Who’s Who in Christian AI Ethics

The top leaders, authors, researchers, and promoters of Christian AI Ethics

Anyone searching for AI Ethics will find a multitude of references, most of which will have little or nothing to say about Christian AI ethics.  For that you’ll need to include Christian in the search terms.  In the scientific technological realm, Christian AI ethics are a separate discussion, if discussed at all.  Fortunately, there’s a growing collection of experts who have made headway in this overlooked and under-represented niche.  Following is a diverse group of leaders in AI ethics (and their bio’s), advancing the cause in different ways.

Among different Christian denominations, scholars such as Trevor Sutton, Michael Stephen Burdett and Jason Thacker are showing how AI can be navigated applying biblical perspective.  All have authored bestselling books centered in biblical wisdom.

Spreading the word of AI to all faiths, you’ll find advocates like Nelson Musonda who provides training to small businesses, nonprofit organizations, churches, and ministries.  Among the “big 5” AI companies you’ll find prominent AI ethicists such as Sarah Bird (Microsoft) and Lila Ibrahim (Google’s DeepMind).  These leaders are being challenged with shrinking ethical AI departments, a result of ChatGPT’s growing influence.  Other leading ethicists such as Daniela Amodei and Margaret Mitchell left top positions at Open Ai and Google respectively over disputes relating to AI ethics.

Misuse of AI technology has become a growing occurrence.  From Elon Musk removing (and exposing) the ethics team at Twitter to Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s congressional testimony, we’ve seen the programmers tasked with enforcing ethical operations are themselves the perpetrators of bias.  Researchers like Inioluwa Deborah and Timnit Gebru have risen to prominence after taking on Big Tech, exposing racial bias in AI.  Renowned researcher Yejin Choi developed a statistical technique to identify fake hotel reviews.

In response to this growing problem, companies like Parity Consulting (run by Dr. Rumman Chowdhury) have emerged to monitor AI strategy and ethical adoption.  

Within the scope of Christian AI ethics, three names stand out: Dr. Gretchen Huizinga, Dr. John Lennox, and Dr. Derek Schuurman.  Dr Huizinga’s thesis Righteous AI: The Christian voice in the Ethical AI conversation captures the current disparity between Christian ethics and the prevalent human centric ethics.  Dr. Lennox and Dr. Schuurman have both contributed seminal works on the integration of Christianity and AI.

Biographies

Daniela Amodei – Daniela cofounded AI startup Anthropic in 2021 after an exit from OpenAI.  At Anthropic, Amodei is focused on ensuring trust and safety. The company’s chatbot Claude bills itself as an easier-to-use alternative than OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and is already being implemented by companies like Quora and Notion.

Anthropic relies on what it calls a “Triple H” framework in its research. That stands for Helpful, Honest, and Harmless. That means it relies on human input when training its models, including constitutional AI, in which a customer outlines basic principles on how AI should operate.

Sarah Bird – Sarah leads Responsible AI for foundational AI technologies at Microsoft.  As an expert in responsible AI implementation, she contributes to the development and adoption of responsible AI principles, best practices, and technologies company wide.  Sarah led the cross-company team of experts to develop the new Bing responsibly and led the Responsible AI development for Github Copilot. Sarah led the product development of responsible AI tools including Fairlearn, SmartNoise and InterpretML. She is an active member of the Microsoft AETHER committee and contributed to the creation of the Microsoft Responsible AI Standard. Sarah was one of the founding researchers in the Microsoft FATE research group.

Michael Stephen Burdett – Assistant Professor of Christian Theology at University of Nottingham.  Holds undergraduate degrees in physics, philosophy, engineering, and theology. Pursued further graduate work in theology and philosophy at the University of Oxford.

Published Proximate and Ultimate Concerns in Christian Ethical Responses to Artificial Intelligence (Sage Journals).  Currently authoring a book tentatively titled Death and Glory: Humanism, Transhumanism and Christianity.

Yejin Choi – MacArthur Fellow and natural language processing expert Yejin Choi is immersed in artificial intelligence, with a particular focus on understanding if these systems can (or should) learn a sense of commonsense reasoning. She is a computer science professor at the University of Washington, a distinguished research fellow at the Institute for Ethics in AI at the University of Oxford and a senior research director at the nonprofit Allen Institute for AI, where she oversees the commonsense-focused Mosaic project.

Choi is the co-recipient of two Test of Time Awards and five best paper awards from top academic conferences in AI. She won the inaugural Alexa Prize Challenge in 2017, was a co-recipient of the Borg Early Career Award in 2018 and was named to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ “10 to Watch” in AI list in 2016.

Rumman Chowdhury – Dr. Chowdhury currently runs Parity Consulting, Parity Responsible Innovation Fund, and is a Responsible AI Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. She is also a Research Affiliate at the Minderoo Center for Democracy and Technology at Cambridge University and a visiting researcher at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering.

Previously, Dr. Chowdhury was the Director of META (ML Ethics, Transparency, and Accountability) team at Twitter, leading a team of applied researchers and engineers to identify and mitigate algorithmic harms on the platform. Prior to Twitter, she was CEO and founder of Parity, an enterprise algorithmic audit platform company. She formerly served as Global Lead for Responsible AI at Accenture Applied Intelligence. In her work as Accenture’s Responsible AI lead, she led the design of the Fairness Tool, a first-in-industry algorithmic tool to identify and mitigate bias in AI systems.

Inioluwa Deborah –  is a Nigerian-Canadian computer scientist and activist who works on algorithmic bias, AI accountability, and algorithmic auditing. Raji has previously worked with Joy Buolamwini, Timnit Gebru, and the Algorithmic Justice League on researching gender and racial bias in facial recognition technology. She has also worked with Google’s Ethical AI team and been a research fellow at the Partnership on AI and AI Now Institute at New York University working on how to operationalize ethical considerations in machine learning engineering practice. A current Mozilla fellow, she has been recognized by MIT Technology Review and Forbes as one of the world’s top young innovators.

Timnit Gebru – is a computer scientist who’s become known for her work in addressing bias in AI algorithms.  Gebru was a research scientist and the technical co-lead of Google’s Ethical Artificial Intelligence team where she published groundbreaking research on biases in machine learning.  By 2021, Gebru founded the Distributed AI Research Institute, which bills itself as a “space for independent, community-rooted AI research, free from Big Tech’s pervasive influence.”

Dr. Gretchen Huizinga – is a researcher, writer, speaker, and podcaster. She is a Board Member and Research Fellow at AI and Faith, an organization that brings the wisdom of the world’s great religions to the discussion around the moral and ethical challenges of artificial intelligence. She is currently the host of Collaborators, a Microsoft Research podcast showcasing the range of talent and expertise necessary to bring new technologies from lab to life. She is also a principal investigator and host of a podcast for the Beatrice Institute’s project Being Human in an Age of AI.

Gretchen has also worked as a teacher, media producer, journalist, adjunct professor, software product planner, and executive director of a private family foundation. She holds a BA in English, a Master of Mass Communication, a Master of Arts in Learning Sciences & Human Development, and a PhD from the University of Washington, exploring the Christian voice in the ethical AI conversation.

Lila Ibrahim – is the Chief Operating Officer of DeepMind, co-founder and chair of Team4Tech, and a member of the UK AI Council. Her previous roles include Chief Operations Officer at Coursera, Senior Operating Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Chief of Staff to Intel CEO and Chairman Craig Barrett.  Ibrahim studied electrical and computer engineering at Purdue University, and remains on their board of advisors.  She earned her bachelor’s degree in 1993

Dr. John Lennox – (PhD, DPhil, DSc) is Professor of Mathematics Emeritus at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow in Mathematics and the Philosophy of Science, and Pastoral Advisor at Green Templeton College, Oxford. He is a prolific author writing such acclaimed books as Cosmic Chemistry: Do God and Science Mix and his recent, 2084: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity. He has lectured extensively in North America and in Eastern and Western Europe on mathematics, the philosophy of science, and the intellectual defense of Christianity, and he has publicly debated New Atheists Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.

Margaret Mitchell – Margaret is a researcher focused on the ins and outs of machine learning and ethics-informed AI development in tech. She has published around 100 papers on natural language generation, assistive technology, computer vision, and AI ethics, and holds multiple patents in the areas of conversation generation and sentiment classification. She has recently received recognition as one of Time’s Most Influential People of 2023. She currently works at Hugging Face as Chief Ethics Scientist, driving forward work in the ML development ecosystem, ML data governance, AI evaluation, and AI ethics.

Margaret previously worked at Google AI as a Staff Research Scientist, where she founded and co-led Google’s Ethical AI group, focused on foundational AI ethics research and operationalizing AI ethics Google-internally. Before joining Google, she was a researcher at Microsoft Research, focused on computer vision-to-language generation; and was a postdoc at Johns Hopkins, focused on Bayesian modeling and information extraction. She holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Aberdeen and a Master’s in computational linguistics from the University of Washington. While earning her degrees, she also worked from 2005-2012 on machine learning, neurological disorders, and assistive technology at Oregon Health and Science University.

Nelson Musonda – Nelson is a UI/UX Designer and Webflow Developer from Yucaipa, Ca., a devoted Media Designer & Digital Marketing specialist, and the creative force behind DelMethod, a process widely used by churches to reach and connect with their members. A graduate from the Academy of Art University, Nelson’s mission is to help small businesses, nonprofit organizations, churches, and ministries grow their online presence and reach new audiences.  Upcoming work includes training pastors on AI. Nelson is the founder of the nonprofit Hut and Essan Media Productions.  Author of, AI And Christianity: Navigating the Intersection of Technology And Faith In Ministry Work

Dr. Derek Schuurman – (PhD, McMaster University) is professor of computer science at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He previously taught at Dordt University and Redeemer University and has also worked as an engineer designing embedded systems. Coauthor of A Christian Field Guide to Technology for Engineers and Designers (with Ethan J. Brue and Steven H. Vanderleest) and author of Shaping a Digital World: Faith, Culture and Computer Technology, Schuurman has also done research in the areas of robotics and computer vision as well as faith and technology issues.

Schuurman is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) and holds memberships with the ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) and the Association of Christians in the Mathematical Sciences (ACMS). He is a fellow of the American Scientific Affiliation (ASA) and an associate fellow of the Kirby Laing Centre for Public Theology in Cambridge.

Trevor Sutton – Lutheran pastor in Lansing, Michigan. His most recent books include Redeeming Technology: A Christian Approach to Healthy Digital Habits (coauthored with Dr. Brian Smith, MD, Concordia Publishing House, 2021).  Master of Arts in Digital Rhetoric and Professional Writing (2017).  PhD Candidate (Present) Concentration: Doctrinal Theology (Michigan State University).                                              Dissertation: Put It on the Scales: Bringing Reflective Equilibrium to Digital Ecclesiology.

Jason Thacker – Jason serves as assistant professor of philosophy and ethics at Boyce College and Chair of Research in Technology Ethics & Director of the research institute at The Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) of the Southern Baptist Convention. The author of several books including Following Jesus in the Digital Age (B&H, 2022) and The Age of AI: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity, he is the editor of The Digital Public Square: Christian Ethics in a Technological Society and coeditor of the Essentials in Christian Ethics series with B&H Academic.

Jason is the project leader and lead drafter of Artificial Intelligence: An Evangelical Statement of Principles, and his work has been featured at Slate, Politico, The Week, Christianity Today, The Gospel Coalition, and Desiring God. Jason holds a BA in Communication Studies from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and an M. Div. from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary where he is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in ethics, public theology, and philosophy.