Vatican City, Holy See—Pope Francis will address G7 leaders on Friday on artificial intelligence, an unprecedented appearance that reflects the Vatican’s growing interest in the new technology, its risks and rewards.
“From this perspective it is clear that the AI that interests the Church is not the technical tool, but how the tool can impact on the life of man,” he told Agence France Presse . Francis—who has himself been the subject of several AI-generated images, including a viral image showing him wearing a huge white puffer coat and a large crucifix—called for a binding international treaty to regulate the development and use of AI.Since the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot, whose capabilities range from digesting complex text to writing poems and computer code, governments have been scrambling to respond to the rapid growth of AI.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said in April that the pope’s presence would “make a decisive contribution to defining a regulatory, ethical and cultural framework.”