Soon after his election, Pope Leo XIV revealed why he chose his papal name, and he noted that the rise of artificial intelligence was on his mind:
I chose to take the name Leo XIV. There are different reasons for this, but mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution. In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice and labour.
The new pope’s comments should signal to every Catholic: if you aren’t preparing for AI and how it will impact the world, you should be.
It’s a cliché at this point to say that AI will change the world. Tech moguls and Silicon Valley visionaries proclaim the dawn of an AI-driven utopia with all the breathless wonder of the Second Coming: a world where disease is eradicated, poverty is solved, and human toil becomes a relic of the past. But here’s the thing: some of the promises of the AI promoters might actually happen. You don’t have to be Nostrodomus to predict that our world in ten years will look far different than it does today because of AI.
These changes challenge many people’s conception of what it means to be intelligent, or even human, and what man’s place is in a world dominated by machines. As people are driven to ask these questions, Catholics need to be on the forefront, ready with answers that diminish neither the dignity of man nor his technological achievements.
It’s a formidable endeavor: while the technological aspects of the AI revolution might be exciting, many of the philosophical views of its high priests are downright frightening. The AI movement is led by men who hold to presuppositions that directly contradict a Catholic understanding of human nature and our origins. If Catholics don’t challenge some of these presuppositions, we risk being overrun by a movement that on the surface promises a future far brighter than Catholicism but in reality embraces a deeply anti-human philosophy. If we simply ignore or condemn the movement outright—ignoring its promise to condemn its dangers—we risk being relegated to cultural irrelevance. Catholics bear the responsibility to be a sane, competent, and truthful part of the AI conversation.
So what is the proper, balanced approach? When grappling with AI, many people fall into one of two errors. The first is blurring the distinctions between man and machine, between the brain and the mind, thus catapulting AI to equality with humanity. Dazzled by AI’s ability to generate poetry or defeat chess grandmasters, AI optimists envision machines that are not just intelligent but truly conscious—essentially “human.” This error stems from a fully materialistic mindset and thus a fundamental misunderstanding of humanity’s unique nature. In Life 3.0, one of the most popular books on AI (endorsed by Elon Musk and recommended by Barrack Obama), MIT professor Max Tegmark presents a compelling argument for the technical potential of AI—alongside a horrifying view of reality. Tegmark is relentlessly materialistic: he sees man as no more than a collection of atoms, and so a lifelike robot, which is also a collection of atoms, can be defined as “life” just as reasonably as your child.
Yet as Pope John Paul II emphasized in Veritatis Splendor, human beings possess a dignity rooted in their creation “in the image and likeness of God” (Gen. 1:26), endowed with a rational—and immaterial—soul capable of knowing and loving the Creator. No matter how sophisticated and lifelike AI becomes, it remains a creation of human hands—code running on silicon, not a being with a soul breathed into him by God.
This overestimation isn’t merely a technical misstep; it’s a philosophical and spiritual crisis. It reduces humanity to a collection of algorithms, stripping away the transcendent dignity that defines us. It sees men as no more than electrical impulses controlling a physical body—without soul or spirit in any meaningful sense. Equating human consciousness with machine processes disavows the divine spark that animates us. This is the greatest societal danger AI poses: a materialist worldview that erases the line between creator and creation, human and machine.
Thankfully, most faithful Catholics are unlikely to fall into this trap. But there’s a second error we must guard against: underestimating AI’s capabilities and ignoring the profound impact it will have on how humanity views the world. It’s tempting to scoff at the notion of machines “thinking,” but AI is already mimicking human behavior in startling ways. Artificial neural networks, still in their infancy, can already “think” in ways similar to the human brain. AI can solve complex problems, reason through scenarios, and even convincingly and eerily simulate emotions. I’ve found that most people who dismiss AI’s capabilities haven’t spent much time with them. The release of ChatGPT 3.5 in November 2022 fundamentally changed the playing field: AI went from annoying bots and unfulfilled promises to a whole new—and somewhat unsettling—way that we interact with computers. These stunning advancements can’t be ignored or dismissed with a wave of the hand and a casual, “Well, AI will never be able to do [X].” On the contrary, AI likely will be able to do [X] and do it better than humans one day.
Avoiding these two errors is important for Catholics in order to get to the heart of the issues surrounding AI, which are often more philosophical than technological.
