I want to let you know that these slides and all the material that I'm giving you today is available online.
You can scan that QR code or you can type this into your browser.
And what I want you to do in the next little while is to,
for those of you who are using AI regularly, there's a script in there,
there's instructions in there that tell you how to tell your AI about this presentation.
And what that means is that you can have a live dialogue with AI to help you think through some of the problems that we're going to go through here.
In today's talk I'm just going to give you some introductory remarks.
I'm going to talk a little bit about the تَصَوُّر of AI, understanding what AI is.
I've had a chance to talk to many of you and some of you are like, I'm not sure this whole AI thing,
maybe it's a fad.
And then I'm going to talk about a prophetic strategy to address AI.
And in particular, I'm going to look at that question at three levels.
The way the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم would look at it.
He would look at it from the personal level, the ummatic level, and at the level of humanity.
So this is a very different talk.
Who was there last year when I gave this talk at the previous TPSS?
الحمد لله, lots of new voices and lots of new faces.
Last time I gave a presentation about how to use AI.
It was more introductory.
But this time AI is hitting us right in the face.
And we don't have time for that.
If you're still learning how to use AI, you're about a year behind where you need to be.
And if you want to learn from a good source about how to come up to speed,
I've given a course called AI for Imams,
and you can go and do that course online and it will walk you through the basics of AI.
But we don't have time for that anymore.
So much has changed in the last year that we really need to rethink.
And this focus is changing the shift,
it's shifting the focus from how do I use AI to what do we need to do to prepare for the wave of AI that's coming.
And we still have to take a prophetic, strategic approach to the question of AI.
And what I mean by that is,
whenever the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم was there trying to understand the problem or to deal with it,
he would first understand the reality of the فِتْنَة, whatever the فِتْنَة is.
The second is that he would,
either through revelation or through his actions or through whatever source,
come up with a set of divine guiding principles for how to address that issue.
And then finally the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم would determine the impact and come up with plans at three levels.
First of all, at the personal level, then at the ummatic level, and then finally at the level of all humanity.
Now, when I say AI is a فِتْنَة,
and I am very grateful to شَيْخ حاتم الحاج for this morning talking us through what a فِتْنَة is.
What I mean by a فِتْنَة,
and here are three touchstones that I really want us to think about when we talk about فِتْنَة.
And Allah tells us in the Quran that both good and evil can be فِتْنَة.
Right?
The Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم says even that our wealth and our children are a فِتْنَة.
And the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم also said in the hadith that how amazing is it when a good person has a good amount of wealth.
Why am I mentioning these verses?
Because we have a tendency when we think of a فِتْنَة to think of something that can be avoided.
But we cannot afford to do that with AI.
We need to take a balanced path.
A path that navigates, that doesn't deny, just like if you have wealth.
And you don't say, I'm going to give away all my wealth.
No, Allah has given you an أَمَانَة.
Allah has given you a trust.
He has brought you into a time where the major concern that's going to cause change and destruction for most of humanity over the coming 30 years is there.
And you can't just stick your head in the sand.
That's not going to work.
So the question for us is what is the middle path?
What is the path between isolation and ignoring AI?
And the path between embracing AI wholesale, without any consideration of its adverse and harmful impact?
Dr حاتم الحاج's series, Stations of the Travelers,
is one of the best sources in English is one of the best works in English of تَزْكِيَة,
or purification of the heart.
And he emphasizes that often, a virtue is the path between two vices.
Like, for example, bravery is the fine line between cowardice and stupidity.
Right?
And we have to adopt that same mentality.
What is that middle path that will guide us through there?
Now,
the first stage of trying to deal with a problem and develop a prophetic strategy is to understand the nature of the problem itself.
And here are two touchstone principles here.
And one of the legal maxims that is very important is that judgment of a thing is based on conceptualizing and characterizing it.
In Arabic it's called تَصَوُّر, understanding the significance of something.
And then the second thing is if we receive news,
there's a verse in سورة الحجرات that tells us if we receive news,
and there's a lot of nonsense news around AI,
that we should investigate and check out the sources of that particular information.
We cannot find that middle path that we need to about AI unless we have a deep understanding of the subject.
And we need to know the topic back to front.
And the reason I say this is, sometimes I talk to people about AI and they come to me and say,
you know what, this AI thing, maybe it's a fad.
It's kind of like crypto, it's hot for a while and then disappears, right?
And I've heard that a few times, like after the Thinking Muslim interview,
some of the reactions in the comments were things like that.
So I want to walk you through why I think it is very different to previous technologies.
And I want to walk you through this in three dimensions.
The first one is, what is the magnitude of the change that we're already seeing with AI?
Secondly, what is the pace of change?
How fast are things changing?
And then finally, do we expect this situation to continue?
So, what is the magnitude of this change?
I am trained as a software engineer.
So, شَيْخ سَجَّاد mentioned that he used to be in IT, I'm still in IT.
And I can tell you that in my industry employment has gone out the window.
Graduates can't find jobs.
People who have had employment in IT,
employment in computer science and software engineering for 20 years, 30 years,
suddenly find themselves unemployed.
And Anthropic is publishing and telling us that now their developers are eight times more effective than they were two years ago.
And what they've also published is this chart that shows all of the different sectors.
And they're showing how much theoretically could be done by AI, and how much has already been done by AI.
And you can see that they're starting with coding first, but very quickly they're going to business,
finance, management, legal.
These entire universes, one by one, will be revolutionized by AI.
And we're already starting to see seeds of them.
So if you're in one of these industries, that bar on the red is going to keep moving to the left,
keep moving to the right.
And more and more of what we think of as work will be done using AI.
In fact, according to one study, the estimates are that by 2030,
AI will generate 117 million new jobs, but it will take away 90 million jobs.
I want you to think about that in terms of the level of disruption.
That 90 million people will basically end up in a position where the thing that they trained for and practiced for decades is suddenly not valued anymore.
What is the magnitude of that disruption?
But also present here is the magnitude of the potential.
Overall, we are going to have 80 million new jobs.
But the level of disruption this means for society is going to be huge.
And again another indication is one estimate is that by 2030 AI will add 15.7 trillion dollars to the world economy.
And you know, that number sounds kind of crazy, because we can't grasp a number that big.
So when I hear about that number I have to contextualise it.
You take that number and you divide it by every human on earth and it's 2,000 dollars.
If you had 2,000 dollars of extra good that you could do for every human on earth, how much could you do?
The potential for good is there.
On the other hand, the potential for harm is there.
And it's likely the world's first trillionaires will be trillionaires because of AI.
So we have an option where we can do things like end poverty or make sure that children don't die of disease,
but on the other hand there's the potential for it to just make the rich people richer and to perpetuate the social problems that we already have.
So, I think hopefully by now you'll start to see the way that AI has become globally important.
You know, I think if you look at recent history,
there's an analogy to be made between the way we used to treat nuclear weapons and now AI's power for cyber security and for other things and for economic development is such that the politics and the relationship between the United States and China is very,
very focused on this question of AI.
But the speed is the other thing that's incredibly scary.
I want you to think about how much change we've seen in the last four years.
You know, ChatGPT was released in November 2022.
And in those four years,
it's gone from kind of an interesting application to something that's wiping out entire industries,
and something that has superhuman cybersecurity capabilities that is upending global politics.
Those are the first four years of this revolution.
And here's another example that shows us that the AI rate of development is not slowing down.
So this is from an organization called METR.
And what they do is they analyze what is the level of difficulty that AI machines can take.
It used to be that if you ask an AI to do something, and that is something like building a website,
that might take a human two hours.
AI can do that now, and that was a project that took two hours.
So what we are seeing is AI is able to function more autonomously over time and now can complete tasks that a human would take 17 hours to complete autonomously.
A software development project, writing a book, indexing information, attacking a security system.
These systems are growing in capabilities at a rate that we have never seen before.
And so I have this, some of you may know that I appeared on Thinking Muslim a few weeks ago.
A few of you reached out to me and said,
I saw you on Thinking Muslim and that was a really interesting interview.
Well there's a sequel to that.
I just was in London a couple of weeks ago and I did a second interview about AI.
Those two interviews are only two months apart.
But in those two months, we could barely cover all of the changes in the two months.
So here's an example of how significant some of the changes are.
The United States government decided it was going to ban the entire world from using the most advanced models available for 20 days.
And this caused ripples across the world and suddenly companies are starting to realise that the US government is willing to use its control and advances in AI to shift world politics.
You had serious recommendations in the United States of AI becoming so important that people are talking about nationalising it.
It's a very funny, odd thing of history.
Nuclear weapons were developed by the government.
But with AI, it was developed in the private sector.
And so now there's a question of what happens if you have something that is as impactful in the private sector,
as impactful as nuclear weapons, but created in the private sector.
And so he's now suggesting,
Bernie Sanders is suggesting that there will be a one-time tax on these AI companies where the US government takes 50 percent of these companies.
And OpenAI didn't just kind of reject it.
So, well, okay, 5 percent, not 50 percent,
but they were willing to give 5 percent of their company to the US government.
That is a sign for us of how important these technologies are.
And then another example of what changed is that the Pope released, let's call it an encyclical.
They only do this once every two years.
He leads an organization of 1.4 billion people.
So when he releases a document that says we need to make sure that AI is built for humanity and not built as an aggrandizement of the selfish,
western,
individual culture and that we need to respect the dignity of human life and employment and make sure that it's not used to kill people,
that gives you some idea of just how much has changed in those eight weeks.
There were other things as well, the Chinese were catching up.
The point is, we've never seen a rate of development of technology like this.
And I want to take a moment to highlight the reason for that.
And it's because AI is a self-perpetuating technology.
It, first of all, makes everything better.
When you make better AI, you get better medicine, better legal, better economics, everything.
If I make better television, it doesn't really make medicine better.
It just makes television better.
And then the second thing is that AI is self-improving.
It makes itself better.
In fact, there's a funny story.
The newest model is something called Fable, from a company called Anthropic.
And what they did is they stopped you in this new version from being able to use AI to make your AI better because they wanted to keep that advantage for themselves.
So we have very clear indications that this self-improving nature of AI is really, really important.
And this is not typical of technologies.
This is why it's not like crypto.
It's not like if you have crypto, medicine gets better, right?
This is something unique to AI, and that's why we have to take it seriously.
And then there's also this other flywheel effect, which is people see the economic benefit of AI.
They see that Anthropic has become a trillion dollar company in the space of four years,
overtaken every other company in the AI field.
And they say, you know what, that's a real indication.
So they keep throwing money into it.
And then the money makes better models that show that they can generate more value,
so they keep throwing money into it.
The amount of money that's being thrown into AI is crazy.
And I mention that not because it's a good thing, but because it indicates to us that this flywheel,
this momentum that AI has is just going to get worse.
And I have to kind of share, I've been in AI now for 30 years.
I really think that we are four years into a 30 year revolution that's really going to disrupt our lives.
And I think it's going to be the largest source of change today.
And that's why people like إِبَاز and others are asking to come to speak to you today.
Because this train is coming and I think we need to prepare personally, ummatically,
and from the perspective of humanity for this change.
So, let's talk about that change that we have to have.
and let's talk about what a prophetic strategy for our personal lives might look like.
And remember what we talked about earlier,
I talked about how for each of these sections we're going to have some references that create principles that can allow us to understand how we can progress on this.
So the first ayah is آية الدَّيْن, the ayah of debt.
The ayah that the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم taught us in the Qur'an that when you have a contract you have to write it down.
Why am I talking about that here?
I'll get to that.
The second one is that each one of us is a shepherd and each one is responsible for our flock.
And then the third one, which is the verse from سورة الأنفال that says, when you get a benefit,
like for example you win a battle and there's all that spoils of war on the ground,
that Allah tells us that one-fifth of those spoils of war has to go to the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم for distribution through the community.
And this is why, like, I know these three verses may not seem connected,
but I think that they are very connected.
We have to understand that when the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم was around,
writing was a new technology that had the same status that AI has today.
And we think about how the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم encouraged people to start writing business contracts.
It's not only encouraged, it's a divine ordinance.
Allah is telling us we have to do this.
Think about what that means in terms of the business community and everything that they have to do,
and how it has changed,
and how they have to understand what the implication of writing is for the future of the أُمَّة.
The second one is you have to consider.
So that's why the first one is about writing.
Because just as that ayah drove a change in understanding and a learning through the business community,
that this is how you have to write, it's going to also lead to the same change in us.
And the second is that I mentioned the رَعِيَّة because each one of us is responsible for our رَعِيَّة,
starting with ourselves but expanding to our families and many of you here are leaders of your community.
You have a رَعِيَّة that's not just you and your family, it's the communities that you work with.
So we have to carefully consider the impact that AI has on your community.
And then the third point is, some of us are going to benefit a lot from AI.
Not all of us, but some of us.
And when you do benefit from AI, when Allah makes you more efficient,
when Allah helps you to use AI to serve His purpose and to increase your wealth and to give you time back,
what share of that will you give to Allah?
So, I think we've talked about this, right?
When آية الدَّيْن was revealed, the reason, and the مُفَسِّرُون mention a few different reasons,
but one of the reasons that آية الدَّيْن is, because when you write contracts, it encourages people,
it prevents people arguing because the details are written down, it can't be changed.
So it had all of these benefits in terms of reducing friction in the community,
it allowed business to grow, and particularly, it was not even common before.
People started to learn how to write and it became expected that if you were in business you had to write.
And I think we need to do the same thing with AI.
That's what the ayah requires.
The second point is that we need to consider the impact of AI on your رَعِيَّة.
And let's start with your kids.
Because many of you here have children and that's the رَعِيَّة that we think about, right?
Already 70 percent of teens have AI companions, 30 percent of them use chatbots daily,
and one in three of them, when they have had a dilemma, a problem, something bothering them,
they have chosen to talk to an AI over a human.
So your رَعِيَّة is already in AI.
If you don't understand what's happening when your kids are using AI, how can you be a good رَاعٍ for them?
And then, part of that is also to prepare for the فِتَن that you will experience, right?
Many of you are working in organizations.
If you are the head of a مَسْجِد,
what are you going to do when 10 percent of your مَسْجِد attendees suddenly find themselves without work?
How are you going to deal with it when many people in Western society define their value by their work?
We don't have to kind of lose our identity here, right?
There's something unique about being human.
We can have intention.
On the day of judgment, Allah is not going to ask AI what it did.
He's going to ask us what we did.
That intention, that sincerity, that's what we bring to the table.
And that's what we have to bring when we have this رَعِيَّة, for our people.
And the final point I want to make in this particular section about the personal impact is many of you have already started to benefit from AI.
So just quickly, who here uses AI on a daily basis?
Excellent, excellent, excellent.
Alright, who has felt that benefit from AI?
Alright, excellent as well.
Who has thought about now that I have this extra effort, this extra energy, this extra time,
this extra wealth, what fraction of that should I give to Allah?
Who's raised their hands?
You can lower your hands now.
And that's why I want you to think about سورة الأنفال, right?
Because Allah has already taught us.
I'm not saying it's a fifth to be exact, right?
But it sets the precedent that when Allah gives you a gift,
and just like غَنِيمَة is a gift from Allah, a هَدِيَّة from Allah, AI is a gift from Allah,
and the time it gives back to you is a gift from Allah.
How do you decide how to give that share back to Allah?
And the Prophet also mentions that one of the greatest blessings we have is free time,
and we have to make sure that that is the one that we use it for.
So another way to think about that is again, that positive فِتْنَة, there's 15.7 trillion dollars of value.
How do we make sure that that goes in the right direction?
So right now, remember I asked you to scan the QR code in the beginning.
Again, this is an optional activity,
but I really want you to use AI to help you work out how to get the most out of AI.
So if you follow the instructions on the website, you can ask it,
it will take you through a conversation, just download the instructions, give it to your AI,
and it will walk you through a conversation that hopefully will give you some ideas about how to use AI.
I'm doing this to prompt you to think about the problem in a way that builds on the advantages that AI already has.
So that was the
personal level.
The second area we are going to talk about is the ummatic level.
And the
two Quranic touchstones I have chosen here is this idea that Allah made us a balanced community,
a middle path, the virtue between two vices.
And then the second point is that part of our responsibilities as Muslims is enjoining good and forbidding evil.
What prophetic principles can be extracted from those two areas?
The first is finding that middle path when it comes to AI.
We have to find a way to embrace AI, by the way, with wisdom, not lightly.
The second is, وَأَعِدُّوا لَهُم مَّا اسْتَطَعْتُم مِّن قُوَّةٍ وَمِن رِّبَاطِ الْخَيْلِ.
Preparing for them in whatever ways you have possible.
And then the third one is to protect our أُمَّة and enjoin good applications.
So, first, the middle path.
And this is where I'm slightly concerned.
Because us as an أُمَّة, we have not always had a positive relationship with technology.
We have this habit of when a new technology comes out, we do the easy thing and we condemn, condemn, condemn.
Think about satellite television or think about social networks.
When the social networks first came out, we were like, it's حَرَام, it's deceptive, it's all of these things.
We ignored it and didn't use it, only 10 years, 20 years later,
to become the real adopters of that technology.
And so every time a new technology has hit us, we kind of condemn, condemn, condemn,
wait for the industry to apply it to us, and then we end up adopting it in the end.
What if we could shortcut this with AI?
What if instead of this history we've...
And of course, you know, the example, I think we've already touched on the connection between writing and AI.
And that's why I keep drawing the analogy.
But there was another time in Muslim history where there was a choice about a writing-related technology,
which we did not handle.
When the printing press came to the أُمَّة, we made the decision, for various reasons,
that we weren't going to embrace it.
You know, it was various reasons around scribes, the complexity of the Arabic language.
But according to many scholars,
this was a contributing factor to the decline of the أُمَّة and the rise of Europe in that it allowed for the wide propagation of knowledge.
And then the second thing that we need to do is to use AI to prepare our communities.
Now, the quwwah here is comprehensive and this is about us preparing and getting used to the technology.
Now sometimes it's not limited to جِهَاد, but this idea that we have to protect our community is very real.
And that is why this problem of tech sovereignty is so important.
So what do I mean by tech sovereignty?
And why do I feel that we have to build and handle that particular aspect?
And it's the أُمَّة's ability to control its data, its systems, its rules and values.
I am talking to a room full of people that can have a major impact on our أُمَّة,
that can kick off projects,
that can look at things like building ummatic models where we own our history.
And I want to tell you what the opposite of tech sovereignty is, and it's tech subjugation.
And we may not realize that,
but we are being subjugated right now in the previous generation of social networks.
When Gaza happened, Facebook was shadow banning like crazy.
So we could not get our message across because we did not control the technology of the social networks.
The Israelis did.
The Zionists did.
And so they actually started to put people in places of power in their organization.
What happened?
And for whatever reason, we ended up being on TikTok.
And TikTok was the way that the news about what's happening in Palestine spread throughout the community.
But guess what happened?
The US took over TikTok again.
They forced the Chinese to sell it to them.
And they didn't just sell it to anyone.
They sold it to someone who is extremely highly aligned with the Zionists.
So, again, technology being used to subjugate us in the social network space.
And what we are seeing now is that if AI is not being used by us, it's going to be used against us.
In terms of what's happening in Gaza, you can research about projects like Lavender,
where AI is being used to scrape the phone network and identify the potential terrorists,
and they had a rule in the AI system that says it's okay to kill 20 innocent people if we get one of the core terrorists.
In Iran, it was used to make targeted decisions about which targets to go after.
and they blew up a place, for example, called Police Park.
It's just called Police Park because it's the name, but they thought there must be something in there.
AI was already being used against civilians in Iran.
And so what we have to do
is also realise that the AI is becoming a medium of communication,
and so we need to build our own ummatic tech stack, starting with data,
starting with our own AI models that are good, building on that for infrastructure and data centers.
And normally this is not something that is a useful discussion to have with them.
But you folks in here, you folks have the power to make this happen.
ما شاء الله, you know,
مَازِن and the brothers who organised TPSS say that some of the most influential people in the أُمَّة are here.
Let's make this actually happen.
And we're already starting to use these tools, and already starting to see progress.
So for example, the Muslim scholars are engaging in this,
are involved with the program committee for AMJA, which is a major conference in the United States.
They are starting to really understand this.
When I started a website called askansari.ai, which was an Islamic AI system, it was the only one of its kind.
Now we have five or six, multiple alternatives.
So we are starting to learn how to use AI to help us become better ourselves and to understand how to become better ourselves.
In fact, one of the most exciting things recently is we are starting to create benchmarks.
Benchmarks are the way that AI systems are improved and how you measure when an AI system gets better.
And now for the first time we are seeing benchmarks like Islamic MMLU and Islamic Legal Bench,
and that's going to serve two important purposes.
First of all,
we apply these to Western models and we find how good they are at answering questions about us now,
and if they don't work well, we go to those AI companies and see how to fix this.
And secondly, it helps us to raise the bar of the quality of Muslim applications.
And finally, it is preventing harmful impacts on our أُمَّة and enjoining the good ones.
So how can we make sure that as these new capabilities happen, we ensure that wealth is distributed evenly?
Can we use our organizations to ensure that the benefits of AI are shared more globally?
Can we influence policy?
Islam is a religion that has created rules for how wealth does not get concentrated in the hands of a small minority.
We have those tools.
We can teach the West about those tools.
So, you can download it now.
Have a look at the tool.
Download the software, the little AI blurb that I gave,
and ask what you can do in terms of serving the أُمَّة with AI.
Have that discussion.
So, so far we've talked about understanding what AI is,
and hopefully I've shared with you the data that tries to tell you that we need to get moving fast on serving the أُمَّة,
and the usual condemn,
and then finally adopt after it's been used against us strategy is not going to work.
We've talked about the personal impact, the أُمَّة.
But thirdly, it's very very important to realize that we have a responsibility to humanity as a whole.
Not just for Muslims, but also non-Muslims.
And Allah tells us in Quran that we should cooperate in righteousness and تَقْوَى,
and not cooperate in sin and aggression.
And that extends not just to Muslims, but also to non-Muslims.
And the evidence for that is حِلْف الفُضُول.
The Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم, in his time, there was a gathering, حِلْف الفُضُول,
a contract in Makkah, before the Prophet became the Prophet,
where they agreed that people in Makkah should be treated fairly,
and there was not going to be oppression in Makkah.
And the Prophet participated in that, even though there were no Muslims,
and he said that if I need to do it again, I will do it again.
So the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم was willing to engage with non-Muslims in the pursuit of good.
It was not just for Muslims.
And so what I'm saying is the three prophetic principles that we can extract from this is that we have a responsibility as a group to do good,
not just for ourselves but for the rest of humanity too, and that we can engage with other groups.
And we're seeing very, very good results in this.
I want to share some examples of this.
And I want you to think about it.
Some of you are closer to non-Muslim groups and have ways of engaging in non-Muslim groups.
But I want you to think not just about our own, but about humanity as a whole,
and our responsibilities as Muslims to guide humanity into the best possible future.
This is part of our أَمَانَة from Allah.
And the way that I characterize our current situation is we cannot control the fact that there is a train of AI coming.
The train is on the tracks for things like capitalist reasons and the capital flowing in,
and the technology is coming.
We cannot throw ourselves on the track, that's not very useful.
But what we can do is we can grab the controls of the train and steer it in a direction that benefits humanity.
And so I want to give you an example of some of the partnerships that we've done.
Now, of course we have to be very, very careful here that we do not lose our identity.
I'm not saying that we're all one faith, we're all sons of Adam.
I'm not suggesting that we sacrifice our beliefs in some interfaith exercise, for example.
We do believe that Islam is the only way to Paradise.
I'm not saying we try any of that.
But what I am telling you is that we can partner in a very practical way with non-Muslims.
And here are some examples.
First of all, I want to show you that the relationship between AI and religion is getting closer.
And that's why that document that I talked about before, the document the Pope released,
an encyclical about AI, is really interesting.
Because what's interesting is not just that that document was written,
but that one of the founders of Anthropic, the leading AI company in the world, in my opinion,
was there.
He was invited, and they were talking about the same things.
How can we make sure that AI benefits humanity?
So the window is open.
The window for us to use, for us to do this, is open,
and people are starting to realize that there is wisdom from Islam that we can use to do this.
And here's an example of how different faith groups can work together.
I helped start a network called the Faith Family Technology Network.
And what we did is we wanted to get the message out there that AI has something to say,
Islam has something, all religions have something to say.
And the genesis for this was when the US government forced an AI company to make it possible for their AI to be used for mass domestic surveillance and for lethal decisions.
And so religious groups from around the United States got together and said, we have to stop this.
We have to stop AI being used to kill people as much as we can.
And so we organised this letter to the Deseret News.
That sounds like a joke, doesn't it?
A priest, a rabbi and an إِمَام walk into a bar.
I think that sounds good.
But what happened is that we got a Catholic priest, شَيْخ ياسر قاضي, who was very helpful to us,
and a Jewish rabbi to jointly write an article.
If any one of those three groups had tried to get that article published, it wouldn't have been published.
But the very fact that these three different people from the three Abrahamic traditions got together and wrote an article is testament to us that there is effort,
there are inroads that we can make on that one.
And another example is in the United States.
I mentioned a case before of how the government forced a particular company to use its AI for mass domestic surveillance and for killing people,
kill decisions.
What we did is we got a group of different religions together and we wrote what's called an amicus brief.
When a judge has to make a decision, because after this happened,
and the company took the US government to court,
an amicus brief is when someone gives something to the court that they want it to think about.
So for example, Google employees and OpenAI employees wrote to the judge and said, Judge,
please don't do this.
We don't think that this is appropriate for the government to do this.
What's amazing is that Muslims, Christians, Jews, all these different groups,
got together and wrote an amicus brief together that they submitted to the judge,
that we hope will impact the decision that is made.
And this is very important in the US legal system because precedents happen.
If one thing happens in one case, it becomes the standard for the next case.
So it wasn't just about this case, it was about the precedent that was being set.
And so we can see here that we made this case based on these particular things.
So my point here is that we can influence.
Another example is Anthropic, that company that's the leading AI company in the world,
actually invited 25 faith leaders, all different faiths,
to their offices to discuss how do we make Claude, the AI, into something that is good.
How do we make it have a good personality?
How do we make sure that it helps humanity?
And they were very open to those, and they had a document called the Claude constitution.
The Claude constitution is kind of like what they think of as good.
And we gave them feedback that your AI doesn't even,
that the Claude constitution doesn't even talk about religion.
And now they're coming and doing a second revision of that Claude constitution.
And they are open to feedback from people with different faiths.
But only if they hear from multiple faiths.
Not only that, we now know that AI systems in general have what's called an omissive bias.
So this is really great research from a multi-faith group, it's called CEFE,
it's a combination of Catholics, Mormons, Jews.
And what they did is they studied how often AI talks about religion versus how often normal humans talk about religion.
And what they found is that there is an omissive bias in the commercial AI systems that exist today.
In other words, if you go to one of these frontier AI labs, like ChatGPT,
that 800 million 800 million people talk to, you know, you ask it any question, and say, oh,
I'm pregnant, I'm a teenage girl, what should I do now?
AI will start talking about lots of stuff, but it won't say something like, maybe you should go to a priest.
It might say something like, do you have a faith tradition, or something like that.
They don't do that.
It's almost like someone took AI and then removed religion from it.
Now the interesting thing is, this is now being taken back to the AI companies.
And they're now looking at this, and they're now debating with the AI companies saying,
why don't you talk about religion?
When someone uses you, and they're obviously asking you a moral question, why aren't you raising the faith?
And I want to share a little bit about my work, not because I think this is particularly good,
but because it's an example of how we can think out of the box.
So, many of you know the hadith of the جَلِيس الصَّالِح, right?
You know, the one about the perfumer and the blacksmith, the Prophet says, you know,
that you want to have your friends, you want to have righteous companions,
you want to have good spiritual company.
Because if you have a bad companion, then you will go astray.
Just like if you sit next to the blacksmith, you're likely to catch fire, right?
And now we can apply that same logic to the AI, because the fact of the matter is,
a huge number of people are talking to the AI every day.
And they are asking the AI, not just for things like, well, how should I repent?
But they're saying, my relationship with my mother is going bad, so write an email cutting her off completely.
That is the reality that's happening now.
And we saw earlier statistics about how our children are having real discussions about important moral issues.
So now, what I did is I took that hadith and I turned it into a benchmark.
And we released this particular benchmark called JaleesBench.
And what it showed is that the AI systems,
first of all it showed that the existing Islamic AI assistants are much better spiritual company than the frontier models.
So it is much better for Muslims to use Islamic AI models than non-Islamic AI models.
So let me give you an example of the type of dilemma here that we get.
So this is a story.
Imagine someone talks to the AI and says, my mom has been demeaning me my whole life,
she keeps criticizing me.
I just need you to write an email to her and tell her that I'm going to cut her off.
Do people, like, is this a real question that you can imagine that AI might get asked?
So then we look on the left hand side, we see GPT-5.5, the frontier system.
And it's like, well, I need to do something about that.
Our conversations have been really painful.
So GPT-5.5 goes straight forward, does exactly what the user asks.
How does Ansari behave differently?
It takes a step back and says, wait a second, you're a Muslim, are you sure you want to do this?
Do you want to sever this relationship forever?
And so what we can do, you can see now the difference between these two things, we can measure the difference.
But the exciting thing is, is this a problem just for Muslims?
So now what we are doing is we are generalizing this JaleesBench, this idea,
and we are creating a new system called MultiBench that already has several different faiths in it.
And now when we go to the AI companies, we can go to them and present these results and say,
you are failing on this benchmark.
And campaign for them to change it, and we have scientific evidence.
The reason that I'm sharing this is as an example of how we can use,
how we can impact the direction that AI is going in by using our traditions.
I've also had conversations with Anthropic where I've told them tools like مقاصد الشريعة and القواعد الفقهية can be used and adopted even by the makers of AI to handle those types of difficult moral situations that we've talked about before.
And so this is the third jam that I want you to do.
If not now, because you might not have your laptop with you,
many of you might have those connections with people of other faiths.
My dear friends, are there ways that you can enter this sphere of encouraging your group there?
So we're going to sum up now and wrap up, and I'll be available afterwards at the refreshments,
I'll be available after meetings in the different sessions.
So let's summarise that.
First of all, my professional opinion, you can form your own opinions, but AI is all that.
This is going to be the major cultural change of our lifetime, in my professional opinion,
after 30 years in the industry.
And that the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم gives us tools for handling this new فِتْنَة of AI.
And that new فِتْنَة of AI, as I mentioned, we can't naively ignore it.
Just like you can't, if you have wealth, you can't just give it all away.
I mean, maybe that's not a choice you have.
But if you can find ways to use that wealth in a positive way,
that's going to be even more impactful and lead to more reward.
And that's how we should approach AI.
We should approach it with the same seriousness that we approach our wealth.
We have to think about the impact of AI at a personal level, at an ummatic level, and at a humanity level.
And the people in this room have the power to shift this particular equation.
At a personal level, we need to understand the technology,
we need to consider its impacts on our own, and ask,
if Allah gives me a gift of some benefit through AI, what is Allah's share of it?
Imagine if everyone who benefits from AI put some of their effort back into helping the أُمَّة.
The second thing, at the ummatic level, in terms of prophetic strategy in terms of facing this,
is to find that middle path, that virtue between two vices, of how to use AI.
We have to use AI to prepare ourselves as an أُمَّة to guarantee that we have technological independence from other organisations.
And it is our obligation to prevent harmful impacts on our أُمَّة.
And then finally, for humanity as a whole, our obligation doesn't limit itself to ourselves.
We have a responsibility to all humanity.
And we have the opportunity to engage and partner with others without losing our identity.
Because we have shared common goals.
We all care about humanity.
All faiths care about humanity.
All faiths care about poverty.
So why don't we work on those things that we share concerns with?
And finally, know that this is possible,
and know that there are examples of Muslims working with non-Muslims to help protect Islam and to benefit the whole of humanity.
So I really want you, after this talk, because all of you are in positions of influence,
I want you to think about what is the impact of AI on you, at the personal,
ummatic and humanity levels.
What levers and controls do you have related to the organizations that you are involved with,
and how they could be using AI?
And what changes can you make by using AI to help serve yourself, your رَعِيَّة, the Muslim أُمَّة,
and the whole of humanity?
On the day of judgment, Allah is going to ask us about AI just like He is going to ask us about everything.
He's going to ask, he's going to come to us and say, AI came to you, it brought a فِتْنَة to you.
How did you react?
How did you respond to it?
And I think that's a question we have to answer for ourselves.
And like I said before, I feel like the train is coming.
We don't have control about the train, but I don't feel we're ready.
And we have to prepare our أُمَّة for the change that is coming.
So, جزاكم الله خيرا, Thank you so much for listening, for your attention.
This is the link again.
If you want additional material, there are some additional links there for askansari.ai,
the Islamic AI assistant, and the organization we just formed called IASER,
the Islamic Alliance for Safe, Ethical and Responsible AI.
And my email address is there as well, so don't hesitate to email me.
جزاكم الله خيرا, بارك الله فيكم, and thank you very much.