On May 25, Pope Leo XIV released Magnifica Humanitas — “Magnificent Humanity”— the first encyclical of his papacy, subtitled “On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.”
There’s something incongruous about turning to the Catholic Church for moral guidance on AI. This is an ancient institution with a deeply complex history, still reckoning with its own moral missteps and controversies over the centuries. But here we are, reading what the pope has to say about AI.
Of course, the Catholic Church has more adherents than Taylor Swift has fans — well over a billion people. So, the pope has a megaphone the rest of us will never touch. And Pope Leo is sincere, serious, and well informed. So what did he say?
Magnifica Humanitas frames AI as a new industrial revolution, capable of reordering work, wealth, and society at a foundational level. It warns that AI threatens human dignity, genuine relationships, and our shared grip on truth. It insists that AI is not a morally neutral tool—that design choices carry values, and it matters not just how a system is used but how it is built. It calls for stronger regulation, national and international. In addition, the encyclical offers a litany of well-worn worries: job insecurity, manipulation, privacy, bias, and autonomous weapons.
The encyclical’s verdict on AI is about as surprising as a Sunday preacher’s verdict on sin, which brings to mind the old joke about President Coolidge, who was famously terse. He returned from church one Sunday, and the following dialogue ensued with his wife.
Mrs. Coolidge: What did the preacher talk about?
Coolidge: Sin.
Mrs. Coolidge: What did he say?
Coolidge: He’s against it.
One image, though, rises above the litany. Leo returns repeatedly to the Tower of Babel, the biblical city whose people set out to build a tower “whose top reaches to the heavens” in a bid for their own power and dominion. It is a pointed choice.
The pursuit of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) — a single system meant to match every human ability — is in some sense the purest modern expression of that ambition. Leo’s warning is not that the project is impossible but that a civilization chasing godlike capability tends to forget the human beings standing at the base of the tower. The story’s ancient ending — scattering and confusion rather than ascent — is one the architects of AGI might not care to hear.
Nor is the document all lofty abstraction. For all its moral sweep, Magnifica Humanitas descends to specifics. It surveys the research on how early, unsupervised screen exposure harms children’s sleep, attention, and emotional development, and it condemns the “new forms of slavery” behind the technology: the data labelers paid a pittance, the children mining rare earths in dangerous conditions so that, as Leo puts it, computational flow may continue uninterrupted. These are not platitudes. They are concrete harms with names and victims.
Sadly, history suggests that even a forceful encyclical like Pope Leo’s changes little. Consider Humanae Vitae, Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical reaffirming the Church’s ban on artificial contraception. It was clear, it was forceful, and it was largely ignored, even by the faithful.
Within a generation, most Catholics in the developed world were using contraception anyway. Whatever one thinks of the teaching itself, the lesson about influence is the same: a pope can speak with total clarity and still watch the faithful go their own way. Moral clarity is easy; moral change is hard.
I know the feeling on a smaller scale: back in 2018 I published a Hippocratic Oath for AI practitioners, crafting a voluntary approach to ethical AI, but nobody noticed. Here is the uncomfortable truth: a prophet, whether a pope or Moses, can only lead us to the promised land if we are willing to make 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 refuse to walk.
Rather than admit this, we have constructed a narrative in which the villains are external. We rail against the tyranny of technology, and the tyranny of the technologists — the handful of men who, quite literally, can reshape national policy with a few phone calls.
Just last week, President Trump’s AI executive order was reportedly scuttled overnight after calls from Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and David Sacks. The outrage is understandable, but it is also a deflection. The deeper tyranny is the one we impose on ourselves, through our own choices.
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 the most powerful and least examined force shaping modern life. To resist it, to decline the default, is surprisingly difficult. We do not choose the surveilling, attention-harvesting, deepfake-generating version of the future in any single dramatic moment. We choose it a thousand times a day, one convenient click at a time.
Our failing recalls the war on drugs. However hard we go after the cartels, it is our own consumption that funds the enterprise and creates the incentive to manufacture more. The supply answers the demand. The same logic governs AI.
We blame the architects of these systems while our own behavior underwrites their business models. If we truly care about privacy, why do we hand our lives to Google and Meta? If we truly care about democracy, why do we let deepfakes proliferate unchallenged? We want to have our cake and to eat it too: the moral high ground and the frictionless feed, the indignation and the dopamine.
A better AI future will not be handed down to us. We will have to actively pursue it.
In the early 2000s, a popular adage was that we were drowning in data and starving for wisdom. Today, we are drowning in AI and starving for a moral compass. The pope has offered us one — but are we, the people, willing to go where he has pointed?
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