Constructive Conversations Pilot Project: Mental Health, Artificial Intelligence and Religious Communities (360G-Wellcome-346000_Z_26_Z)

This project pioneers and evaluates a new way of fostering constructive conversations between researchers and religious communities, to have positive impact on researchers while benefitting the religious communities and giving them a voice. We will adapt the Participatory Futures Dialogue (PFD) approach to cover sensitive scientific topics, with three modules: scientific information, societal issues, and religious issues. Multiple religious issues modules can be produced to enable interaction with different religious communities. This pilot will look at AI and mental health, engaging with UK Jewish and Christian communities. This approach is scalable to other scientific topics, regions and religions in future. We will examine the implications of emerging AI technologies for mental health, with particular attention to ethical, clinical and psychosocial dimensions as understood within religious contexts. Religious communities play a significant role in mental health and wellbeing support, yet remain underexplored in current AI and mental health research. Through constructive conversations with AI researchers, this project will investigate how faith communities understand and engage with both generic AI tools and AI-mediated mental health tools in pursuit of wellbeing, asking how theology shapes responses to automation, care and vulnerability, and how these perspectives can inform responsible, culturally sensitive deployment of AI.