Can artificial intelligence be considered conscious?

That’s one of the questions Associate Professor of Theology Jordan Wales and his colleagues advising the Vatican are trying to answer.

Wales is a member of the AI Research Group of the Centre for Digital Culture, which is housed in the Dicastery for Culture and Education of the Holy See.

As AI technologies rapidly advance in power and scope, the Vatican’s AI Research Group seeks to apply Catholic theology to the ethical, cultural, and societal implications of AI’s development.

“A kind of theology of machines has to be invoked and, where it doesn’t exist, developed further and rooted in the Catholic tradition,” Wales said, “To be able to give a picture that not only says, ‘R2-D2 isn’t a person,’ but also says what R2-D2 is.”

Large language models like ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini are a popular example of AI advancement. These new technologies that predict the next word in a sentence can write a poem, summarize the day’s news, and may even match proteins to create new, life-saving drugs, according to the Wall Street Journal.

At the same time, AI chatbots can simulate conversations in a romantic relationship, and visual technologies can create artificial pornography using online images. Students at high schools around the country have used these programs to create pornographic images of their classmates, according to the Journal.

Pope Francis said in a January statement that advancements in AI raise “deeper questions about the nature of human beings.”

“The technology of simulation behind these programmes can be useful in certain specific fields,” the pope said, “but it becomes perverse when it distorts our relationship with others and with reality.”

The AI Research Group was formed in 2020 by Bishop Paul Tighe, a secretary of the Dicastery for Culture and Education. Comprised of theologians from around the world, Wales said the group was without a particular direction in its first year.

“Each person was putting on the table the things that really struck them as interesting or as necessary to the conversation,” Wales said. “It’s a bit like being in a kitchen where you have cooks from different culinary traditions, and they say, ‘These are the ingredients I’m working with.’ How do you make food out of that?”

Wales said he and his colleagues have split into three groups exploring three topics. One group is investigating the “ethical formation of the human person in interaction with AI,” another is focused on the “effect on human beings’ relationships” of “seemingly personal” technologies, and Wales’ group is researching “machine consciousness.”

“In the consciousness group, our goal was to develop a position concerning machine consciousness that made sense of the existing literature on the subject and that could communicate in that conversation,” Wales said.

When answering questions like “Can AI be considered conscious?”, Wales said it was important to apply Catholic theology in a way that experts, programmers, and other workers in the AI field could understand.

“Our work was often a matter of intellectual translation,” Wales said.

As AI becomes better at writing, learning, coding, and other more advanced tasks, it becomes more difficult to point to differences between the thinking a computer does and the thinking humans do. 

Wales refers to Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart’s explanation: “The computer doesn’t compute; we compute using the computer.”

For example, a student may use a pencil to write formulas or even a calculator for long division and say, “I externalized some of my calculations for this problem,” Wales said.

While an AI tool can manipulate informational symbols, Wales said, this act should not be confused with the human use of reason. New technologies call on us to “develop richer accounts” of both the capabilities of AI and the uniqueness of the human person.

“The old metaphors don’t work,” Wales said. “If we say, ‘the computer reads as I read,’ then we lose something of what it means for me to read. If we say, ‘I read but the computer doesn’t read,’ then we neglect something of what is happening with the computer.”

The AI Research Group published a book online in December titled, “Encountering Artificial Intelligence: Ethical and Anthropological Investigations,” which can be read in the Journal of Moral Theology. Wales edited this book with three other members of the research group. 

“It’s intended to introduce artificial intelligence to people who might not know much about it, and to engage with the questions raised by artificial intelligence,” Wales said.

Wales taught a three-credit course last spring titled “Theology and AI.” 

Senior Bridget Whalen, who took the class, said many questions about AI concerned the nature of the human person. 

“It was a massively important class — I didn’t expect it to be,” Whalen said. “It has underwritten the rest of my classes in a fundamental way, simply because we were defining and understanding humanity. That’s what the class was about.”