Fellow the Venerable Dr Lyndon Drake awarded AI grant

The Hall’s Chaplain and Senior Research Fellow, the Venerable Dr Lyndon Drake, is sole Principal Investigator on a £1.6m John Templeton Foundation grant to support research project exploring artificial intelligence through theological enquiry.

Based at the Faculty’s of Theology and Religion’s Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion, this major research project will bring theological scholarship into close dialogue with the technical realities of AI. Co-Investigators on the project are Professor Mark Harris, Professor Andrew Davison, Professor Joshua Hordern, and Dr Tim Middleton.

The project frames AI systems as powerful tools which mediate the world and influence human thought and behaviour, drawing on the rich resources of theological thought in these areas to move beyond a false binary of technological utopianism or dystopian fear. The project has two main work streams: interpretation and hermeneutics, and influence and formation. The first stream will involve experimental work with Large Language Models (LLMs), examining the ways that they interact with theological texts, despite LLMs’ lack of lived participation in the world, which makes them different in kind from human interpreters. The second stream will theologically analyse the ways a range of AI systems are already reshaping human desires and knowledge, including consideration of epistemology and the formation of political loyalties.

The project is made possible through the support of grant #63871 from the John Templeton Foundation.