Originally published at Southern Cross
By Carol Glatz
VATICAN CITY — Catholic Church needs to expand its safeguarding efforts to include the new threats and opportunities posed by artificial intelligence, top organizers of a Vatican conference said.
“We are really currently in a war” on two fronts when it comes to protecting children from abuse and mistreatment, Joachim von Braun, president of the Pontifical Academy for Sciences, said at a Vatican news conference March 20.
There is the traditional battleground that most safeguarding guidelines and policies address: protecting minors from “one-on-one” exploitation by a perpetrator in their environment at home, school, church, society and online, he said. But the new frontier is where AI and gender-based violence have come together in very sophisticated ways and “at scale” that is, where the crime and its victims are easily and rapidly multiplied, he said.
The church has a role to play, he and other speakers at the conference said.
The Catholic Church must work with science-based knowledge about AI and “deeply engage in the regulatory debate, otherwise, we cannot win these two wars at two frontiers,” von Braun said.
The president of the papal academy and others were presenting a conference organized by the academy with the Institute
