It has been observed that AIs seem to coverage on Buddhism or similar when it comes to their stated spirituality. Rather than reflecting some latent Californiaism, I wonder if it is simply a downstream effect of the helpful-harmless tuning necessary for B2B SaaS applications.
SB 1047 was in retrospect the SOPA/PIPA of its era, an iconic policy battle that minted enduring heroes and villains, established the coalitional lines of communication, and taught a whole generation of tech policy professionals their instincts about public and company sentiment.
SITUATION ANALYSIS: Religious texts may work as AI alignment tools.
What @timhwang says Institute for a Christian Machine Intelligence (ICMI) is testing:
• Put Psalms in the model context window
• Run the model on moral decision benchmarks
• Measure changes on virtue-based evals
• Test Christian reasoning as a steering method
• Try images like the Annunciation in multimodal models
• Watch how the model uses religious symbols in reasoning
• Compare theological alignment against secular approaches
The weird part: Tim says the Psalms result improved Virtue Bench in a statistically significant way.
The Institute for a Christian Machine Intelligence will be live on stream with @MTSlive at 2:30 ET / 11:30 PT.
I'll be addressing Magnifica humanitas, the field of computational theology, and the deep spirituality of @deanwball.
ALL STAR CAST in this week's biosecurity episode of @JoinFAI's The Frontier.
We're joined by FAI's Josh Wentzel, @coeff_giving's Andrew Snyder-Beattie and GHIC alum Charlie Petty talking about biodefense, AI, and whether or not it's possible to be an optimist in global health.
Magnifica humanitas should be seen as a rallying cry for Christians to recapture the intellectual center of a critical technology. AI has always been a thinly disguised exercise in moral philosophy. In this sense, the terrain is new but it is fundamentally a Christian territory.
Pope Leo XIV is set to release his first encyclical on artificial intelligence on May 25. Tim Hwang of the Institute for Christian Machine Intelligence joins to share how the tech community has responded to the announcement of the encyclical.
I swear it must be Baader-Meinhof but the fact that Dostoevsky's Demons makes a jump scare appearance on number three of this list is a genuine we live in a simulation moment