Pope Leo XIV: Unchecked AI Development Risks Building a New Tower of Babel

Pope Leo XIV: Unchecked AI Development Risks Building a New Tower of Babel | PCMag

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Pope Leo XIV signs the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas at the Vatican. ( Credit: Simone Risoluti - Vatican Media via Vatican Pool/Getty Images)

The first American pope used his first encyclical to express his profound concerns about a topic that increasingly dominates American political and technological discourse: the rise of AI.In Magnifica Humanitas (Latin for “Magnificent Humanity”), Pope Leo XIV rejects the notion that AI represents salvation or damnation for humanity, instead describing it as “a valuable tool that requires vigilance” lest it undermine human autonomy, dignity, and worth.Leo, born Robert Francis Prevost in Chicago in 1955, anchors this essay on the notion of humanity choosing between two stories from the Old Testament: building the Tower of Babel as an act of arrogance versus rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem as an act of cooperation. You May Also Like

Writes Leo: “Therefore, the primary choice is not between a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to technology, but rather between constructing Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem; between a power that claims to dominate the heavens and a people who work together in the presence of God to rebuild the walls of fraternal coexistence.”The document then unpacks how considering the costs of this change builds on centuries of Catholic social-justice teachings, in particular Leo’s namesake predecessor, Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum (“Of New Things”), which upheld the rights of working people while rejecting state socialism.The Pope writes that he sees AI models as “not simply a tool” but also fundamentally incapable of reaching human-level sentience. “They may imitate language, behavior, and analytical skills, or even simulate empathy and understanding, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational, and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom,” he says.The phrase “artificial general intelligence” does not appear in this lengthy work—almost 38,000 words before footnotes—but the Pope seems very much unsold on the notion of AGI being just a few years away and is definitely wary of “transhumanist” and “posthumanist” notions of how AI will enable people to transcend human limits.A List of AI AnxietiesHe does, however, express grave concerns about what today’s much less powerful AI chatbots are already doing with their impressive imitations of human discourse. “The artificial imitation of positive human communication—words of advice, empathy, friendship, and even love—can be engaging and at times genuinely helpful,” he writes. “However, for less discerning users, it can also be misleading, creating the illusion of a relationship with a real personal subject.” (See also the problem of AI disinformation.)Leo also warns of the potential for AI to engage in algorithmic discrimination. That was a policy focus for the Biden administration that the Trump administration now seems to regard as a distraction raised by meddlesome states.As the Pope writes: “If such kinds of data are used to make decisions affecting concrete opportunities—such as access to credit, employment or essential services—there is a risk of undermining freedom and discriminating against the most vulnerable.”

(Credit: Alberto PIZZOLI / AFP via Getty Images)

The essay spends some time on how vulnerable tech’s youngest users can be to digital distractions: “In recent years, psychological and psychiatric literature has documented with growing insistence how early and unsupervised exposure to digital devices and social media can negatively impact sleep, attention span, control of emotions and relationships, especially during the most vulnerable stages of life, at times with tragic consequences.”Leo also objects to all the energy used by AI data centers, especially when that electricity comes from burning fossil fuels. Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, in particular, should re-read this sentence before they celebrate building more giant, gas-powered data centers: “Current AI systems require enormous amounts of energy and water, significantly influencing carbon dioxide emissions, and place heavy demands on natural resources.”And the Pope nods to the underpaid work done by people far away from the offices of AI startups: “Millions of people engaged in essential yet largely unseen activities, such as data labeling, model training and content moderation, often involving disturbing material” as well as the worse-off workers overseas with the “even harsher work of extracting the resources required for the production of the devices and microprocessors on which AI depends.”A subsequent discussion of the role of technology in abetting human trafficking includes an unprecedented personal apology from the Pope for “the delay with which both society and the Church came to denounce the scourge of slavery.”The Pope takes particularly strong exception to using AI to automate military combat, writing that it “can only bring about conflict more quickly and render it more impersonal, lowering the threshold for resorting to violence, transforming defense into threat prediction and thus reducing victims to data.”An Unusual Guest at the Vatican

Pope Leo and Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah (Credit: Alberto PIZZOLI / AFP via Getty Images)

The Vatican event at which the Pope presented his encyclical featured a guest from a company that has publicly resisted government pressure to build autonomous military systems: Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah. That firm refused to remove safety measures from certain AI systems as requested by the Department of Defense. The Pentagon then labeled it a supply chain risk, leading Anthropic to sue.On Friday, the National Catholic Reporter covered Anthropic’s engagement with the church, including soliciting advice from a few Catholic theologians for the “constitution” governing its Claude series of AI models.  Recommended by Our Editors 'Technology-Facilitated Harm': How AI Chatbots Are Failing Abuse Survivors Bill Gates Says Humans Won't Be Needed for 'Most Things' in the AI Age Stop Telling AI Your Secrets: 10 Chatbot Habits You Should Quit Today

The Trump administration might not appreciate Anthropic’s inclusion in the Vatican event. It might be even less happy about Pope Leo’s call to “disarm” AI—rejecting the idea that AI must be “a race for ever more powerful algorithms and larger datasets, driven by the desire to secure geopolitical or commercial dominance," a foundational belief of the White House’s AI Action Plan.Pope Leo goes into exceptional depth in discussing how AI threatens the “dignity of work,” writing that AI “frequently forces workers to adapt to the speed and demands of machines, rather than machines being designed to support those who work,” and can “subject them to automated surveillance and relegate them to rigid and repetitive tasks.”He writes later: “The pursuit of greater profits cannot justify choices that systematically sacrifice jobs, because the human person is an end, not a means, and the economic order must remain subordinate to human dignity and the common good.”It’s easy to read that as an implicit critique of Meta, which last week fired about a tenth of its employees while requiring many remaining workers to accept having their keyboard and mouse activity logged for AI-training purposes.   (Zuckerberg visited Leo’s predecessor Pope Francis in Rome in 2016, when he presented the pontiff with a model of the Aquila broadband drone that the then-Facebook scrapped two years later. Whatever advice Francis might have given the founder about the dignity of work then does not seem to have landed.) Now What?Many of Pope Leo’s recommendations are the sort of bu