Humanist Wins Religious Accommodation to Avoid AI Tools at Work
David Durman, an administrator at the University of Kentucky who identifies as a nontheistic Humanist, has been granted a religious accommodation that means he does not have to use AI to complete his work. The university granted the accommodation in September. Religion News Service reported the case on October 26, and TechCrunch followed with a profile based on a direct interview with Durman.
Durman's objection is philosophical rather than theological. According to Tom's Hardware, he argues that offloading his thinking to large language models (LLMs, the AI systems behind chatbots) violates his beliefs, and he says he is unwilling to outsource that thinking to AI. The American Humanist Association says the exemption is the first case of its kind.
Durman sought help from the American Humanist Association to pursue legal protections against required AI use at work. Alexandria Huiskens, a Staff Attorney at the association, spoke directly to TechCrunch for its article. The association's involvement places the case within a legal framework built around religious accommodation, which has historically been applied to faith-based practices and beliefs.
The case followed a precedent set by someone else. Erin Maus, a Unitarian Universalist software engineer, secured similar AI-use protections, and her case inspired Durman to seek his own. Her accommodation came from a religious tradition, which is the category most employment-accommodation law was written to address. Durman's came from a nontheistic one.
Jay Blanton, a University of Kentucky spokesperson, said the university reviews religious accommodation requests on an individual basis, considering job responsibilities and circumstances. Blanton said the university determined that an accommodation could be provided in Durman's case while allowing him to continue performing the essential functions of his position. The reporting cited here does not describe how Durman's duties are now carried out without AI tools, and the accommodation's scope has not been detailed publicly beyond that.
A detail from the university's own records adds a layer. The May 2024 commencement program lists David Paul Durman II's dissertation as "From Code to Crops: Harnessing Bioinformatics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Agriculture Omics." That work sits in the computational biology and machine learning area that the general-purpose AI tools now in use grew out of.
The broader context here is a question that employers and accommodation officers will eventually have to answer repeatedly. Religious accommodation requests are assessed case by case, and the University of Kentucky's stated process does exactly that. What Durman's case tests is whether a sincerely held secular conviction about cognitive autonomy, the idea that a person should do their own reasoning, can enter the same process, and whether a workable arrangement can be reached when the required tool is a general-purpose model embedded in routine work. Blanton's account suggests the university found one, at least in this instance.
In my view, the more useful takeaway for practitioners is procedural. An accommodation that preserves essential job functions, rather than eliminating the tool across the board, is a model other institutions can examine. The technology's spread into workflows has outpaced the policies governing it, and cases like this one show that accommodation frameworks can be stretched to cover new kinds of objection. Whether that flexibility extends to other workers and other beliefs is a question the reporting so far does not answer.
