Pope Leo XIV has intensified his warning that artificial intelligence cannot be treated as a substitute for human creativity, conscience or experience. On Friday, the pontiff told artists that machines may imitate artistic output but cannot share the humanity from which art emerges.
Speaking Friday to participants in “The Art of Possibility: Weaving Together,” a meeting promoted by the Vatican’s Dicastery for Culture and Education, Leo said the church needs artists who can make spiritual realities “accessible and understandable,” especially in an age shaped by search engines and generative AI.
Download the Straight Arrow app today to get the stories that matter free from manipulation, bias or agenda.™
Point phone camera here
Leo said there is an “ontological difference” between human art and material generated through statistical calculation based on millions of works created by others. Art, he said, can resist homogenization, slow the viewer’s gaze and surface questions about beauty, justice, peace and meaning that automated systems tend to flatten into ready-made answers.
That distinction echoes Magnifica Humanitas, released in May and dated to the anniversary of Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 social encyclical Rerum Novarum. Leo XIV wrote that AI systems do not undergo experiences, possess bodies, feel joy or pain, or exercise moral conscience. He framed the central challenge of the digital age as not only technological but anthropological: how society understands what it means to be human.
The pope has also warned that digital connectivity can leave people disconnected from themselves, others and their interior lives. He has linked competitive, technology-driven environments to anxiety and uncertainty among young people and argued that convenience or efficiency cannot come at the expense of dignity, responsibility and authentic human relationships.
The debate became more pointed after The New York Times reported that Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah saw an advance copy of the encyclical and considered withdrawing from its presentation because of its treatment of AI consciousness. Two participants told the newspaper that Olah and his team later pressed papal advisers to take seriously the possibility that machines could be conscious.
The Times reported that the episode was part of a broader Anthropic campaign involving private meetings and calls with theologians and religious scholars, some under nondisclosure agreements, about whether Claude models might have consciousness or moral standing. The outreach included an April dinner in San Francisco at which attendees received a handwritten note, a mug and a copy of Claude’s constitution, according to the report.
Olah has publicly argued that questions raised by AI are larger than the technology industry and require participation from religious communities, civil society, academics and governments. His outreach reflects an effort by frontier AI companies to engage institutions whose moral traditions long predate modern computing, even as critics question whether those conversations give the companies too much influence over the terms of the debate.
Grant Kaplan, a theology professor at Saint Louis University, told Straight Arrow earlier this year that large language models challenge assumptions about human uniqueness because they can reproduce forms of intellectual and creative work once considered distinctly human. He said the uncertainty over whether a poem came from a person or a computer illustrates the stakes for human dignity, authorship and accountability.
Kaplan also cited reports that Leo has discouraged clergy from using AI to prepare homilies, arguing that ministers are expected to wrestle personally with sacred texts rather than outsource reflection. The concern parallels Leo’s appeal to artists: Technology can assist human work, but it cannot assume the moral responsibility or lived experience of the person using it.
The Catholic Church has confronted earlier waves of industrial and social change, but Leo’s statements suggest it will draw a firm line around claims that statistical systems are equivalent to human beings. For the pope, the question is not whether machines can produce convincing words or images, but whether society will confuse simulation with the embodied, relational and moral life that gives human creation its meaning.
Round out your reading
- Lawyer says 57 Cornell frat members were in the group chat. Could their silence be a crime?
- Florida county discovers mysterious Flock cameras with no obvious owner.
- Off Script: They won their primaries on one message. Now it’s disappearing.
- Some question whether a popular affordable housing policy is making the nation’s home shortage worse.
- Kelvin wave incoming: Why the US should care.
