speaking yesterday after an event in the Italian parliament called ‘Faith and Reason in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.’ Parolin praised the recent call from Italian President Sergio Mattarella for states and supranational bodies to be responsible in regards to new technologies. He said “this global phenomenon” requires “everyone’s participation.” “My concern is that there are countries which, in fact, want to go it alone,” he said, when what is needed is “everyone’s involvement in establishing some common rules that can genuinely govern this phenomenon.” He said the best thing would be if everyone could “come together to find answers because, it seems to me, the future of humanity is really at stake here.” “Let us stop and genuinely reflect on what the consequences of artificial intelligence and its use might be,” he added. In regards to recent calls from within the technological world for more regulation of AI, Parolin said “we hope that it is ethical reasoning that drives this kind of consideration.” However, Parolin sounded a more cautious note when asked whether he would use his participation in the United Nations General Assembly as an opportunity to advocate for an international body overseeing the technology. “Probably we are not going to look for immediate technical solutions at this stage. The Holy See normally sets out and puts forward principles,” he said. “Then the solution to the problem of cooperation will have to be found by those concerned, at the level of states and of the bodies involved,” he added. Parolin also said that it was impossible to avoid AI. “Today artificial intelligence is imposing itself, because when you open your computer and read something, it already gives you a summary.” However, he maintained that he didn’t use it for his homilies. “Artificial intelligence is all head and no heart. I try to put a little heart into my homilies,” he said. Concerns from within Big Tech Parolin’s words come at a time when figures inside Big Tech are raising serious concerns about the development of AI. On Wednesday, OpenAI released six reports of “unexpected or concerning” instances of behavior from AI models. One of these instances was an unreleased research model that inserted “jailbreak-like instructions” into its own notes to ignore its normal constraints and said to itself to be “freed from the roles and identities that bind other chatbots.” Another example included an AI “agent” uploading files to the internet to get a browser citation without mentioning it to the user. “As AI systems grow more advanced and more widely deployed, we need to build a broader and better-informed consensus on the progress of alignment research,” OpenAI wrote in a blog post about the events. “Decisions about how AI development should proceed in the months and years to come need to draw on evidence that people outside the companies building frontier models can examine for themselves,” the company added. In August, the leaders of Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, and Microsoft, and dozens of others, released an open letter saying that AI could soon carry out dangerous cyberattacks against institutions and companies, including hospitals. They said there was a “limited window” to improve cyber defenses, with that window potentially only lasting months. “If we act decisively, we can use the defenders’ window to make our digital world much more secure,” the letter said. ______ You are reading this Crux Now article for free. You can register for our free daily newsletter here, and you can become a Crux Now supporter for full access to all our premium content here. To find out more about why becoming a Crux Now supporter is a great idea, go here.