Faith leaders bring ethical concerns, curiosity to AI debate at multi-denominational conference; Episcopal News Service (ENS), September 5, 2025

David Paulsen, Episcopal News Service (ENS) ; Faith leaders bring ethical concerns, curiosity to AI debate at multi-denominational conference

"Some of the most tech-forward minds in the Protestant church gathered here this week at the Faithful Futures conference, where participants wrestled with the ethical, practical and spiritual implications of artificial intelligence. The Episcopal Church is one of four Protestant denominations that hosted the Sept. 2-5 conference. About halfway through, one of the moderators acknowledged that AI has advanced so far and so rapidly that most conferences on AI are no longer focused just on AI...

AI raises spiritual questions over what it means to be human

Much of the conference seemed to pivot on questions that defied easy answers. In an afternoon session Sept. 3, several church leaders who attended last year’s Faithful Futures conference in Seattle, Washington, were invited to give 10-minute presentations on their preferred topics.

“What happens to theology when the appearance of intelligence is no longer uniquely human?” said the Rev. Michael DeLashmutt, a theology professor at General Theological Seminary in New York, New York, who also serves as the Episcopal seminary’s senior vice president.

DeLashmutt argued that people of faith, in an era of AI, must not forget what it means to be Christian and to be human. “Being human means being relational, embodied, justice-oriented and open to God’s spirit,” he said. “So, I think the real risk is not that machines will become human, but that we will forget the fullness of what humanity actually is.”

Kip Currier, a computing and information professor at the University of Pittsburgh, warned that AI is being used by sports betting platforms to appeal to gamblers, including those suffering from addiction. Mark Douglas, an ethics professor at Columbia Theological Seminary, outlined the ecological impact of AI data centers, which need to consume massive amounts of energy and water.

The Rev. Andy Morgan, a Presbyterian pastor based in Knoxville, Tennessee, described himself as his denomination’s “unofficial AI person” and suggested that preachers should not be afraid of using AI to improve their sermons – as long as they establish boundaries to prevent delegating too much to the technology."

Nashville church helps unhoused people after downtown library fire; NewsChannel5, September 6, 2025

Kim Rafferty, NewsChannel5; Nashville church helps unhoused people after downtown library fire

"When the Nashville Public Library's downtown branch closed after a fire, McKendree United Methodist Church stepped up to fill a critical gap for people experiencing homelessness who had lost their daily refuge.

"Alright we'll get ya all bagged up here," said Francie Markham, who volunteers at the church every Thursday morning helping people experiencing homelessness...

After losing their cool refuge with computers and resources, Smith said many people just wanted to avoid the long stretch of summer heat.

"So what we were able to do on our Tuesdays and Thursday meal is to allow them to come in much earlier rather than at the 11:30 times so they would be out of the element," Smith said.

"With the changing of the season we need it open as soon as we can," Smith said.

In the meantime, Smith and Markham keep doing what's written on the walls — serving kindness.

Despite initial reports the library would open soon after the fire, library officials say the library requires a third party inspection before it can open. The two nearest library branches, North Branch and Hadley Park, are both more than a 30-minute walk from the library downtown. 

Have you witnessed acts of community kindness during challenging times? Share your story with Kim Rafferty and help us highlight the helpers making a difference in Middle Tennessee. Email kim.rafferty@NewsChannel5.com to continue the conversation.

In this article, we used artificial intelligence to help us convert a video news report originally written by Kim Rafferty. When using this tool, both Kim and the NewsChannel 5 editorial team verified all the facts in the article to make sure it is fair and accurate before we published it. We care about your trust in us and where you get your news, and using this tool allows us to convert our news coverage into different formats so we can quickly reach you where you like to consume information. It also lets our journalists spend more time looking into your story ideas, listening to you and digging into the stories that matter."

Big Questions About AI and the Church Video; August 25, 2025

Big Questions About AI and the Church Video

Kip Currier: This Big Questions About AI and the Church video (1:12:14) was created by the members of my cohort and me (Cohort 7). Our cohort emanated from the groundbreaking August 2024 ecumenical AI & The Church Summit in Seattle that we all attended.

Perhaps raising more questions than providing answers, the video's aim is to encourage reflection and discussion of the many-faceted issues and concerns at the nexus of AI, faith communities, and our broader societies.

Many thanks to our cohort member Rev. Dr. Andy P. Morgan for spearheading, synthesizing, and uploading this video to YouTube. 

Time; TIME100 AI 2025

 Time; TIME100 AI 2025

Meet the innovators, leaders, and thinkers reshaping our world through groundbreaking advances in artificial intelligence.

Medicare Will Require Prior Approval for Certain Procedures; The New York Times, August 28, 2025

Reed Abelson and Teddy Rosenbluth , The New York Times; Medicare Will Require Prior Approval for Certain Procedures

[Kip Currier: Does anyone who receives Medicare -- or cares about someone who does -- really think that letting AI make "prior approvals" for any Medicare procedures is a good thing?

Read the entire article, but just the money quote below should give any thinking person heart palpitations about this AI Medicare pilot project's numerous red flags and conflicts of interest...]

[Excerpt]

"The A.I. companies selected to oversee the program would have a strong financial incentive to deny claims. Medicare plans to pay them a share of the savings generated from rejections."

Thirteen Journalists on How They Are Rethinking Ethics; Columbia Journalism Review, August 21, 2025

JULIE GERSTEIN AND MARGARET SULLIVAN, Columbia Journalism Review; Thirteen Journalists on How They Are Rethinking Ethics

"Seek truth. Own up to mistakes. Consider all sides of a story. Prioritize accuracy, minimize harm, be transparent, avoid conflicts of interest. These are the core ethics many working journalists today learned in school or during their first years on the job.  

This summer, the two of us—Margaret Sullivan and Julie Gerstein, of the Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security at Columbia University—have been exploring, in a series of pieces with CJR, whether those ethics are sufficient for journalists in the modern moment. Whether, in the face of artificial intelligence, “fake news,” eroding protections for sources, and the weakening of their business model, journalists should adjust their core tenets. 

As part of our research, we asked working journalists and academic journalism ethicists to share their thoughts on themes including disinformation, objectivity, AI, nonprofit news business models, and dealing with sources. 

In some areas, we heard calls for change. “Traditional journalistic norms and conventions for covering politics and politicians were not created for a president like Donald Trump,” said Rod Hicks, executive editor of the St. Louis American and formerly the director of ethics and diversity at the Society of Professional Journalists. Stephen J. Adler, director of the Ethics and Journalism Initiative at the NYU Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and chair of the steering committee of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, argued that “the media isn’t doing its job in correctly balancing the news value of a leak versus. the news value of who made the leak and why.” 

But other journalists spoke out in favor of renewed allegiance to old values. “Limiting the use of unnamed sources to matters of public interest wherever we can helps us ensure we don’t dilute the credibility that makes our coverage worth reading,” pointed out Elena Cherney, senior editor at the Wall Street Journal and leader of the newsroom’s Standards & Ethics team. And even as business models have changed, Matthew Watkins, editor in chief of the nonprofit Texas Tribune, argues, “the need to protect journalism from the potential corrupting influence of money is as old as the profession itself.” 

Their comments highlight the value of open, honest conversation among thoughtful leaders in an industry seeking a path forward."

CHATBOT CHEATING IN ETHICS CLASS; Christianity Today, August 18, 2025

MYLES WERNTZ, Christianity Today; CHATBOT CHEATING IN ETHICS CLASS

"The ethical and practical problems are legion: copyright disputes, ecological effects, a possible economic bubble, and plain deceit. Still, for an undergraduate on a deadline, the appeal is obvious."

Margaret Boden, Philosopher of Artificial Intelligence, Dies at 88; The New York Times, August 14, 2025

 Michael S. Rosenwald , The New York Times; Margaret Boden, Philosopher of Artificial Intelligence, Dies at 88

"As a philosopher of AI, Professor Boden was often asked if she thought that robots would, or could, take over society.

“The truth is that they certainly won’t want to,” she wrote in Aeon magazine in 2018.

Why? Because robots, unlike humans, don’t care.

“A computer’s ‘goals,’” she wrote, “are empty of feeling.”"

Larry Ellison Wants to Do Good, Do Research and Make a Profit; The New York Times, August 12, 2025

  Theodore Schleifer and Nicholas Kulish, The New York Times; Larry Ellison Wants to Do Good, Do Research and Make a Profit

"Mr. Ellison has rarely engaged with the community of Giving Pledge signers, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. He has cherished his autonomy and does not want to be influenced to support Mr. Gates’s causes, one of the people said, while also sensitive to any idea that he is backing off the pledge.

But the stakes of Mr. Ellison’s message on X are enormous. His fortune is about 10 times what it was when he signed the pledge as the software company he founded, Oracle, rides the artificial intelligence boom. Mr. Ellison controls a staggering 40-plus percent of the company’s stock...

“Oxford, Cambridge and the whole university sector are under pressure to capitalize on intellectual property because of long-running government policy belief that the U.K. has fallen behind economically,” said John Picton, an expert in nonprofit law at the University of Manchester."

AI Eroded Doctors’ Ability to Spot Cancer Within Months in Study; Bloomberg, August 12, 2025

Bloomberg ; AI Eroded Doctors’ Ability to Spot Cancer Within Months in Study

How Short-Term Thinking Is Destroying America; The New York Times, August 11, 2025

 Ben Rhodes , The New York Times;  How Short-Term Thinking Is Destroying America

"Unsurprisingly, the second Trump administration has binged on short-term “wins” at the expense of the future. It has created trillions of dollars in prospective debt, bullied every country on earth, deregulated the spread of A.I. and denied the scientific reality of global warming. It has ignored the math that doesn’t add up, the wars that don’t end on Trump deadlines, the C.E.O.s forecasting what could amount to huge job losses if A.I. transforms our economy and the catastrophic floods, which are harbingers of a changing climate. Mr. Trump declares victory. The camera focuses on the next shiny object. Negative consequences can be obfuscated today, blamed on others tomorrow."

Boston Public Library aims to increase access to a vast historic archive using AI; NPR, August 11, 2025

Chloe Veltman, NPR ; Boston Public Library aims to increase access to a vast historic archive using AI

"Boston Public Library, one of the oldest and largest public library systems in the country, is launching a project this summer with OpenAI and Harvard Law School to make its trove of historically significant government documents more accessible to the public.

The documents date back to the early 1800s and include oral histories, congressional reports and surveys of different industries and communities...

Currently, members of the public who want to access these documents must show up in person. The project will enhance the metadata of each document and will enable users to search and cross-reference entire texts from anywhere in the world. 

Chapel said Boston Public Library plans to digitize 5,000 documents by the end of the year, and if all goes well, grow the project from there...

Harvard University said it could help. Researchers at the Harvard Law School Library's Institutional Data Initiative are working with libraries, museums and archives on a number of fronts, including training new AI models to help libraries enhance the searchability of their collections. 

AI companies help fund these efforts, and in return get to train their large language models on high-quality materials that are out of copyright and therefore less likely to lead to lawsuits. (Microsoft and OpenAI are among the many AI players targeted by recent copyright infringement lawsuits, in which plaintiffs such as authors claim the companies stole their works without permission.)"

Now Trump Wants to Rename Artificial Intelligence to This; The Daily Beast, July 23, 2025

Erkki Forster, The Daily Beast; Now Trump Wants to Rename Artificial Intelligence to This

"President Donald Trump has set his sights on a new linguistic enemy. While speaking at an artificial intelligence summit Wednesday, Trump realized mid-thought that he doesn’t like the word “artificial” at all. “I can’t stand it. I don’t even like the name,” the 79-year-old president said. ”You know, I don’t like anything that’s artificial so could we straighten that out please?” he asked, pointing to someone in the audience. “We should change the name.” As disbelieving laughter rippled through the room, Trump insisted, “I actually mean that—I don’t like the name ‘artificial’ anything.” He then offered an alternative—one he often uses to describe himself: “It’s not artificial. It’s genius. It’s pure genius.”"

Getting Along with GPT: The Psychology, Character, and Ethics of Your Newest Professional Colleague; ABA Journal, May 9, 2025

 ABA Journal; Getting Along with GPT: The Psychology, Character, and Ethics of Your Newest Professional Colleague

"The Limits of GenAI’s Simulated Humanity

• Creative thinking. An LLM mirrors humanity’s collective intelligence, shaped by everything it has read. It excels at brainstorming and summarizing legal principles but lacks independent thought, opinions, or strategic foresight—all essential to legal practice. Therefore, if a model’s summary of your legal argument feels stale, illogical, or disconnected from human values, it may be because the model has no democratized data to pattern itself on. The good news? You may be on to something original—and truly meaningful!
• True comprehension. An LLM does not know the law; it merely predicts legal-sounding text based on past examples and mathematical probabilities.
• Judgment and ethics. An LLM does not possess a moral compass or the ability to make judgments in complex legal contexts. It handles facts, not subjective opinions.  
• Long-term consistency. Due to its context window limitations, an LLM may contradict itself if key details fall outside its processing scope. It lacks persistent memory storage.
• Limited context recognition. An LLM has limited ability to understand context beyond provided information and is limited by training data scope.
• Trustfulness. Attorneys have a professional duty to protect client confidences, but privacy and PII (personally identifiable information) are evolving concepts within AI. Unlike humans, models can infer private information without PII, through abstract patterns in data. To safeguard client information, carefully review (or summarize with AI) your LLM’s terms of use."

AI guzzled millions of books without permission. Authors are fighting back.; The Washington Post, July 19, 2025

Will Oremus , The Washington Post; AI guzzled millions of books without permission. Authors are fighting back.

[Kip Currier: I've written this before on this blog and I'll say it again: technology companies would never allow anyone to freely vacuum up their content and use it without permission or compensation. Period. Full Stop.]

[Excerpt]

"Baldacci is among a group of authors suing OpenAI and Microsoft over the companies’ use of their work to train the AI software behind tools such as ChatGPT and Copilot without permission or payment — one of more than 40 lawsuits against AI companies advancing through the nation’s courts. He and other authors this week appealed to Congress for help standing up to what they see as an assault by Big Tech on their profession and the soul of literature.

They found sympathetic ears at a Senate subcommittee hearing Wednesday, where lawmakers expressed outrage at the technology industry’s practices. Their cause gained further momentum Thursday when a federal judge granted class-action status to another group of authors who allege that the AI firm Anthropic pirated their books.

“I see it as one of the moral issues of our time with respect to technology,” Ralph Eubanks, an author and University of Mississippi professor who is president of the Authors Guild, said in a phone interview. “Sometimes it keeps me up at night.”

Lawsuits have revealed that some AI companies had used legally dubious “torrent” sites to download millions of digitized books without having to pay for them."

US authors suing Anthropic can band together in copyright class action, judge rules; Reuters, July 17, 2025

 Blake Brittain , Reuters; US authors suing Anthropic can band together in copyright class action, judge rules

"A California federal judge ruled on Thursday that three authors suing artificial intelligence startup Anthropic for copyright infringement can represent writers nationwide whose books Anthropic allegedly pirated to train its AI system.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup said the authors can bring a class action on behalf of all U.S. writers whose works Anthropic allegedly downloaded from "pirate libraries" LibGen and PiLiMi to create a repository of millions of books in 2021 and 2022."

The Future of Weather Prediction Is Here. Maybe.; The New York Times, July 13, 2025

Tim Fernholz

Photographs by Jason Henry

, The New York Times ; The Future of Weather Prediction Is Here. Maybe.

Thanks to A.I., companies like WindBorne hope to usher in a golden age of forecasting. But they rely in part on government data — and the agency that provides it is in turmoil.

"The good news is that we may be poised to enter a new golden age of A.I.-enabled weather prediction. That heat wave that scorched the East Coast last month? WindBorne says its software first flagged that 15 days out, two to four days before competing forecasts.

There’s a catch, though. These new deep learning forecasts are built on data provided for free by public science agencies. In the United States, that relationship is threatened by the Trump administration’s heavy cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, which houses the National Weather Service."

Can Gen AI and Copyright Coexist?; Harvard Business Review, July 16, 2025

 Michael D. Smith and Rahul Telang, Harvard Business Review ; Can Gen AI and Copyright Coexist?

"We’re experts in the study of digital transformation and have given this issue a lot of thought. We recently served, for example, on a roundtable of 10 economists convened by the U.S. Copyright Office to study the implications of gen AI on copyright policy. We recognize that the two decisions are far from the last word on this topic; both will no doubt be appealed to the Ninth Circuit and then subsequently to the Supreme Court. But in the meantime, we believe there are already many lessons to be learned from these decisions about the implications of gen AI for business—lessons that will be useful for leaders in both the creative industries and gen AI companies."

I’m Watching the Sacrifice of College’s Soul; The New York Times, July 14, 2025

 Frank Bruni, The New York Times; I’m Watching the Sacrifice of College’s Soul

"At dinner recently with fellow professors, the conversation turned to two topics that have been unavoidable these past few years. The first was grade inflation — and the reality that getting A’s seldom requires any herculean effort and doesn’t distinguish one bright consultant-to-be from the next. Many students, accordingly, redirect their energies away from the classroom and the library. Less deep reading. More shrewd networking.gr

The second topic was A.I. Given its advancing sophistication, should we surrender to it? Accept that students will use it without detection to cull a semester’s worth of material and sculpt their paragraphs? Perhaps we just teach them how to fashion the most effective prompts for bots? Perhaps the future of college instruction lies in whatever slivers of mental endeavor can’t be outsourced to these digital know-it-alls.

And perhaps a certain idea of college — a certain ideal of college — is dying...

I’m not under the illusion that college used to be regarded principally in such high-minded terms. From the G.I. Bill onward, it has been held up rightfully as an engine of social mobility, a ladder of professional opportunity, yielding greater wealth for its graduates and society both.

But there was a concurrent sense that it contributed mightily to the civic good — that it made society culturally and morally richer. That feeling is now fighting for survival. So much over the past quarter century has transformed Americans’ relationship to higher education in ways that degrade its loftier goals. The corpus of college lumbers on, but some of its soul is missing."

Join Our Livestream: Inside the AI Copyright Battles; Wired, July 11, 2025

 Reece Rogers Wired; Join Our Livestream: Inside the AI Copyright Battles

"WHAT'S GOING ON right now with the copyright battles over artificial intelligence? Many lawsuits regarding generative AI’s training materials were initially filed back in 2023, with decisions just now starting to trickle out. Whether it’s Midjourney generating videos of Disney characters, like Wall-E brandishing a gun, or an exit interview with a top AI lawyer as he left Meta, WIRED senior writer Kate Knibbs has been following this fight for years—and she’s ready to answer your questions.

Bring all your burning questions about the AI copyright battles to WIRED’s next, subscriber-only livestream scheduled for July 16 at 12pm ET / 9am PT, hosted by Reece Rogers with Kate Knibbs. The event will be streamed right here. For subscribers who are not able to join, a replay of the livestream will be available after the event."