As AI mandates spread, employment attorneys warn a new wave of religious accommodation requests is coming.
An employee tells HR they refuse to use any AI software as part of their job. They’re a devout Christian, they say, and believe that using generative AI for creative or analytical work violates their faith; humans, they argue, are made in God’s image to be the sole creators and delegating that to a machine is a form of idolatry.
Some HR professionals might smirk. A few might push back. But employment attorneys say that reaction, however instinctive, could cost an employer hundreds of thousands of dollars.
James Paul, an employment attorney at Ogletree Deakins, has been advising employers on employment law for nearly 20 years. For most of that time, a religious accommodation request was a rarity.
“Usually, it’d be maybe one issue every month, or maybe one every two months,” said Paul, a shareholder at Ogletree Deakins. That changed after the pandemic, and now AI is accelerating the trend further.
“Now I’m seeing three or four a week. And I’ve had three situations in the last two months where employees have articulated objections to the use of certain technologies in the workplace.”
David Miklas, a Florida-based employment attorney with 27 years of experience advising HR leaders, sees the same shift coming.
“There are a lot of religious people out there and sometimes their beliefs aren’t traditional, and that doesn’t give them any less protection,” he says.
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