By JoAnne Wadsworth, Communications Consultant for the G20 Interfaith Forum
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On August 13, 2026, the G20 Interfaith Forum (IF20), in partnership with the International Academy for Multicultural Cooperation (IAMC), held a webinar entitled “AI and Education,” the seventh in an eight-part series on artificial intelligence and faith. Speakers included Medlir Mema, a political scientist and educator who directs the AI Ethics and Governance Institute (AEGIX), serves as Executive Director of Organized Intelligence, and is a Senior Fellow at Faith Matters; Rev. Dr. Marian Edmonds-Allen, a public theologian, peacebuilder, and values-based strategist who founded FaithWise.ai, co-directs the AI & Spirituality Initiative within the Neurospirituality Lab at Mass General Brigham, and serves on the steering committee of the Faith, Family, and Technology Network; and Noah Torres, Policy Director of the Family Success Project at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, where his work spans family law, child welfare, artificial intelligence regulation, and child online safety. Dr. Marianna Richardson, Director of Communications for the G20 Interfaith Forum and adjunct professor of management communication at Brigham Young University’s Marriott School of Business, moderated the discussion.
Medlir Mema
Mema opened by affirming that AI can and should expand educational possibilities, while cautioning that it must not be allowed to redefine learning as speed, output, or optimization. Education, he argued, has to stay centered on human dignity, agency, and relationship. From a faith perspective, he named relationality, embodiment, friction, and agency as essential to what human beings are, and insisted that all four survive whatever recontextualization the age of AI brings.
He then laid out the scale of adoption. Eighty-four percent of U.S. students now use generative AI for schoolwork, and roughly 90 percent of school staff use AI personally, though only about 20 percent of schools have a policy in place. Gallup data suggests teachers are saving some six hours a week — but those gains carry a cost, because removing friction from the exchange between faculty and student work also removes the feedback that reveals where students’ gaps lie. He flagged a global divide as well: 2.2 billion people remain offline, and only 23 percent of people in low-income countries are online, against 94 percent in high-income ones.
He urged the audience to understand AI as a sociotechnical phenomenon rather than a simple exchange with a chatbot — one that begins with data centers and their environmental footprint and depends on so-called ghost workers in the Global South paid less than subsistence wages to label training data. Genuine AI literacy, he added, means grasping the technology’s limits, the values it embodies, and when not to use it at all; for teachers, it may mean less content delivery and more mentorship. Within five to ten years, he predicted, AI-free learning will become a premium educational experience, and institutions that can demonstrate independent judgment and intellectual discipline in their graduates will gain a reputational advantage.
“The paradox is that the more capable AI becomes, the more valuable distinctly human, unaided intellectual performance may become.”
Rev. Dr. Marian Edmonds-Allen
Edmonds-Allen opened with a recent news story about college students hiring an autonomous AI agent to take an online course for them from start to finish. Educators once worried about students copying one another’s notes, she observed; this is a different order of problem. The pressure runs both ways, she added, since AI can now build nearly every element of a course, grade student work, and generate avatar or “deepfake” lectures in which a professor appears to be teaching but the instruction is synthetic.
She illustrated the stakes with an exchange at a conference for HBCU college presidents and deans. A business school dean told her afterward that her deepest concern was not students skipping assignments but students voluntarily de-skilling themselves — graduating with a degree but without the skills the job would require. Asked whether the answer was simply to ban AI, the dean disagreed, noting that employers want graduates who know how to use it.
Edmonds-Allen rejected that binary. She described the present as a crossroads at which a season of technological transformation might also transform education — but only if the work starts from the core, with what values and virtues make a person of integrity and character, faculty as much as students. People centered in that core can build an inner compass that guides their use of technology and extends rather than erodes their agency. That work has to begin with the user, she argued, rather than with technology companies too large and too focused on profit to be relied upon. Students, she concluded, can be taught to treat AI not as an answer machine but as a learning machine.
“Before we decide what we should delegate to a machine, we need to be centered in who we are, and who we are trying to become.”
Noah Torres
Torres framed artificial intelligence and education as a question of right and justice: what is owed to teachers as educators, and what is owed to children as students. His remarks drew on his graduate work on the School of Salamanca — the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theologians and jurists who worked out questions of right and justice for a newly globalized world — and on renewed attention to religion and technology following Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical on artificial intelligence.
His central emphasis was the uniqueness of human agency as against the simulated agency of machines. Human beings are rational creatures, he said, whose intellect and will enable them to learn, create, develop their own ideas, and integrate themselves into their world.
“Even though artificial intelligence might simulate some of these processes, it will never replicate them, and it can never stand in for them.”
Education, Torres argued, is not the acquisition of knowledge or technical skills alone but the formation of the whole person — next to life in the family, the second most important space for integral human development, and inherently communal. If classroom assessments come to be seen as products a computer can master, students risk atrophy not only of cognition but of social virtue, civic responsibility, and solidarity. He also raised subsidiarity, asking whether these technologies are introduced into classrooms, and developed in the first place, with the input of the students and teachers who use them. Technology can still be a genuine partner, he concluded, so long as the in-person experience of teaching and learning remains central and AI is understood as something that may supplement human agency but never supplant it.
Question and Answer Session
Why haven’t AI companies built stronger protections into their products?
Edmonds-Allen answered that these companies are not in business to provide such protections, though some have begun inviting conversations with faith leaders and others concerned about children. In the meantime, individuals can write their own guidelines and load them into AI systems so that friction is deliberately built into the interaction — work she is pursuing through a personal moral compass framework. Mema agreed but declined to let developers off the hook, observing that attention rather than intention drives their business models, and that today’s providers inherited Silicon Valley’s ethos of moving fast and testing later. The response, he said, must be a whole-of-society effort in which users, companies, and governments all carry responsibility.
What role can policy play?
Torres pointed to recent activity in Texas, including the App Store Accountability Act, discussions of chatbot liability for harms done to users, and the Texas Responsible Artificial Intelligence Governance Act, which set guardrails for development and deployment. State-level debate remains vigorous on questions specific to education, he said: whether there should be years of schooling free of digital technology altogether, whether technology should be confined to particular periods, tasks, or locations within a school, and how to keep children from being exposed to harmful content.
How should we define cheating in an AI world?
Mema argued that the meaning of honesty does not change simply because technology makes dishonesty easier. Shortcuts are not inherently illegitimate — driving to work is not cheating — but if the object of the exercise is to run a marathon, arriving by car defeats the purpose. Using AI on an assignment designed to exclude it is straightforwardly cheating, and a university that graduates students on friction-free work is also cheating the employers it hopes to serve. Citation alone is insufficient, he added, describing a student who answered an AI policy by resubmitting the same AI-generated assignment with a disclaimer attached. He recommended pairing institutional policy with a class-level contract developed together with students, and cited research by his colleague Peter Cardon at the University of Southern California finding that business leaders now place greater value on oral communication, because they can no longer be confident that what they read was written by the person who sent it.
Concluding Remarks
Torres closed by returning to education as a space for integral human development, second only to the family. The cultivation of a student’s intellectual, physical, spiritual, mental, and social capacities acts upon human agency and requires the training of intellect and will — training that cannot happen in isolation or be fulfilled by a machine. Future AI policy, he argued, must be made with the individual classroom and the individual student in mind.
Mema turned to Diogenes the Cynic, who wandered the streets of Athens in broad daylight holding a lantern up to people’s faces. Asked whether he had gone mad, Diogenes answered that he was looking for a human. In the age of AI, Mema said, he prefers to take that answer literally.
“AI should help education become more human, not less. The goal is not to make students better machines, but to help them become fuller persons.”
He ended with the invitation he uses to close his podcast interviews: stay human. Edmonds-Allen offered a final note of hope drawn from her own family. Her youngest child recently finished a master’s degree in playwriting at Carnegie Mellon University and, facing an uncertain job market, has become more focused than ever on what makes playwriting matter to the world. That, she suggested, is the shape of this moment: a time of transformation in which people return to what is core to being human. Richardson thanked the panelists and invited participants to the final webinar of the series, “AI and the Future,” the following Thursday.
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JoAnne Wadsworth is a Communications Consultant for the G20 Interfaith Forum Association and Editor of the Viewpoints Blog, IF20’s platform for commentary at the intersection of faith and global policy. She has covered the work of the Forum across multiple G20 cycles, producing summaries, articles, and editorial content that bring the voices of interfaith leaders and scholars to a broader audience. Her writing engages with topics spanning environmental governance, religious freedom, anti-racism, and the role of faith in multilateral policy processes. She is based in the United States.