Description
Our quest to build intelligent machines can produce valuable insights for theological anthropology through both its successes and its notorious failures. This paper outlines how a zoomed-out theological reflection on the history of AI research so far can foster a necessary breakthrough in the theological interpretation of the biblical notion of imago Dei. Evolutionary theory spurred a complexification of the theological discourse around what it means to be human and in the image of God, pushing the interpretation of these notions away from a substantive understanding and toward functional, relational, and eschatological formulations. Similarly, I argue, engagement with AI can provide new “data” for theological theory, triggering a refinement of our interpretation of human distinctiveness and imago Dei. Contemplating what might still render humans distinctive in a hypothetical scenario of human-level AI leads to an appreciation of the phenomenological dimension of human nature, and it points to our unique relationship with God as the most fundamental aspect of the divine image. This has profound implications for our assessment of claims made by chatbots powered by large language models, and the paper reviews some of these implications.| Period | 2024 |
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| Event title | Generating Wisdom: Artificial Intelligence and the Bible |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Washington, United States, District of ColumbiaShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |