If your boss asks why you haven’t integrated artificial intelligence tools into your workflow yet, tell them it’s because your faith forbids you from doing so. According to a report from the Religion News Service, a research administrator at the University of Kentucky successfully received a religious exemption from his employer, excusing him from any expectations to use AI for his work.
The man, 45-year-old David Durman, identifies as a humanist and told Religion News Service that he felt being asked to use AI tools like ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot, as the University of Kentucky reportedly encouraged its employees to utilize, undermined his belief in the importance of the human parts of life and ran counter to his desire to see human flourishing.
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I mean: fair. If your religious beliefs are incompatible with your use of a particular tool that isn't essential for a particular kind of work, then you should absolutely be able to be exempted from using those tools. The quality of your work should, of course, be assessed in a fair fashion: but while a weaver who refuses to use a loom would probably be measurably less-productive, I know plenty of software engineers whose productivity is comparable with-or-without AI assistance... just different.
It's a shame that this fella's employer were sufficiently stubborn that he had to go down this route, of course. I mean: I'd much prefer workers were able to choose the right tools for them regardless of the nature of those tools. I might well use a different web browser and text editor than most of my coworkers, for example, and that's fine because I'm just as useful with those as I would be if I used different ones. The same logic should apply.
But, sadly, some employers have gone a bit overboard with AI. There's things that LLMs are absolutely capable of doing, and in some cases doing well in a way that's faster and cheaper than a human (so long as you don't mind the side-effects of that in terms of nondeterministic quality etc.). And then there's a much larger class of things that it totally sucks ass at, but that people seem to keep trying to shoehorn it into anyway.
Anyway: I thought it was an interesting news story.
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