On June 14, the Council of General Synod (CoGS) passed a resolution directing the office of the primate and general secretary to appoint a working group to draft terms of reference for an AI ethics task force to study the subject further. That task force’s mandate will be to “to establish guiding virtues that will help the Church negotiate faithful engagement as generative artificial intelligence (genAI) technologies shift,” the resolution says.
CoGS members agreed that further study was needed before the church was ready to form its own policy on the use of AI. Some raised concerns about the potential risks and human costs involved in some of the technology’s applications. Among these concerns were the technology’s potential to drown out the voices of human artists and the need for serious consideration of its environmental impacts from an Indigenous perspective.
Noah Skinner, lay member from the province of Ontario who works in computer science, told CoGS he was skeptical of claims that generative AI was “the next big thing” in technology. However, he said, the concerns CoGS discussed constituted a “well-known capacity for harm” which the church must implement policies to guard against.
Archdeacon Jordan Haynie Ware, CoGS member from the ecclesiastical province of Northern Lights who moved the resolution, also put forward another AI-related motion that CoGS approved.
The second resolution directs the office of the primate and general secretary to adopt an interim AI policy identical to that of the Anglican Foundation of Canada. That would allow the church some measure of protection based on the consideration of a trusted partner, Haynie Ware said, while it made a “good, slow, deliberate” decision of its own. The interim policy will be in place until CoGS can receive advice from the AI ethics task force.
