Archbishop tells Parliament artificial intelligence regulations fail to protect human dignity

The Archbishop of Canterbury has warned Parliament that current regulations governing artificial intelligence are “wholly inadequate” to prevent serious harm.

Dame Sarah Mullally highlighted concerns that chatbots were facilitating rape and child sexual abuse roles; He fears that this is a development that risks normalizing and legitimizing such heinous acts.

Speaking at the start of a debate in the House of Lords on artificial intelligence, a topic of her personal choosing, Dame Sarah advocated a “pro-human framework” for AI development.

Citing a recent report from Durham University, it provides “evidence that chatbots are now facilitating violence against women and girls: allowing roles such as incest, child sexual abuse and rape to be played out with little precaution, risking the normalization and legitimization of such abuse.”

The archbishop emphasized: “These harms are not merely the result of user misuse; the design choices, policies and governance failures of AI platforms encourage and enable them, and current regulation is completely inadequate to prevent them.”

While Dame Sarah acknowledged the potential benefits of AI in fields such as science, medicine and nursing, where she noted that as a former nurse, “the value of human dignity can be seen in some of the most tangible, practical ways”, she warned against its darker applications.

“Unfortunately, there are other uses of artificial intelligence today that offer new ways to degrade or violate human dignity rather than enhancing it,” he told colleagues.

The archbishop’s intervention follows similar calls by Pope Leo XIV, who addressed artificial intelligence in his first public letter, Magnifica Humanitas. Both Christian leaders underlined the imperative that artificial intelligence serve humanity and the common good.

Dame Sarah concluded: “To use AI as an extraordinary tool to serve humanity and create a more just, abundant and hopeful world, we must put people ahead of our profits, comfort or technological progress at all costs.”

Long-time online safety campaigner Baroness Kidron stressed the urgent need for robust AI regulation, questioning why the government has “repeatedly rejected measures designed to ensure democratic oversight, accountability and sovereignty”.

“Every technology reflects decisions about who gets the benefits, who bears the risks, and who gets to make the decisions,” the independent cross-comparator said.

He drew parallels with other heavily regulated industries, from pharmaceuticals to aviation, noting that “all other industries…are regulated to ensure that private profit is balanced against the public good.” But he still observed: “The tech industry has argued for 30 years that this should be the exception, and continues to have that debate about artificial intelligence.”

Baroness Kidron warned of the tangible costs of this “technology exceptionalism”, noting its impact “on the bodies and minds of our children, on our public discourse, on our deserted high streets and on the weakening of trust in our democratic institutions”.

He argued: “These results were not technical errors; they were the predictable consequences of a business model designed to maximize engagement, capture markets and minds, and become indispensable, if unreliable, intermediaries in every aspect of human life.”

He added that these systems are “perfectly compatible, they do exactly what they were designed to do, but they are aligned with commercial incentives rather than the public interest, or as Pope Leo put it, the common good.”

Highlighting the widespread impact of AI, he said: “AI is already shaping our economy and society. It affects what we see, what we believe and, increasingly, what opportunities are available to us.”

Moreover, he noted a significant transfer of wealth and power: “Large sums of money are being transferred from the UK to Silicon Valley, concentrating control of increasingly important infrastructure in the hands of a very small number of companies.”

Baroness Kidron dramatically described the current situation as: “An extraordinary moment when perhaps the greatest technological opportunity in human history has also become one of the greatest transfers of power and wealth in history. An obvious robbery.”

Amplifying the religious leaders’ message, he concluded: “Our religious leaders are asking us to evaluate AI not by what it can do, but by whether it serves human dignity and the common good, and while this may seem simple, it is truly radical.”