The Church needs to expand its safeguarding efforts to include the new threats and opportunities posed by artificial intelligence, top organisers of a Vatican conference said. Source: CNS.
“We are really currently in a war” on two fronts when it comes to protecting children from abuse and mistreatment, Joachim von Braun, president of the Pontifical Academy for Sciences, said at a Vatican news conference on March 20.
There is the traditional battleground that most safeguarding guidelines and policies address: protecting minors from “one-on-one” exploitation by a perpetrator in their environment at home, school, church, society and online, he said.
But the new frontier is where AI and gender-based violence have come together in very sophisticated ways and “at scale” that is, where the crime and its victims are easily and rapidly multiplied, he said.
The Church has a role to play, he and other speakers at the conference said.
The Church must work with science-based knowledge about AI and “deeply engage in the regulatory debate, otherwise, we cannot win these two wars at two frontiers,” von Braun said.
The president of the papal academy and others were presenting a conference organised by the academy with the Institute of Anthropology: Interdisciplinary Studies on Human Dignity and Care in Rome and the World Childhood Foundation, founded by Queen Silvia of Sweden to help prevent child sexual abuse and exploitation.
The three-day conference, which concluded on Saturday, looked at the risks and opportunities of AI for children and to come up with a common commitment for safeguarding.
Some of the risks include AI being used to: generate and distribute child sexual abuse material; groom children online; facilitate human trafficking; and infringe on a child’s right to privacy and dignity with excessive monitoring, according to the conference program.
However, AI can also be used to promote the safety and dignity of children as well as expand their access and opportunities in health care and education, the speakers said.
But to do that, they added, there must be greater awareness about AI, clear and consistent regulation by governments and ethical guidelines in AI development.
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Speakers: Church has role in fight against AI-generated exploitation (By Carol Glatz, CNS)
