ROME — It took Pope Leo XIV a little over a year to write the 42,000 words of his first encyclicalwhich deals with safeguarding human dignity in the age of artificial intelligence.
Without doubt, with the right prompt, it would have been necessary ChatGPT, Claude AICopilot or any number of AI chatbots just a few minutes to write as many words based on the entire history of Catholic social teaching.
But that’s exactly one of the points the pope makes in the paper released Monday: While AI “often surpasses human intelligence in terms of speed and computational capacity,” he writes, it simply imitates human intelligence. It does not draw directly on the most human traits and ideals like love, compassion, creativity, genius, and the desire for justice.
In addition to the guidelines Leo gives in the encyclical – an official pastoral letter addressed to bishops but also often aimed at all Catholics – this document draws on accessible cultural references as it calls for “disarming AI.”
The usually self-effacing pontiff shows his vast knowledge of literature, art and culture in the document, which is unusually readable for a broad modern audience and references Picasso, JRR Tolkien’s wizard Gandalf and the seminal film “Schindler’s List,” among others.
He emphasizes how “authentic culture and art” resist 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 justice, human beings must remain at the center of civilization.
“Even today, colonialism takes new forms. It no longer only dominates bodies, but appropriates data, transforming personal lives into exploitable information,” he writes. “Herein lies one of the most urgent moral challenges of our time: ensuring that shared knowledge becomes a true common good rather than an instrument of domination. »
The document has been commented on more widely than the encyclicals of previous popes, which were traditionally heavy with turgid liturgical language.
Instead, Leo makes several references to human virtuosity to provide insight into what may 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 toward totalitarianism.”
Remembering Martin Luther King Jr., he writes: “Some events clearly show that history can also change when individuals truly take the dignity of each person 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 for us to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us to help in the years we are in, by uprooting evil from the fields we know, so that those who live after will have clean land to cultivate. »
But one work more than any other influenced the pope’s beliefs and his text on artificial intelligence: Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical dealing with 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 that he signed his text on May 15, 135 years to the day after the publication of his predecessor’s founding work.
Since his election more than a year ago, numerous books and documentaries have provided insight into what influenced Robert Prévost before he became Pope Leo XIV.
We know, for example, that he loved “Blues Brothers” so much that he once wore the characters’ signature fedora and black sunglasses.
And as pope, Leo seems to have received a mission from God: to warn humanity of the dangers of AI.