Leo says encyclical will confront ‘anthropological’ challenge of AI

‘In light of the Church’s mission and the current misconceptions concerning God and the human person, digital literacy must also include an education in the truth about God and about humanity.’

Pope Leo said he intended his first encyclical to respond to the “anthropological” rather than “technical” challenge posed by artificial intelligence.

Speaking on Friday to participants in a Vatican conference on AI, the Pope said the Church was “compelled to contribute to the effort of planning and implementing media, information and AI literacy within education systems”.

“As sadly evidenced by the unbridled promotion and implementation of technology at the expense of human dignity and the damage caused when chatbots and other technologies exploit our need for human relationships, we are truly experiencing an eclipse of the sense of what it means to be human,” he said.

“It is therefore all the more imperative to recover an understanding of the true meaning and grandeur of humanity as intended by God.”

Pope Leo will present his encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, “on the protection of the human person in the age of artificial intelligence”, at an event in the Vatican’s Synod Hall on Monday.

“It is precisely within the context of the Church’s universal mission that her advocacy of social communications can best be understood,” he said, referring to the Second Vatican Council’s Decree on the Mass Media.

“The primary concern of the Church has been, and continues to be, the eternal salvation of every human person,” said Leo.

He argued that it “it is only through contemplating Christ, the Incarnate Word, that we can not only recover a proper vision of God, but also come to understand the truth of humanity”.

Leo continued: “Naturally, all of this must be born in mind while discussing the implications of digital technology and the role of the Church in social communications.”

He emphasised the impact of technology “not only on the physical and intellectual development of children and young people, but also on their spiritual wellbeing”.

“Moreover, in light of the Church’s mission and the current misconceptions concerning God and the human person, digital literacy must also include an education in the truth about God and about humanity,” he said.

The AI conference – held the previous day at the Pontifical Urbaniana University with the theme “preserving human voices and faces – was a joint initiative of the Dicastery for Communications and the Dicastery for Culture and Education.

The prefect of the latter Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça said this theme, echoing the Pope’s message for the sixtieth World Day of Communications on 17 May, was “a programme – indeed a profession of faith in humanity – at a time when the boundaries between reality and simulation are becoming increasingly blurred”.

“Human beings can never be reduced to a statistic, a profile or an algorithm. What is human is always something more, a mystery, a call,” the cardinal said in his introductory address.

The conference included discussion of the positive and negative use of AI, which “can be engineered to be parasitic or pro-social” according to the activist and entrepreneur Eli Pariser.

“We need a positive vision of human sociality that co-exists and is supported by a world with powerful AI,” he said.

However, others emphasised the role of AI in deepening injustices. Professor Paola Ricaurte Quijano of the Department of Media and Digital Culture at Mexico’s Tecnológico de Monterrey warned that “the dominant model of AI development reproduces structural violence and inequality”, citing its neglect of marginalised communities.

“Who is harmed by AI, how, and whose lives, bodies, faces, voices and knowledge count?”

Bishop Paul Tighe, secretary of the Dicastery for Culture and Education, told Vatican News that the conference “reminded us that there’s nothing inevitable about the future of AI”.

He said it entails responsibilities that require user “to be attentive and intentional about what we’re doing in terms of our use of AI” and to think about “when to AI and when not to AI, just to keep alive our own agency”.

“Like Pope Francis did around the environment with Laudato si’, where he created a constituency of people who would be trying to hold politicians and others accountable for responsible use of our environment, as now move into the more subtle environment of the cognitive revolution, we think again about how we create a constituency of people who are able to hold the major operators responsible,” Bishop Tighe said.

In his address to participants on Friday, Pope Leo said the subject of AI was “particularly close to my heart and close to that of the Church”.

“It is my hope that these reflections lead to a restored trust in technology as a fruit of the genius of the human person in harmony with God’s creative design,” he said.

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