Religious actors constitute fundamental interlocutors in the debate concerning the ethical implications of artificial intelligence. Think of the involvement of religious organizations in the discussion, within the European Parliament, of the “Ethical guidelines for trustworthy AI” developed by the High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence appointed by the European Commission or of the initiatives undertaken in the Catholic context, which led to the preparation in 2020 of the “Rome Call for AI Ethics”, signed on 10 January 2023 also by representatives of Judaism and Islam.

The reflection on algor-ethics was enriched with a further important contribution following the publication, on 14 December 2023, of Pope Francis' Message for the LVII World Day of Peace on the theme "Artificial intelligence and peace". The Message takes on even greater interest because it comes a few days after the provisional agreement reached on 8-9 December 2023 between the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union on the text of the European Regulation on artificial intelligence (AI Act).

In the Document, Pope Francis highlights the risks that may arise from the use of algorithms aimed at categorizing individuals in "social credit systems" (so-called “social scoring”), a practice which in the AI Act’s provisional agreement was appropriately included among those prohibited along with cognitive behavioral manipulation, untargeted scraping of facial images from the Internet or CCTV footage, emotion recognition in the workplace and educational institutions, biometric categorization to infer sensitive data, such as orientation sexual or religious beliefs, and to some cases of predictive policing for people. On this point, specifically, Pope Francis reiterates, against any risk of discrimination or prejudice that an improper use of artificial intelligence can generate, that «the intrinsic dignity of every person and fraternity [...] must be at the basis of the development of new technologies and serve as indisputable criteria for evaluating them before their use, so that digital progress can take place while respecting justice and contributing to the cause of peace».

Precisely the risk that artificial intelligence becomes a tool at the service of war - as unfortunately demonstrated by the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian and Israeli-Palestinian conflicts - is clearly denounced by Pope Francis. The Message for the LVII World Day of Peace, in this sense, underlines the need to identify, at a regulatory level, ethical guidelines for the production of forms of artificial intelligence which cannot ignore the meaning of human existence, the protection of rights fundamental human rights and the pursuit of justice.

Also in this area, therefore, the collaboration between different religious faiths becomes fundamental for the identification of adequate ethical principles and for the construction of a more supportive, fair and peaceful future.