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ROME — It took a little over a year for Pope Leo XIV to write the 42,000 words of his first encyclical, which deals with the safeguarding of human dignity in the age of artificial intelligence.
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Arguably, with the right prompt, it would have taken ChatGPT, Claude AI, Copilot or any number of AI chatbots only a few minutes to write just as many words based on the whole history of Catholic social teaching.
But that’s exactly one of the points the pope is making in the document released Monday: While AI “often surpasses human intelligence in speed and computational capacity,” he writes, it merely imitates human intelligence. It does not draw directly on the most human of traits and ideals like love, compassion, creativity, genius and a desire for justice.
Aside from the guidelines Leo provides in the encyclical — an official pastoral letter addressed to bishops but also often meant for all Catholics — this document leans on accessible cultural references as he calls for AI to be “disarmed.”
The normally self-effacing pontiff shows off his expansive knowledge of literature, art and culture in the document, which is unusually readable for a broad modern audience and references the likes of Picasso, J.R.R. Tolkien’s wizard Gandalf and the seminal movie “Schindler’s List,” among many others.
He points out how “authentic culture and art” resists what he calls the “normalization of evil,” and cites as examples Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 as a desire for unity, Picasso’s “Guernica” as a “denunciation of dehumanization,” and “Schindler’s List” as a “call to consign the past to oblivion.”
His message is clear — in the battle for righteousness, human beings must remain at the center of civilization.
“Even today, colonialism assumes new forms. It no longer dominates only bodies, but appropriates data, transforming personal lives into exploitable information,” he writes. “Here lies one of the most urgent moral challenges of our time: to ensure that shared knowledge becomes a true common good rather than an instrument of dominance.”
The document has been commented on more widely than previous popes’ encyclicals, which traditionally have been heavy on turgid liturgical language.
Instead, Leo makes several references to human virtuosity to provide a glimpse of what might have influenced him in the past. He also quotes German and American philosopher and historian Hannah Arendt to warn that “indifference to the truth leads, slowly but surely, to a descent into totalitarianism.”
Recalling Martin Luther King Jr., he writes, “Certain events make it clear that history can also change when individuals truly take the dignity of everyone seriously.”
In a passage attributed to Gandalf in Tolkien’s “The Return of the King,” he urges people to build a “civilization of love” amid the threat of AI:
“It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succor of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.”
But one work more than any other has influenced the pope’s beliefs, and his text on artificial intelligence: Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical addressing workers’ rights and the limits of capitalism during the Industrial Revolution.
“Today we find ourselves facing a transformation of similar magnitude, with perhaps even greater consequences,” he writes in reference to Rerun Novarum.
And it is no coincidence he signed his text on May 15 — 135 years to the day from the publication of his predecessor’s seminal work.
Since his election over a year ago, a number of books and documentaries have provided an insight into what influenced Robert Prevost before he became Pope Leo XIV.
We know, for instance, that he loved the “Blues Brothers” so much he once dressed in the characters’ signature fedora and dark sunglasses.
And as pope, Leo appears to be on a mission from God to warn humanity about the dangers of AI.
