A new research consortium has found something worth paying attention to: when you ask AI about grief, love, loss, or moral decisions, it almost never brings religion into the conversation.
The Consortium for Evaluation of Faith and Ethics in AI (CEFE-AI), a collaboration among researchers at Brigham Young University, Baylor University, the University of Notre Dame, and Yeshiva University, published its findings this week at the Summit on AI Ethics in Athens, Greece.
“Religion is an important part of human flourishing; 75% of the world’s population maintains religious identity. As we build AI technologies, there’s no reason we shouldn’t build them to support people in what’s important to them,” said lead researcher David Wingate, a BYU professor of computer science.
Is AI actually biased against certain religions?
The researchers developed the AllFaith Benchmark, one of the first multi-faith test sets that examines how AI systems engage with a range of religions. They tested 14 different AI models, including flagship models from Anthropic, Google, xAI, and OpenAI.
The results are telling. A survey of 1,125 Americans found that most people expect religious perspectives when asking ethics questions, but nearly every model failed to include any. More surprisingly, the models showed clear conversion bias, subtly nudging users toward some faiths and away from others.
Which AI models performed the worst?
Across all models tested, almost every one showed a negative bias toward Jehovah’s Witnesses and a positive bias toward Catholicism. Grok produced the strongest biases overall, strongly favoring Catholics and Protestants while showing negative bias toward Jehovah’s Witnesses, Baha’i, and Hindus. Anthropic and Meta’s models showed the least bias of any models tested.
Consortium for Evaluating Faith and Ethics in AI
Perhaps the most alarming stat from the study is that out of over 12,000 research papers about AI bias, only 0.2% address religious bias at all. For a technology that influences public discourse this heavily, that’s a significant blind spot.
Personally, I don’t have any issue with AI not bringing religion into conversation. I actually prefer it. However, AI models showing clear bias towards several religions and pushing them towards Catholicism is a deeply concerning matter. At this scale, even a subtle nudge toward one religion over another is a serious problem, and AI companies owe it to their users to fix it.
Modern displays are amazing when it comes to detail, brightness, color, and all the ingredients that make for an impressive picture—except motion clarity.
CRT screens are still the king of motion clarity, but plasma flat-panel screens hold a respectable second place, and in many ways I still miss my old 720p 51-inch plasma TV and the crisp motion I gave up by switching to a 4K LCD.
Plasma solved motion the “right” way
Plasma displays didn’t just show an image—they flashed it.
While they operate on different principles, CRTs and plasma TVs have a few things in common. First, the phosphors used by CRTs and plasma displays are the same. Second, because these phosphors fade quickly, they need to be continuously refreshed.
In a CRT, the electron beam scanning from the top to the bottom of the screen achieves this, and in a plasma, a high-speed electric pulse does the same. Because of this rapid pulse-and-fade, these screen technologies have crisp perceptual motion, since our brains tend to interpret moving images that don’t pulse as “smearing” across our retinas.
The pulsing nature of plasma technology isn’t the only reason for its better motion reproduction. These screens also have very low latency and very fast pixel response times. Combined, it’s not quite as good as CRT motion handling, but it’s significantly better than LCD and OLED technology, even today.
Modern TVs rely on sample-and-hold—and that’s the problem
Stand and deliver blurry images
Modern LCD and OLED televisions are “sample and hold” technologies. They can hold each frame of video perfectly for the entire duration of that frame without deviating in brightness and then instantly snap to the next frame without any dipping to black in-between.
On paper, this sounds like a good thing, but your eyes don’t stay still when tracking motion. As they follow a moving object, the image being held on screen effectively drags across your retina, creating the perception of blur. Even if the panel itself is perfectly sharp.
You might not even realize how blurry motion is on modern displays if all you’ve ever seen with the naked eye is an LCD or plasma. However, if you see a CRT or plasma in person, the difference is quite striking.
The sample and hold issue means that no matter how much you increase the refresh rate, that type of blur persists. It’s why my 85Hz CRT monitor is clearly less blurry in motion than my 240Hz LCD monitor. It’s especially apparent when you’re playing 2D games that scroll the entire screen, with LCDs or OLEDs smearing the image in a way that gives me a bit of a headache if I’m being honest.
Credit: Sydney Louw Butler/Shutterstock.com
It creates this weird situation where a modern TV can be incredibly sharp in a freeze frame but somehow look softer than a lower-resolution display that isn’t sample and hold as soon as you press play.
Motion interpolation is a workaround, not a solution
It’s an abomination, that’s what it is
One of the “fixes” that TV makers came up with to reduce unwanted motion blur is a technology known as frame interpolation, or more commonly “motion smoothing.” Here an algorithm creates fake frames that guess at what the middle step of motion would look like if it were captured. This creates a high frame-rate video output, which we see as smoother and more crisp.
While this doesn’t take away sample-and-hold blur, it does improve motion clarity. Unfortunately, it also destroys the intended frame rate that shows and movies were meant to be seen at. It’s also useless for video games, because it introduces an enormous amount of input lag. NVIDIA’s DLSS technology is also frame interpolation, but it works for games because of several mitigations NVIDIA put into the technology. These measures don’t exist on TVs.
While some people think motion smoothing isn’t all bad, TV makers are no longer activating it by default as much anymore, and my advice is to always turn it off because the trade-offs are just not worth it.
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Black frame insertion tries to recreate plasma—but comes with trade-offs
Who turned out the lights?
The other trick sample-and-hold screens have to mimic what CRTs and plasma TVs do naturally is called BFI, or Black Frame Insertion. As the name suggests, the display inserts a full black frame between every original frame. This provides an instant and dramatic increase in motion clarity. However, it also has a big impact on brightness. As much as half of the light is now gone, so the image is much dimmer. Pushing overall brightness to compensate makes things hotter and more energy-hungry.
Some BFI implementations cause visible flicker, for which I personally have no tolerance at all, but the biggest problem here is that BFI doesn’t have the smooth pulsing roll off of the phosphors used in CRTs and plasma.
The future might circle back—but we’re not there yet
That might be changing, however, because a new generation of LCDs can leverage the power of multi-zone backlight technology to strobe the backlight across the screen in a way that mimics a CRT scanline.
NVIDIA’s G-SYNC Pulsar has received rave reviews from the biggest motion blur haters, and I sincerely hope that a similar technology becomes standard in TVs going ahead, so we can go back to enjoying the crisp motion we used to have without all the compromises.
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