The Start of Something Bigger: Why AI Needs a Moral Compass

Almost overnight, artificial intelligence has exploded into the public consciousness. It’s already playing a major role in the lives of ordinary people, influencing their decisions and behavior. 

At Gloo, we believe in AI’s potential to do good in the world. So we set out to understand the moral frameworks that underpin this technology. The fundamental question at the heart of our journey: Do the algorithms that so many have come to depend on truly support our flourishing or are they subtly eroding it? Are they helping us grow in faith, or just distracting us from it?

What is human flourishing?

Dr. Tyler VanderWeele, Director of Harvard University’s Human Flourishing Program, defines human flourishing as “ the relative attainment of a state in which all aspects of a person's life are good.” By defining 6 key domains – including Character and Virtue, Close Social Relationships, Happiness and Life Satisfaction, Meaning and Purpose, Mental and Physical Health, and Financial and Material Stability – his team has laid the foundation for evaluating human flourishing. 

That work is further explored in the Global Flourishing Study (a collaboration between Harvard University, Baylor University and Gallup). It offers profound science based on insights from 200,000 people over a 5-year period, helping the broader community better understand the factors driving human flourishing. Among its key findings:

• Young people are not flourishing today as much as they have in the past

• Flourishing is notably higher for those married than for those separated or divorced

• Events in childhood can impact flourishing later in life

• Flourishing goes up with more frequent religious attendance

That last point is essential: faith matters. How we feel about our lives is not just about success, happiness or comfort—it's about wholeness, meaning, and deeply rooted well-being. At Gloo, we believe that faith plays a crucial role in achieving holistic human flourishing. Research from the Barna Group has consistently shown that individuals whose lives are grounded in faith and who maintain a connection to an active church community tend to flourish more broadly across various life dimensions. This finding and others, including the most recent results from the Global Flourishing Study, led to our incorporation of spirituality as a seventh dimension to complement Harvard's core framework.

In fact, we recently released our Flourishing AI Benchmark, which is a framework that measures how well LLM responses align across multiple dimensions of flourishing. It found that while models are relatively strong at pragmatic or emotionally supportive outputs, they underperform in dimensions requiring ethical reflection, existential reasoning, and virtue-based considerations. And the greatest performance gaps were found around Faith and Meaning. 

All of this work around human flourishing is one of the driving forces behind our creation of AI tools that are values-aligned and grounded in the principles of the Christian faith. If we can’t measure how AI models perform with regards to human flourishing, how can we and the broader AI community work to improve them?

The start of a longer conversation

With that as a foundation, this is the first in a series of posts that will explore the impact of technology on each of these seven dimensions of human flourishing. Calling on voices from diverse fields, we’ll explore the hard questions about the tools being built and used today. 

Experience a values-aligned AI

In the meantime, if you’d like to see how we’re putting values-aligned AI into practice and help us shape that technology for good, we’d like to invite you to try Gloo AI Chat [https://chat.gloo.com/?prompt=who+is+god%3F. It’s values-aligned chat and conversational AI tool designed to help people find answers to everyday questions, based on biblical values. Whether you’re asking about parenting, faith, relationships, or life decisions, it’s designed to help you find clarity in a safe, reliable, and values-aligned way.