On May 25, Pope Leo XIV was released Magnifica Humanitas — “Wonderful Personality”—the first book of his pontificate, subtitled “For the Defense of the Human Person in the Age of Improper Intelligence.”
There is something wrong with turning to the Catholic Church for moral guidance in AI. This is an ancient institution with a very complicated history, which is full of moral errors and conflicts over the centuries. But here we are, reading what the pope has to say about AI.
Yes, the Catholic Church has more followers than Taylor Swift – over a billion people. So, the pope has a megaphone that the rest of us will not touch. And Papa Leo is honest, sincere, and well-informed. So what did he say?
Magnifica Humanitas it positions AI as a new industrial revolution, capable of reshaping work, wealth, and society at the grassroots level. It warns that AI threatens human dignity, real relationships, and our collective grasp of reality. It emphasizes that AI is not a morally neutral tool—that design choices carry values, and that it matters not just how the system is used but how it is built. It calls for stricter regulation, nationally and internationally. In addition, the encyclical offers a list of well-worn concerns: job insecurity, fraud, privacy, bias, and private weapons.
The Encyclical’s decision about AI is about as surprising as a Sunday preacher’s decision about sin, reminiscent of an old joke about President Coolidge, who was famous. He returned from church one Sunday, and a conversation with his wife ensued.
Mrs. Coolidge: What was the preacher talking about?
Coolidge: A sin.
Mrs. Coolidge: What did he say?
Coolidge: You are against it.
One image, however, rises above the litany. Leo returns again and again to the Tower of Babel, the biblical city whose people set out to build a tower “whose top reaches to the heavens” in order to claim power and rule. It’s a straightforward decision.
The pursuit of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) – a single system intended to match all human capabilities – is in some ways the purest modern expression of that ambition. Leo’s warning is not that the project is impossible but that civilizations chasing god-like ability tend to forget the people at the bottom of the tower. The ancient end of the story – disintegration and confusion instead of escalation – is one of the properties of AGI that they may not care to help.
And the document is not all that high. Throughout its moral history, Magnifica Humanitas it comes down to the details. It examines research on how unsupervised premature screen exposure harms children’s sleep, attention, and emotional development, and criticizes the “new forms of slavery” behind technology: data labels pay less, children dig strange worlds in dangerous situations so that, as Leo puts it, the computer flow can continue without interruption. These are not speeches. They are physical injuries with names and victims.
Sadly, history suggests that even a powerful book like Pope Leo’s changes slowly. Think about it Humanae VitaePaul VI’s 1968 letter confirming the Church’s ban on artificial contraception. It was obvious, it was powerful, and it was largely ignored, even by the faithful.
Within a generation, most Catholics in developed countries were using contraceptives anyway. Regardless of what one thinks of the teaching itself, the lesson about influence is the same: the pope can speak clearly and watch the faithful go their own way. Moral clarity is simple; Behavioral change is difficult.
I know the feeling to a small degree: back in 2018 I published the Hippocratic Oath for AI practitioners, I made a voluntary way of AI behavior, but no one noticed. Here is the unpleasant truth: a prophet, whether it is the pope or Moses, can only lead us to the promised land if we are willing to take the journey. The failure of moral words is not proof that the words are wrong. It is proof that words alone cannot carry people who do not want to leave.
Rather than admit this, we create a story where the villains are outside. We resist the tyranny of technology, and the tyranny of technocrats — a handful of men, literally, who can reshape national policy with a few phone calls.
Just last week, President Trump’s AI executive order was reportedly disrupted overnight after calls from Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and David Sacks. Anger is understandable, but it’s also deviant. The deepest tyranny is what we inflict on ourselves, by choice.
In his brilliant New York Times essay “The Tyranny of Convenience,” Columbia law professor Tim Wu named the culprit years ago. He argued that convenience has become a powerful and under-explored force shaping modern life. Resisting it, rejecting the established, is incredibly difficult. We’re not opting for a surveilled, attention-grabbing, deepfake-producing version of the future for any freaking moment. We choose it a thousand times a day, one click at a time.
Our failure is reminiscent of the war on drugs. No matter how hard we go after the cartels, it is our own consumption that supports business and creates an incentive for more production. Supply responds to demand. The same logic governs AI.
We blame the designers of these programs while our behavior emphasizes their business models. If we really care about privacy, why give our lives to Google and Meta? If we really care about democracy, why do we allow deepfakes to proliferate unchallenged? We want to have our cake and eat it too: the moral high ground and conflict-free eating, anger and dopamine.
A better future for AI will not be given to us. We will have to pursue it diligently.
In the early 2000s, a popular saying was that we were drowning in knowledge and hungry for wisdom. Today, we are drowning in AI and hungry for a moral compass. The pope has given us one – but are we, the people, willing to go where he pointed?
