Microsoft, IBM, Cis­co, the U.N.‘s Food and Agri­cul­ture Orga­ni­za­tion and the inno­va­tion min­istry of the Ital­ian gov­ern­ment have signed the doc­u­ment. A July 10 press release from the acad­e­my said Fran­cis­can Father Pao­lo Benan­ti, an ethics pro­fes­sor at Rome’s Pon­tif­i­cal Gre­go­ri­an Uni­ver­si­ty, pre­sent­ed an adden­dum to the doc­u­ment in Hiroshi­ma specif­i­cal­ly focused on the eth­i­cal gov­er­nance of gen­er­a­tive AI — which can process, inter­pret and pro­duce human lan­guage. The adden­dum said gen­er­a­tive AI requires sus­tained com­mit­ment to ensur­ing its use for human­i­ty’s good.

In his mes­sage to the con­fer­ence pub­lished by the Vat­i­can July 10, Pope Fran­cis not­ed the “great sym­bol­ic impor­tance” of the reli­gious lead­ers’ meet­ing in Hiroshi­ma and not­ed the increas­ing­ly cen­tral role which arti­fi­cial­ly intel­li­gent tech­nol­o­gy plays in society.

“As we look at the com­plex­i­ty of the issues before us, rec­og­niz­ing the con­tri­bu­tion of the cul­tur­al rich­es of peo­ples and reli­gions in the reg­u­la­tion of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence is key to the suc­cess of your com­mit­ment to the wise man­age­ment of tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tion,” he wrote.

Echo­ing his address on arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence to the G7 sum­mit in June, the pope asked the par­tic­i­pants to joint­ly push for the ban of lethal autonomous weapons, which “starts from an effec­tive and con­crete com­mit­ment to intro­duce ever greater and prop­er human control.”

“No machine should ever choose to take the life of a human being,” he wrote.

Open­ing the con­fer­ence July 9, Arch­bish­op Vin­cen­zo Paglia, acad­e­my pres­i­dent, said that arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence “must be guid­ed so that its poten­tial serves the good from the moment of its design.”

“At Hiroshi­ma, a place of the high­est sym­bol­ic val­ue, we strong­ly invoke peace, and we ask that tech­nol­o­gy be a dri­ver of peace and rec­on­cil­i­a­tion among peo­ples,” he said. “We stand here, togeth­er, to say loud­ly that stand­ing togeth­er and act­ing togeth­er is the only pos­si­ble solution.”