In the document, released Wednesday by the Holy See Press Office, the Pope renewed his call for ‘the community of nations to work together to adopt a binding international treaty to regulate the development and use of Artificial Intelligence in its many forms’.
The AI systems ¨are also radically modifying information and communication and, through them, some of the foundations of civil coexistence¨, Francis warned in that text addressed to the referred celebration, scheduled for May 12 of this year.
With the theme Artificial Intelligence and wisdom of the heart: for a fully human communication, the Pope says that this era ‘runs the risk of being rich in technology and poor in humanity’, and adds that ‘our reflection can only start from the human heart’.
The Bishop of Rome warns that ‘the very use of the word intelligence is misleading’, for, he says, ‘machines have a capacity immeasurably greater than humans to store data and correlate them with one another, but it is up to man, and to him alone, to decipher their meaning’.
Artificial Intelligence systems can be instruments of cognitive pollution, he warns, and refers to the problem of disinformation that we have been facing for years in the form of fake news, which is perverse ‘when it distorts the relationship with others and reality’.
Since the first wave of AI, in social media, we understood its ambivalence, and the second level of generating Artificial Intelligence marked an indisputable qualitative leap, so ‘it is important to have the ability to understand, comprehend and regulate tools, which in the wrong hands could open adverse scenarios’, he asserts.
In this sense, he adds, ‘it is necessary to act preventively, proposing models of ethical regulation to curb the harmful and discriminatory, socially unjust implications of AI systems and counteract their use in the reduction of pluralism, polarization of public opinion or the construction of a single thought’.
‘The use of Artificial Intelligence will be able to contribute positively in the field of communication if it does not override the role of journalism on the ground but, on the contrary, supports it, and if it enhances the professionalism of communication, holding each communicator accountable,’ he specified.
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