Pope Leo XIV on Friday urged the Catholic Church to unite with artists to protect human creativity in the age of AI-generated content.
According to ITNA, the pope, who had previously pointed to the potential benefits of the technology, once again warned that advances in artificial intelligence should not come at the cost of human dignity.
His latest remarks were published just days after The New York Times reported on Anthropic’s efforts to consult religious scholars to inject religious values into the Claude AI model.
According to the report, Leo XIV wrote in a post on the social network X that in the age of AI, distinguishing between human art and what machines produce has become critically necessary.
He emphasized that before any aesthetic distinction, there is a fundamental ontological difference between genuine art and the product of machines’ statistical computations based on millions of images created by others. In his words, “algorithms lack the spark of humanity.”
The pope also announced that the Catholic Church seeks an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to, in his words, “protect our humanity.”
Background on the pope’s stance on artificial intelligence
Leo XIV has previously repeatedly warned about the effects of this technology on humanity. In his first official papal decree he stressed the need to “disarm” AI to prevent its domination over humans. Also in May, he established a Vatican commission to coordinate the Church’s policies and activities in the field of artificial intelligence.
Last week the pope also spoke of the formation of a “paradise of machines” that could encompass and replace humans’ everyday lives. Speaking to reporters, he said recent warnings from AI researchers must be taken seriously and one cannot sit idly by waiting for something to happen.
Before Leo XIV, the late Pope Francis had also warned that artificial intelligence could reduce humans to a set of data.