Dicky Sofjan
Indonesian Consortium for Religious Studies (ICRS) & Universitas Gadjah Mada (UGM)
What would religion and religious life be like in the age of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI)? What would the Internet of Things (IoTs), ChatGPT, Blockchains, A/V Reality, and all these futuristic technologies such as Machine Learning Systems (LMS) and Robotics Engineering have to do with the humankind’s “ultimate concern,” borrowing Scott Appleby’s (2000) notion?
These questions were constantly badgering me immediately when I received a startling invitation by the Digital Communications Network (DCN) early this year to become one of the keynote speakers in its Web3 Fusion: AI and Beyond forum in Bangkok, Thailand. The event, held on April 14-16, was described as “a hybrid forum on technologies impacting the information space.” The forum was intended as a platform to learn, share insights, and build networks among young or youthful tech engineers, developers, digital platform company representatives, academics, non-governmental organizations, and youth from around the world. Other invited keynote speakers included those from the United States, Brazil, Greece, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Japan, Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines.
It was not the first time for me to be invited by DCN. I recall in 2019, DCN, World Learning and the US State Department invited me to also speak in an event dubbed “Tolerance and Co-Existence 2.0 Forum.” I vividly recall how fruitful those exchanges were. So , I was really excited to be invited again to learn and share my modest insights and experiences with youth from around the region.
My engagement on this topic started about ten years ago when I was approached by Facebook Jakarta to give a presentation on countering terrorism and deradicalization. After completing my talk, I was further engaged in a series of online interviews with Facebook Indonesia, Singapore, Myanmar, the UK, and also HQ in San Francisco. The Facebook people said that they wanted to engage me as a social scientist and humanities expert to help them with their policies and guidelines on “community standards.”
The intent of the series of interviews with me was to help Facebook to refine its algorithmic modelling—notably using “Keywords in Context”—to mitigate the problem of hate, more specifically “hate individuals,” “hate groups,” and “hate symbols.” The question was how do we train algorithms to detect propaganda, negative campaigns, and the spread of hate by individuals, groups, and through various symbolisms, logos, illustrations, pictures, and videos. So, by refining the algorithm one can prevent Facebook from becoming an effective and useful platform for hate individuals, groups, extremists, and terrorists alike. It was also a way to disincentivize bad actors as well as hateful individuals and groups in using social media platforms for spreading hate, intolerance, misinformation, and promotion of discrimination by deploying certain “Keywords in Context” and key symbols.
A case in point was our conversation about jihad, which was the topic of my Ph.D. dissertation some twenty years back. I had to explain to them that there are 1.8 billion Muslims around the world, who have a variety of views on the subject matter. Facebook, for instance, cannot just ban the word jihad simply because at that time Al-Qaidah, ISIS/ISIL, and An-Nushrah, who were ‘the bad guys’, were deploying the term for their own terroristic agenda. I explained that in Islam, jihad innocently means “striving to achieve or accomplish something great”.
In classical Islamic thought, based on the Prophetic Hadith (sayings, actions and omissions by the Prophet Muhammad), there are essentially two types of jihad: jihad al-shughra (minor jihad) and jihad al-kubra (major jihad). And the Prophet Muhammad once said upon returning from a major battle, “We have returned from a minor battle and are heading to a major one.” The companions questioned the Prophet, “What other battles are greater than the one we were just in?” The Prophet responded by saying that physical fighting in Islam is considered a minor jihad, and the major one, jihad al-kubra, is the battle within ourselves to fight against our own ego, selfishness, arrogance, and avarice. Now, such interpretation of jihad rings true until today, and is used profusely among Islamic jurists, metaphysicians, regular Muslims and most notably among the Sufis.
The community standards policy and guidelines people in Facebook also wanted its algorithm to be able to minimize postings from certain groups or ideologies, for instance, Nazism and hateful campaigns perpetuated by its contemporary Neo-Nazi groups. They told me that they wanted to eliminate all Swastika symbolisms from its platform. “Because it’s a symbol of hate!” they said. Well, I explained that the Swastika was not invented by the Nazis or any Neo-Nazi group. The Swastika is an ancient symbol for the sun to denote wellbeing and used profusely in Hindusm, Buddhism, Jainism, and other traditional cultures. At the time, I said the Facebook algorithm needed to distinguish between the symbols used by these groups and the Nazi Swastika, which is slightly tilted and without any dots. One could imagine that if the Facebook algorithm failed to accomplish this task, there would most likely be unnecessary social repercussions that could arise out of this problem alone.
Nowadays Facebook and other platforms are using “content moderation tools” and policies to mitigate the problem of discrimination, minoritization, cyberbullying, and harassment. And it is probably why Facebook today is not as severely polarizing as 10-15 years ago, when the height of the Syrian war occurred and when the persecution of Muslim Rohingyas took place in the Rakhine State of Myanmar.
From these conversations I had with the community standard policy wonks at Facebook, I reflected on how we as intellectuals and academics think about these sensitive matters, as we progress on to GAI. There are a few take-aways or lessons learned that may be considered:
1. The Power of Words. Words are powerful, and can move people, for good or bad. But words could and usually also generate multiple interpretations. In this case, social hermeneutics and understanding of context are needed when words have multiple meanings or are context dependent. Much of GAI use Neural Network Language Modeling (NMLM), which is based on a corpus and big data analytics, which may be prone to systematic bias.
2. A picture is Worth a Thousand Words. Like words, pictures can convey powerful messages that are both intended or unintended. It follows the law of montage, that people may have dynamic interpretations. Hence, two plus two is not always four, simply because of the dynamic interpretative nature of audience response. There is also a likelihood in the case of the Swastika that symbols could be manipulated and abused.
3. Role for Social Sciences and Humanities. Not all giant social media platforms have social scientists and humanities experts on board to help them set the parameters or train their algorithms to mitigate the problem of hate, bullying, discrimination, and violent extremism. It is time to realize that GAI will have profound social ramifications in terms of how people view reality, perceive the world and act upon their perceptions. Therefore, the social scientists and humanities expert could perhaps mitigate this problem using their tacit knowledge, social analysis and theories that they are familiar with.
Religion and GAI
Generally speaking, there is an assumption that religious communities or people of faith are conservative. This simply means that they tend to want to ‘conserve their tradition,’ for good or bad reasons. They tend to believe in the sufficiency of their religious traditions and feel that their faith will constantly inspire, guide them through life, and ultimately bring them to salvation. But while this may be true to a certain extent, there are variations in many religious communities, depending on each context.
For instance, during the Covid-19 pandemic, some conservative religious communities around the world were unconvinced of the pandemic, and called it the “Plandemic,” and that it was a ploy for the globalists to control the world in order to make people succumb to their plans to make profits out of our suffering and to achieve global domination. However, most of the other religious communities around the world had a different view of the pandemic and the causes of the spreading of the deadly coronavirus. Evidently, many religious organizations played a central role in convincing the people of the veracity of the deadly coronavirus and in fact delivered vaccines to their congregations and communities all around in places such as Indonesia. While religious authorities also produced fatawa (religious decrees and legal opinions) related to social distancing and avoidance of crowds in houses of worship and so on and so forth.
So, why is this important?! Whether you are a believer or disbeliever, like it or not, the people of faith still hold the majority worldwide. There are at least 85% of people across the world who still believe in God and/or a Universal Spirit. Others may say that they are religious, but not affiliated to any religion. And some others would perhaps argue that they are “not religious, but spiritual”. And this is quite easy to forget or miss. We perceive religious communities as being one monolithic bunch of people who are anti-science and against progress or development. We tend to believe that to the religious people, the only relevant knowledge is religious knowledge. This is simply not true.
Now, I am quite familiar with this type of argument. In reality, religious communities and people of faith are more often than not preoccupied with what Scott Appleby calls “the ultimate concern”. The underlying framework of life and its multiple meanings, and how they could lead to a beautiful life of worship, devotion and ethics. That is what most people of faith want and desire in life. It is undoubtedly wrong to assume that religious people are perpetually vindictive toward modernity, progress and the accomplishments in high technology research and industry.
Their mission in life is to constantly search for and construct meanings in life, and how they could accomplish a higher plane of existence through imagination, contemplation, devotion, rituals and spiritual practices. Hence, this is where the “militance” comes into being and the rendering of that radical notion that we, as the homo sapiens or wise humans, must care for the poor, the weak and underprivileged and those who are subjugated, oppressed and dispossessed. In the extreme form, this is also where self-sacrifice and martyrdom come into the picture in the religious mindset. It is therefore understood that religion could play an ambivalent role in society.
Now, what does all of this have to do with GAI? First, GAI is a human creation, born out of language modelling mixed with computational engineering. People of faith mostly believe that God had created and acted as “the Prime Mover” (as Aristoteles would term it) of humankind. God, through “His Intelligent Design”, created all the co-existing species on the planet and beyond as well as the animate and inanimate objects. And along this process of creation, God had bestowed on creation inherent dignity. As the pinnacle of creation, the homo sapiens is especially bestowed with the gift of human dignity, which refers to an exalted idea that we have been given honor, inherent value, and intrinsic worth simply for being part of God’s creation.
The derivation of such dignity entails theological and social implications. Human beings are endowed with ‘aql or reason to discern reality and make meanings based on our observations and experiences. Due to such blessings, we are grateful for the faculties given to us and the capacity to live a dignified existence, and henceforth we are expected to build a flourishing society. The other, with ‘aql, humans have responsibility as stewards of the earth to ensure sustainability and take good care of the planet, while respecting all creatures living and co-existing with us. We know only now that biodiversity is correlated to human survivability or sustenance, as it is connected with the food chain and the predator-prey relations.
This goes without saying that we need to also discern how we think about the dichotomy between the God-given human intelligence and artificial intelligence, especially GAI, while assuming that the latter could generate content in the form of texts, images, memes, videos, and a multitude of other forms and manifestation imaginable to the human mind. One of the foremost concerns by religious scholars is the idea that this GAI is a necessary transition toward “transhumanism,” the idea that human beings are inadequate, and therefore could or should be upgraded using the high technology at our disposal, such as genetic engineering, nano technology, eugenics, chip implants, and many more.
Another technology that deploys GAI relates to what is known as “Companion Apps.” These are GAI-enabled applications that can answer queries and resolve virtually all problems of life, from the meaning of life to where is the nearest laundromat or how to get the cheapest rate of hotels in a given town or city. In short, these apps provide you with all the necessary information and analysis that one needs to live. Companion apps usually use a particular avatar, whose personality is familiar with the intended users. The Birmingham-based Messiah Application (messiah.com) is a case in point, where Jesus is the main character to help us in our spiritual journey through life and assist us in our daily chores.
Now, whether the Messiah can inject more faith in Jesus or make a person feel more fulfilled in life is a question worth raising. Ultimately, whether or not this Messiah can bring salvation to the 2.3 billion Christians on earth is also a question worth pondering, although perhaps I suspect we already know the answer to this one.
