Call for papers: Civiltà e Religioni (ISSN 2421-3152) vol. 11, 2025
Special issue:
Artificial Intelligence and the History of Religions:
A Paradigm Shift or a Technology with Limits?
In December 2023, the European Parliament published the draft of the first ever regulation law on the use of
Generative Artificial Intelligence1, a document which classifies three levels of threats posed by AI systems:
“unacceptable risk”, “high risk” and “minimal risk”. Among the threats that this kind of technology may generate, the EU identifies as “unacceptable” the cognitive manipulation of the behaviour of specific vulnerable individuals or groups; the classification of individuals based on their behaviour, socio-economic status or personal characteristics; and real-time and remote biometric identification systems. Further to that, AI systems that may adversely affect the safety or fundamental rights of individuals are all considered “high risk”. Areas where the use of AI should be registered in a EU database for regulatory purposes include biometric identification, management and operation of critical infrastructure, vocational education and training, employment and labour management, law enforcement or assistance in legal interpretation and migration management.
Despite potential threats, several scientific and academic publications have so far highlighted the advantages and benefits of generative AI. A report by the European Research Council, published on 26 March 2024 noted how the ERC had invested €2 billion in AI research since 20072. It does not surprise that most of the funded projects (543) belong to the hard sciences (mostly physics and engineering). Quite unexpectedly, 290 social sciences and humanities projects had been funded as well. Among these, the report highlights the following three: (1)
Tracsymbols, which uses predictive computational tools to study the emergence of key cultural innovations between Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis; (2) Algosoc, which focuses on the political-ethical implications of machine learning algorithms; and (3) Facesyntax, which recurs to generative AI to model facial expressions and possible subjective human responses from a cross-cultural perspective.
Almost overnight, AI-based technologies have become part of everyday digital environment. Algorithms are used to reference articles in bibliographic specialised databases; predictive writing systems feature word processing software; automatic translation and simultaneous writing systems are employed to generate the abstracts of scientific articles; consulting chatbots are used to make first approximations to a topic of study or to get suggestions for analysis. But beyond a system that has grown up around us in a seemingly spontaneous fashion, what are the benefits and risks of generative AI for the history of religions? It is time to open a methodological but also a deontological debate on its use.
1 https://www.europarl.europa.eu/thinktank/es/document/EPRS_BRI(2021)698792
2 European Commission, European Research Council Executive Agency, Mapping ERC frontier research artificial intelligence, Publications Office of the European Union, 2024, https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2828/163337
2 The next issue of Civiltà & Religioni will address these and cognate questions by launching a call for papers on the history of religions and generative artificial intelligence. The main objective will be to investigate whether we are facing an interpretative paradigm shift, akin to the symbolic turn, structuralism, the linguistic turn or the bodily turn, or an epistemological change. Likely research questions are:
– Will the use of AI be limited to reinforcing data analysis and information within already constructed analytical and interpretative frameworks or are there further areas of development?
– In what ways are generative AIs being used in the history of religions? Are there specific analytical approaches related to the history of religions? If so, in what way do they differ from those employed in other fields of the humanities and social sciences?
– Does the use of AI necessarily mean an advancement in the choice of topics for the history of religions?
– Could AI create an interpretive framework capable of opening up new hermeneutical horizons, or is it going to be limited to already consolidated hypotheses?
– Are there deontological risks in the use of generative AI tools, in addition to, for instance, plagiarism or the unacknowledged creation of contents by chatbots?
Interested scholars are invited to submit title, abstract and manuscript by 5 May 2025 to the guest editor, prof. Antón Alvar Nuño (Universidad de Málaga), at the following email address: anton.alvar@uma.es.