If you’re taking a firm stance against using AI in the workplace, the pope, of all people, might just have given you the perfect cover in the form of a religious exemption.
Last month, Pope Leo XIV issued a massive, strongly worded 42,000-word screed about how AI could undermine human dignity and decimate the human workforce if left unchecked. He even called for AI to be “disarmed.”
According to Business Insider, 34-year-old software engineer Erin Maus decided to test how far religious protections might stretch in the AI era. Maus works for a large tech-entertainment company in North Carolina. She’s a Unitarian Universalist. In April, she formally requested a religious accommodation to opt out of using AI, citing a series of ethical objections to the technology, including concerns about environmental impact and job losses.
It sounds so silly. Too silly to be real. Too silly to be taken seriously, right? Surely, a workplace would laugh her claims out of the office.
In mid-May, her employer granted the exception.
Maus is a software engineer. This exception means that now she can write and review her code by hand, the way she would prefer it to be done. Unitarian Universalists believe that any advancement in technology has to be grounded in an ethical understanding of how it affects real flesh and blood human beings, first and foremost. Your cute corporate productivity ploy to maximize profits and further degrade the human experience isn’t a good enough excuse in the eyes of the Unitarian Universalist. If all evidence suggests that forced AI implementation in the workplace isn’t actually a good thing, then they simply won’t partake. She even says that she completed her work just as quickly as a colleague who relied on AI assistance.
The Business Insider article argues that Maus, and by extension Pope Leo, may spark a larger trend. Under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, employers must reasonably accommodate sincerely held religious beliefs unless doing so causes undue hardship. And since some recent Supreme Court decisions have strengthened workers’ claims in disputes over accommodation for religious beliefs, and since religion-based discrimination filings have climbed considerably since the pandemic, it’s easy to envision a future where more and more people claim religious exceptions to AI in the workplace.
Whether the pope intended to hand out a blanket get out of jail free card for anyone who doesn’t want to use AI at work doesn’t really matter anymore. The door is open, and HR departments are going to have to figure out how to manage workplaces where AI mandates can be easily thwarted by a simple claim that AI infringes on an individual’s religious freedom. It’s the science versus faith argument that is covered in dozens of science fiction stories over the decades, but no one ever quite saw it evolving into this.
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