By Courtney Mares

Vatican City, November 8, 2024 / 6:00 a.m.

Microsoft President Brad Smith is set to unveil an AI-enhanced project focused on St. Peter’s Basilica at a press conference at the Vatican on November 11.

This initiative, titled “St. Peter’s Basilica: AI-Enhanced Experience,” is a collaboration between Microsoft and the Cloth of Saint Peterthe organization responsible for the conservation and maintenance of St. Peter’s Basilica.

From Smith spear As part of Microsoft’s AI for Cultural Heritage program in 2019, the tech company worked on a number of projects offering digitally enriched ways to explore art, architecture and historical sites through intelligence artificial.

Microsoft developed the Ancient Olympia Project in Greece, which used AI to digitally reconstruct the birthplace of the Olympic Games, offering an immersive exploration of the ruins.

Likewise, Microsoft partnered with Iconem to create digital models of Mont-Saint-Michel in France using AI and 3D modeling to capture the intricate details of 1,000 years Catholic pilgrimage site.

Other companies have also offered virtual reality experiences at historically significant churches in recent years, including an immersive 3D exhibit of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher called “Tomb of Christ” at the National Geographic Museum in Washington, DC.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently spoke in Rome on October 23 after the company announced an investment of 4.3 billion euros (about $4.64 billion) in Italy over the next two years to develop its hyperscale cloud data center and artificial intelligence infrastructure, which will make the Italian cloud region one of the largest Microsoft data center regions in Europe and a strategic hub for the diffusion of AI innovation in Mediterranean.

Microsoft also announced a collaboration with the Municipality of Rome to develop “Julia”, an AI-based virtual assistant that will help the more than 35 million visitors expected to visit the Italian capital for the upcoming Jubilee Year 2025.

Jubilee pilgrims will be able to ask Julia, a virtual city guide, questions via WhatsApp about cultural heritage sites as well as suggestions for accommodation and restaurants to sample typical Roman and Italian cuisine.

The Vatican and the ethics of AI

The St. Peter’s Basilica project will not be the first time the Vatican has partnered with Microsoft on artificial intelligence issues.

Years before the wildly popular release of the GPT-4 chatbot system, developed by San Francisco startup OpenAI, the Vatican was already heavily involved in the debate over the ethics of artificial intelligence, hosting multiple high-level discussions with scientists and technology leaders on ethics. of artificial intelligence since 2016.

In February 2020, Smith participated in a Vatican event titled “renAIssance: For a Humanistic Artificial Intelligence”, during which he signed the Vatican’s ethical commitment to artificial intelligence, the Rome Call for AI Ethicsalongside IBM Executive Vice President John Kelly III.

Since then, the Pope has hosted other tech sector leaders, including the CEO of Cisco Systems Chuck Robbins, who also signed the Vatican’s commitment to the ethics of artificial intelligence, in April in Rome.

The Rome Call, a document of the Pontifical Academy for Life, highlights the need for ethical use of AI according to the principles of transparency, inclusion, accountability, impartiality, reliability, security and confidentiality.

Pope Francis chose artificial intelligence as the theme of his speech. Message of peace 2024which recommended that world leaders adopt an international treaty to regulate the development and use of AI. Francis became the first pope to address G7 summit in June, when he was invited to speak to world leaders about AI ethics.

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In July, Father Paolo Benanti, a member of the United Nations advisory body on AI and advisor to Pope Francis on ethics and technology, visited Microsoft headquarters to Washington to speak with Smith.

In a interview with GeekWire after the Vatican’s 2023 AI conference, Smith reflected on how having religious leaders in the room at a tech conference “adds an extraordinary dimension to the conversation.”

“You might ask whether it was having religious leaders in a technology meeting or technology leaders in a religious conversation; both are true. … It forces us to think and talk about the need to put humanity at the center of everything we do,” Smith said.

Courtney Mares is a correspondent in Rome for the Catholic News Agency. A graduate of Harvard University, she has reported for news bureaus on three continents and received the Gardner Fellowship for her work with North Korean refugees. She is the author of “Blessed Carlo Acutis: A Saint in Sneakers” (Ignatius, 2023),