by Allison Graham
You don’t need to look far these days to find discussions about artificial intelligence. “Theological education should be on the frontier of artificial intelligence” declares one paper, which may be true if over 40% of Protestant pastors in the US say that they use AI for sermon preparation. Attuned to my more negative view of AI, the algorithms provide me with abundant AI criticism: it’s ruining education, contributing to psychosis and suicidal thoughts, and will be the end of the university, if not human life.
I did not expect to spend quite so much time thinking about AI when I became a librarian, but I probably should have. Teaching information literacy and research skills is a major aspect of librarianship that now includes understanding where AI fits in the information landscape and what its research uses are.
This year’s Divinity orientation week theme of (Re)Orientation provided an opportunity to think about AI beyond the extremes of hype and despair and in a context that didn’t limit ethics to plagiarism and cheating. The session “(Re)orienting Ethics and AI” gathered over 40 students, faculty, and alumni to discuss their experiences, concerns, and hopes related to AI.
The conversation was structured by the five ethical principles outlined in a report on AI from the Church of England’s Ethical Investment Advisory Group: flourishing as persons, flourishing in relationship, standing with the marginalized, caring for creation, and serving the common good. Participants talked about their objections to the AI industry’s extraction of creative work without consent or compensation, the dilemmas around using AI to help write sermons and free up time for other pastoral responsibilities, the problems of offloading thinking to a machine, and the difficulty of understanding how much of an environmental impact AI has. I have been able to continue these conversations through workshops for TST students on evaluating AI research products and a presentation for clergy and licensed lay workers in the Diocese of Niagara.
One of the supposed benefits of AI is that it expands access to information, a goal that libraries support. However, if the information that AI provides is low-quality or inaccurate, this access may do more harm than good. Although AI programs have vast data sets, they don’t have access to most books or journals in library collections and databases. Even the AI features labelled as “deep research” are only surfacing sources from the public internet. Information inequality is a real challenge, but not one that AI, with its inevitable hallucinations, is going to solve. Libraries are not a perfect solution either, but they try to provide high-quality information resources to as wide a community as possible.
At the Graham Library, that community includes Trinity alumni. While you are probably not visiting the stacks as much as you did when you were a student, you can still access library resources. All Trinity alumni can register for free Graham Library cards to borrow library materials. Trinity Divinity graduates have access to thousands of theological journal articles through an alumni subscription to the ATLASerials database, and alumni in ordained or commissioned ministry can request PDFs of book chapters and journal articles available at University of Toronto Libraries or via interlibrary loan through the Trinity Wycliffe Church Express (TWYCE). While these services might not be quite as speedy as an AI chatbot, they provide a depth of information that AI does not, plus you can flourish in relationship by strengthening your connection with the Trinity community.
