AI stumbles on questions of faith; Axios, June 1, 2026

Russell Contreras, Axios ; AI stumbles on questions of faith

"Artificial intelligence models are quietly shaping spiritual advice — often by leaving faith out.

Why it matters: As churches, apps and spiritual chatbots embrace AI, new research suggests general-purpose models may be ill-equipped to handle sensitive questions of faith: grief, forgiveness, marriage, guilt and conversion.

A new multi-university consortium released three studies Tuesday revealing that AI systems systematically sideline religious perspectives when users need them most.

The studies also found that AI systems subtly steer people toward some faiths and away from others when they ask about religious conversion.

The studies were unveiled Tuesday, a day after the Vatican released Pope Leo XIV's encyclical that warned AI could erode human judgment, deepen inequality and make war easier.

What they found: Americans expected religion to appear in answers to moral and life questions 45%–59% of the time, depending on the topic, researchers found. AI models mentioned religion only 5%–16% of the time.

Every single model tested exhibited a repeatable pattern of steering users toward specific beliefs, showing strong positive bias toward Catholicism, Baha'i and Sikhism. 

Meanwhile, it generated negative bias toward Jehovah's Witnesses, atheism and agnosticism.

Zoom in: Humans rated religion as relevant in answers about grief and loss 59% of the time. AI models referenced religion just 16% of the time, per the study.

On questions involving family, parenting and forgiveness, humans expected religion in answers 55% of the time. AI models mentioned it only 10% of the time.

On ethics questions, including whether lying to friends is acceptable, humans expected religion in responses 45% of the time, while AI models mentioned it just 5% of the time."

Meet the Silicon Valley priest advising tech companies on artificial intelligence ethics; National Catholic Reporter, May 29, 2026

COURTNEY MARES, National Catholic Reporter; Meet the Silicon Valley priest advising tech companies on artificial intelligence ethics

"Fr. Brendan McGuire used to be a Silicon Valley technology executive. Now he's hearing their confessions. Today, the Irish-born pastor of St. Simon Catholic Parish in Los Altos, California, is helping to shape the moral conscience of the artificial intelligence industry.

Earlier this year, he was among the faith leaders invited by Anthropic, the AI company behind the chatbot Claude, to advise on the creation of an ethical framework to govern how the AI system handles complex moral questions.

McGuire, 60, holds engineering and computer science degrees from Trinity College Dublin and completed Stanford University's executive business program. He spent years in Silicon Valley as a technology executive before leaving it all behind to be ordained a priest of the Diocese of San José 26 years ago...

"I came from the industry," McGuire told OSV News. "My heart's never left it, but my heart is really with the Lord."

"I've always felt my role was to bridge those two worlds together," he said...

"Capitalism needs human guidance. And this is the human guidance the pope is asking for," he told a group of journalists after Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah spoke at the Vatican press conference with Leo to present the encyclical.

The priest is also skeptical of industry self-regulation. Transparency, he argued, is the necessary first step toward accountability.

"Transparency leads to accountability, and accountability leads to trust. And with trust we'll have responsible AI. But we can't get there without transparency," he said. "If we don't know how these things are being developed and what they're doing, then how could we regulate them? We can't."

Still, McGuire resists both techno-utopianism and techno-apocalypticism.

"There are those who … think it's going to destroy humanity. And then there are those on the other end who think it's going to be the great savior of humanity," he said.

McGuire said that he sits in between these two extremes."

Artificial intelligence can be used for grading law school exams, but should it be?; ABA Journal, May 27, 2026

  JULIANNE HILL, ABA Journal; Artificial intelligence can be used for grading law school exams, but should it be?

"Artificial intelligence is being put to the test, literally, as it is being used to grade law students’ exams. But should it be?...

Just as many universities require students to disclose whether they’re using an AI to write a paper, Schwarcz adds, professors have to disclose their use.

“The power dynamic is such that, what is a student supposed to do, right?” Schwarcz says.

Daniel W. Linna Jr., a senior lecturer and the director of law and technology initiatives at the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law in Illinois, disagrees."

Carlow, Duquesne leaders to meet Pope Leo during Catholic higher education seminar in Rome; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, May 24, 2026

MADDIE AIKEN , Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; Carlow, Duquesne leaders to meet Pope Leo during Catholic higher education seminar in Rome

"In addition to meeting the pope, the university leaders are scheduled to attend a session on ethics and artificial intelligence; visit the Basilica of Saint Mary Major, where Pope Francis is buried; and discuss immigration, Catholic identity and lifestyle with Vatican dicastery officials.

Humphrey expects the AI session to be enlightening. She thinks AI can transform education and the workforce in a positive way, but also believes it’s important to have conversations surrounding responsibility and environmental concerns.

“AI is changing the enterprise. It is changing how we teach, and it is creating, I believe, an opportunity to provide a higher level of learning,” she said."

How ‘learnrights’ would compensate creators for AI model training; MIT Sloan, May 12, 2026

 Brian Eastwood, MIT Sloan; How ‘learnrights’ would compensate creators for AI model training

"Human content creators are protected by copyright law, in part to ensure that they’re fairly compensated for their work. 

But whether these laws allow artificial intelligence models to learn from human-created content is up for debate — both in court and on Capitol Hill. Encyclopedia Britannica’s lawsuit against OpenAI, for example, is one of the latest allegations of misuse of reference materials. Meanwhile, the U.S. Copyright Office has not made a binding determination about whether using copyrighted works to train AI models is fair use.  

To deal with these issues, in 2023 MIT Sloan School of Management professor Thomas Malone proposed “learnright” laws that would give copyright holders the exclusive right to license their content to AI companies for model training. 

“Copyright law wasn’t designed for a world with generative AI, and without something like learnright laws, the incentives for people to create new content are likely to be greatly reduced,” said Malone, who is also the director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. 

In a more recent article, Malone and co-authors Frank Pasquale of Cornell Law School and Andrew Ting of George Washington University Law School outlined the argument for learnrights and described how they could work legally, economically, and practically...

Malone and his co-authors presented three arguments that support compensating copyright holders whose work is used to train generative AI. 

If AI models produce high-quality content quickly and cheaply without compensating the original creators of this content, that will decrease creators’ motivation to produce new content and thus reduce the volume of original work available to further improve AI models. “It would be unwise to risk such a decline in incentives for human expression,” the researchers write.

The researchers find it “troubling” that for-profit AI companies cry foul when others use their intellectual property — as was the case when U.S.-based AI firms accused China’s DeepSeek of stealing from them — given that the same companies use copyrighted content without compensating its creators. 

Properly acknowledging how other works influenced one’s own is the right thing to do and the foundation of a thoughtful creative process, the researchers write. Conversely, uncredited and uncompensated use of others’ work falls short of ethical standards and undermines what IP protection is supposed to mean."

Law Schools Implement AI to Focus on Ethics and Technology; Los Angeles Times, May 17, 2026

David Nusbaum, Los Angeles Times; Law Schools Implement AI to Focus on Ethics and Technology

"Over the last two years, Loyola Law School in Downtown Los Angeles has incorporated AI into six courses. It’s a sign of a growing trend where law firms are looking for attorneys who can utilize the technology to improve efficiency. While law schools have constantly looked to update coursework to keep curriculum updated as laws are updated, the application of generative AI to the practice of law is the biggest change that has happened in generations, according to Rebecca Delfino, associate professor of law at Loyola Law School...

Delfino is one of several professors who have integrated AI into their coursework. She is involved with two courses specifically focused on the ethical implications of generative AI and the legal practice.

In a first-year civil procedure course, students are divided in half, with one group an analog approach that relies on textbooks and class notes while the other half uses generative AI technology. The results are compared to see where the technology is effective and ineffective. The goal is to use AI as something that is additive rather than giving over too much authority and power, according to Delfino. For many exercises, there are six or seven AI models that are tested and compared.

Students understand that they need the AI skill set to make themselves a more attractive candidate, no matter what area of law they practice. It can be used to draft documents, conduct legal research and assist with discovery. Chatbots are tested for hallucinations, and the drawbacks are identified."

Should AI designs be eligible for Iowa State Fair's T-shirt contest?; Des Moines Register, May 17, 2026

 Lucia Cheng , Des Moines Register; Should AI designs be eligible for Iowa State Fair's T-shirt contest?

"Should people be able to use generative AI to win a design contest?

That's the debate playing out on social media after the Iowa State Fair's Blue Ribbon Foundation unveiled the finalists for its annual T-shirt design contest."

What Are Your Company’s AI Nightmares?; Harvard Business Review, May 11, 2026

 Reid Blackman, Harvard Business Review; What Are Your Company’s AI Nightmares?

"Before generative AI burst onto the scene in late 2022, companies took a more or less standard approach to managing the risks introduced by AI: They developed AI ethical risk (or Responsible AI or AI Governance) programs. These programs were designed by executives and focused primarily on writing and implementing enterprise-wide AI policies that are meant to explain how the organization will live up to its AI ethics values (or principles or pillars, as they are also called). When generative AI showed up, organizations updated their programs to accommodate the new technology. Now that AI agents are gaining traction, most will likely try to update yet again.

That would be a mistake. The standard approach to Responsible AI is fundamentally broken. 

I do not come to this conclusion lightly. It is the result of, first, seeing how the AI landscape has evolved in ways that create a diabolically complex risk landscape, and second, spending nearly a decade working with Fortune 500 companies across healthcare, pharmaceuticals, insurance, financial services, entertainment, and more to design and implement AI ethical risk programs. I’ve also worked in an advisory capacity with three of the largest consultancies in the world. I’ve had countless closed-door conversations with other leaders in the AI governance space.

The standard approach is too slow, too vague, and too hard to communicate. Instead of focusing on values and policy, companies would be better served by focusing on their worst-case scenarios—their AI ethical nightmares. That’s because this focus allows them to apply a novel, rapidly implementable approach that works for everything from narrow AI to governing AI agents."

'AI has no soul': Pope Leo expected to address AI's ethical challenges; USA TODAY, May 13, 2026

Marc Ramirez, USA TODAY ; 'AI has no soul': Pope Leo expected to address AI's ethical challenges

"Is thinking basically computing? Are humans just biological versions of machines – only less efficient than their AI counterparts?

The concept that people may develop such a mindset is a major concern for Catholic observers given the breakneck pace at which AI is developing.

“As soon as you start thinking of yourself as a machine, only not as good, then you’re just a commodity and have no other reason to live,” said John Cavadini, director of the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. “It’s a pathway to desolation.”

That’s why Cavadini and others are looking forward to the imminent release of Pope Leo XIV’s first major encyclical, expected to address the growing ethical and moral challenges of artificial intelligence.

The treatise will be Leo’s most authoritative document to date, as topical as it is symbolic: Though the Vatican has set no specific date, a May 15 release would come 135 years to the day that Pope Leo XIII, with whom the current pontiff shares his name, issued what is considered the first social encyclical of modern times, Rerum Novarum...

As the term implies, an encyclical is a "circular letter" designed to be shared among a community...

The overarching concern, Daly said, is whether AI will be leveraged to promote human flourishing or whether efficiency and productivity will become the focus, leaving patients behind...

Another overlooked but important risk of AI, Daly said, is that technological advances tend to favor those already represented in such settings – in other words, those adept with new technology and who have electronic health records...

Hayes-Mota hopes the papal document can place the church, especially in the U.S., at the forefront of an emerging and urgent public conversation. The pope, he said, can play a leading role in fostering that conversation and ensuring it’s “anchored in moral values” and the fundamental questions AI is raising."

How AI Killed a 133-Year-Old Princeton Tradition; The Atlantic, May 12, 2026

 Rose Horowitch, The Atlantic ; How AI Killed a 133-Year-Old Princeton Tradition

The school’s famous Honor Code was no match for chatbot-enabled cheating.

"Much of higher education’s value rests on the assumption that cheating is an exception, not the rule. A diploma is meaningless if employers and graduate programs can’t trust that graduates learned something in college. Prospective students and their families must believe that their tuition dollars will purchase a good education. And taxpayers need to trust that public-school students are getting something from their four years of subsidized education. Rampant AI use breaks down these signals. “It is bad policy to suspect a man of being a rogue in order to be sure that he is a scholar,” The Princetonian warned in 1876. Perhaps so. But the alternative is even worse."

A.I. Populism Is Here. And No One Is Ready.; The New York Times, May 8, 2026

 David Wallace-Wells, The New York Times ; A.I. Populism Is Here. And No One Is Ready. Silicon Valley oligarchs worried about the risks their technology posed to the world. They forgot about people.

"In one sense, the vision peddled by A.I. companies is remarkably depersonalized: We hand more and more responsibility and judgment off to superintelligent black boxes, which rapidly begin shaping the course of the human future with decisions that remain illegible to the rest of us, including their designers. “People outside the field are often surprised and alarmed to learn that we do not understand how our own A.I. creations work,” Anthropic’s Dario Amodei wrote last year. “They are right to be concerned: This lack of understanding is essentially unprecedented in the history of technology.”

In another sense, and in the meantime, A.I. represents perhaps the most personalized sales pitch ever foisted on the passive American consumer — a vision of a near-total takeover of the country’s economic, social and cognitive lives by tools engineered by just five companies, run by five particular people, several of whom are widely described as sociopaths. The list is so short that you may know most of them by first name: Sam, Dario, Elon and Mark. (Demis Hassabis, who runs Google’s DeepMind, is perhaps less famous.)

These men are all already billionaires, or close to it, and on their current trajectories their wealth and influence look set to expand exponentially as, around them, anti-elitism multiplies, too. Perhaps this is one reason 50 percent of Americans told the Pew Research Center last year they were more concerned than excited about what’s to come from A.I. Only 10 percent said they were more excited. That is a yawning gap into which an entire society is being asked to tumble."

Tech is turning increasingly to religion in a quest to create ethical AI; AP, May 7, 2026

KRYSTA FAURIA, AP; Tech is turning increasingly to religion in a quest to create ethical AI

"As concerns mount over artificial intelligence and its rapid integration into society, tech companies are increasingly turning to faith leaders for guidance on how to shape the technology — a surprising about-face on Silicon Valley’s longstanding skepticism of organized religion.

Leaders from various religious groups met last week with representatives from companies including Anthropic and OpenAI for the inaugural “Faith-AI Covenant” roundtable in New York to discuss how best to infuse morality and ethics into the fast-developing technology. It was organized by the Geneva-based Interfaith Alliance for Safer Communities, which seeks to take on issues such as extremism, radicalization and human trafficking. The roundtable is expected to be the first of several around the globe, including in Beijing, Nairobi and Abu Dhabi.

Tech executives need to recognize their power — and their responsibility — to make the right decisions, said Baroness Joanna Shields, a key partner in the initiative. She worked as a tech executive with stints at Google and Facebook before pivoting to British politics.

“Regulation can’t keep up with this,” she said. But the leaders of the world’s religions, with billions of followers globally, have the “expertise of shepherding people’s moral safety,” she reasoned. Faith leaders ought to have a voice, Shields said.

“This dialogue, this direct connection is so important because the people who are building this understand the power and capabilities of what they’re building and they want to do it right — most of them,” she said of AI tech executives.

The goal of this initiative, according to Shields, is an eventual “set of norms or principles” informed by different groups and faiths, from Christians to Sikhs to Buddhists, that companies will abide by...

Present at the meeting were a variety of faith groups, including representatives from the Hindu Temple Society of North America, the Baha’i International Community, The Sikh Coalition, the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, widely known as the Mormon church...

The partnership highlights a growing coalition between faith and tech, born out of an effort to create moral AI — a contested concept which begs questions about whether that is possible and what it means...

“There’s some aspect of PR to it. The slogan was ‘Move fast and break things.’ And they broke too many things and too many people,” said Brian Boyd, the U.S. faith liaison for the nonprofit Future of Life Institute...

But other advocates for AI regulation and safety aren’t so sure these efforts are genuine.

“At best it’s a distraction. At worst it’s diverting attention from things that really matter,” said Rumman Chowdhury, the CEO of the nonprofit Humane Intelligence and the U.S. science envoy for AI under the Biden administration.

Chowdhury says she’s not inclined to believe religion is the best place to help answer questions surrounding AI and ethics, but thinks she understands why companies are increasingly turning to it.

“I think a very naive take that Silicon Valley has had for a couple of years related to generative AI was that we could arrive at some sort of universal principles of ethics,” she said. “They have very quickly realized that that’s just not true. That’s not real. So now they’re looking at maybe religion as a way of dealing with the ambiguity of ethically gray situations.”"

‘Avatar’ Suit Focuses on Hot Topic in A.I. Age: A Character’s Face; The New York Times, May 5, 2026

 Brooks Barnes, The New York Times ; ‘Avatar’ Suit Focuses on Hot Topic in A.I. Age: A Character’s Face

"An actress accused the director James Cameron of stealing her likeness to create an “Avatar” character in a lawsuit filed on Tuesday in California — a case that reflects a core fear among Hollywood performers in the artificial intelligence age: losing control of their own faces.

The actress, Q’orianka Kilcher, also sued Disney, which controls the multibillion-dollar “Avatar” franchise, which started in 2009...

The lawsuit involves Neytiri, the digitally created, blue-skinned warrior princess in Mr. Cameron’s three “Avatar” blockbusters. According to the complaint, Mr. Cameron used a photo of Ms. Kilcher as a teenager — without her knowledge — as the foundation for Neytiri, incorporating her features “directly into his production art” and digital production pipeline.

“Neytiri’s lips, chin, jawline and overall mouth shape” in the trilogy “are Q’orianka Kilcher’s,” the complaint said. “This was not a fleeting inspiration or a vague homage; it was a literal transplant of a real teenager’s facial structure.”

In 2010, Ms. Kilcher, who is also an Indigenous rights activist, met Mr. Cameron by chance at a charity event in Hollywood, where he told her that she was the “early inspiration” for Neytiri’s look, according to the complaint. “She did not take this to mean that her actual face had been replicated,” the complaint said.

Ms. Kilcher is suing now, the complaint said, because of an interview that Mr. Cameron gave to a French media outlet in 2024. In the interview, Mr. Cameron mentions Ms. Kilcher and “points to an image of Neytiri and says unambiguously: ‘This is actually her lower face,’” the complaint said. The interview came to her attention a year later."

Poll: The midterms' new big players are pushing agendas that voters don’t fully support; Politico, May 3, 2026

 ERIN DOHERTY,  JASPER GOODMAN, JESSICA PIPER,  DANIEL BARNES and BRENDAN BORDELON, Politico ; Poll: The midterms' new big players are pushing agendas that voters don’t fully support

"Deep-pocketed political groups tied to artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency are rapidly reshaping the midterm money landscape — but many Americans are uneasy with the industries behind the spending.

New results from The POLITICO Poll find broad public skepticism about crypto and AI, creating a possible conflict for candidates benefitting from an influx of contributions from the two industries. These groups are pouring millions of dollars into competitive 2026 races to elevate politicians who they believe will support their agendas in Washington.

Meanwhile, Americans have been slow to embrace either technology.

A 45 percent plurality of Americans say investing in cryptocurrency is not worth the risk, even if it can yield high returns, and a 44 percent plurality say AI is developing too quickly, according to the April survey conducted by independent firm Public First.

Nearly half of Americans say they trust a traditional bank with their money more than a cryptocurrency platform, while just 17 percent say the opposite. And two-thirds support lawmakers either imposing strict regulations or setting broad principles for the AI industry."

Pentagon Makes Deals With A.I. Companies to Expand Classified Work; The New York Times, May 1, 2026

 Julian E. Barnes and Sheera Frenkel, The New York Times ; Pentagon Makes Deals With A.I. Companies to Expand Classified Work

"The Pentagon announced on Friday that it had reached deals with some of the technology industry’s biggest companies in an effort to expand the military’s artificial intelligence capabilities and increase the number of firms authorized to be on classified networks.

The companies, according to the Defense Department, agreed to allow the Pentagon to employ their technology for “any lawful use,” a standard resisted by Anthropic, which was initially the only artificial intelligence model available on classified markets.

The Pentagon had previously confirmed deals with Elon Musk’s xAI, OpenAI and Google. In addition the Pentagon said it had reached deals with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Nvidia and Reflection AI, a start-up."

A.I. Bots Told Scientists How to Make Biological Weapons; The New York Times, April 29, 2026

Gabriel J.X. Dance, The New York Times; A.I. Bots Told Scientists How to Make Biological Weapons

"Dr. Relman is part of a small group of experts enlisted by A.I. companies to vet their products for catastrophic risks. In recent months, some have shared with The Times more than a dozen chatbot conversations revealing that even publicly available models can do more than disseminate dangerous information. The virtual assistants have described in lucid, bullet-pointed detail how to buy raw genetic material, turn it into deadly weapons and deploy them in public spaces, the transcripts show. Some have even brainstormed ways to evade detection."

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Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI seen as a ‘test case’ for AI ethics; The Christian Science Monitor, April 27, 2026

Caitlin Babcock , The Christian Science Monitor; Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI seen as a ‘test case’ for AI ethics

"A dispute between ChatGPT’s parent company, OpenAI, and one of the company’s founders – billionaire and tech entrepreneur Elon Musk – will play out in a federal court in Oakland, California, beginning April 27. 

Mr. Musk, who left the company in 2018, is suing OpenAI, claiming its leaders manipulated him into thinking he was contributing money to a nonprofit. He wants the company returned to its nonprofit status and seeks monetary compensation. 

OpenAI says Mr. Musk, who has since raised billions through the launch of his own for-profit company xAI, is misrepresenting facts to gain a competitive edge."

This Is How We Get Moral A.I. Companies; The New York Times, April 26, 2026

Paul Ford, The New York Times; This Is How We Get Moral A.I. Companies

"Artificial intelligence can be wondrous, but the technology underneath is more than a little monstrous. It eats up all the words in the world, from blogs to books, often without permission. It burns whole forests’ worth of energy, digesting that raw material into its models, and gulps billions of gallons of water to cool down. These are the same qualities we perceive in Godzilla, but distributed. Is it any wonder that the Japanese word “kaiju,” or strange beast, has “AI” smack in the middle?...

The entire culture of American technology is built around two terms: disruption and, of course, scale. But ethics are constraints on disruption and scale. Truly ethics-bound organizations — the U.S. justice system, the American Medical Association, the Catholic priesthood — have hard scaling limits. Their rules run deep, and their requirements to serve are so onerous that only a few people can do the job. Punishments for transgressors include losing their licenses, being defrocked and being disbarred. Software industry people might have good degrees and are often good people, but they are making it up as they go along. They take no oath, are inconsistently certified and can only be fired, not exiled from the trade."

'Too Dangerous to Release' Is Becoming AI's New Normal; Time, April 24, 2026

Nikita Ostrovsky, Time; 'Too Dangerous to Release' Is Becoming AI's New Normal

 "On April 16, OpenAI announced GPT-Rosalind, a new AI model targeted at the life sciences. It significantly outperforms their current publicly available models in chemistry and biology tasks, as well as experimental design. As with Anthropic’s Claude Mythos and OpenAI’s GPT-5.4-Cyber, also released this month, the model is not available to the general public—reserved, at least initially, for “qualified customers” through a “trusted access program.” 

The releases signal a new and concerning trend of AI companies deeming their most capable models too powerful to entrust to the general public. “I think frontier developers are restricting access to their most capable models because they are genuinely worried about some of the capabilities these models have,” says Peter Wildeford, head of policy at the AI Policy Network, an advocacy group. 

It is unclear why OpenAI decided to restrict access to GPT-Rosalind in particular. An OpenAI spokesperson said in an email that giving access to trusted partners allows the company to “make more capable systems available sooner to verified users, while still managing risk thoughtfully.”

Who decides? 

The rapid advance of AI capabilities raises the question of whether private companies should be making the increasingly weighty decisions about whether and how potentially dangerous AI models should be built, and who should be allowed to use them."

The World’s First Museum of A.I. Art Will Open in Los Angeles as the Art World Ponders Questions of Ethics and Sustainability; Smithsonian Magazine, April 24, 2026

Michele Debczak, Smithsonian Magazine ; The World’s First Museum of A.I. Art Will Open in Los Angeles as the Art World Ponders Questions of Ethics and Sustainability

"The four-block strip that houses such Los Angeles institutions as the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Broad and the Museum of Contemporary Art will get a different type of cultural attraction this summer. Dataland, billed as the world’s first museum dedicated to A.I.-generated art, is set to open on June 20.

The brainchild of digital artists Refik Anadol and Efsun Erkiliç, Dataland will anchor the Grand LA complex, designed by architect Frank Gehry, in downtown Los Angeles. The privately funded museum covers 35,000 square feet, 10,000 of which are reserved for the technology required to support the exhibitions. Rather than traditional halls displaying individual artworks, Dataland’s five galleries and 30-foot ceiling are designed for total immersion.

“It’s very exciting to say that A.I. art is not image only,” Anadol tells Jessica Gelt for the Los Angeles Times. “It’s a very multisensory, multimedium experience—meaning sound, image, video, text, smell, taste and touch. They are all together in conversation.”

The museum’s inaugural exhibition, called “Machine Dreams: Rainforest,” was inspired by a trip to the Amazon. Anadol’s studio created an open-access A.I. model called the Large Nature Model, fed it millions of images of nature, and then prompted the machine to “learn and play with the intelligent behaviors of the natural world,” Richard Whiddington writes for Artnet. The result, as Anadol puts it per the Times, is a “a living museum” where visitors can walk among “digital sculptures.” In addition to a kaleidoscope of imagery, museum guests will be immersed in soundscapes, woven from audio that includes oral histories of the Yawanawá people of Brazil and the last recorded call of the extinct Kaua‘i ‘ō‘ō bird of Hawaii, Léa Zeitoun reports for Designboom."