Pope Warns Against AI Creating "New Forms of Dehumanization"

­In one of religion’s biggest salvos yet against artificial intelligence, the Pope recently warned about the potential for “new forms of dehumanization.”

This represents significant escalation from the Pontiff’s last AI missive, where Pope Leo warned against “the temptation to prepare homilies with Artificial Intelligence”. AI “will never be able to share faith,” he said.

But that’s not dissimilar to education’s ongoing war against AI cheating. In a recent poll from the Pew Research Center, more than half of the student respondents admitting using AI tools for help with their schoolwork, while 10% owned up to using them “with all or most of their schoolwork.”

Significant research has blamed AI for students’ reduced capacity for critical thinking, and more directly, their writing abilities. In some cases, AI has even been held accountable for declining national literary rates.

So the Pope encouraging the faithful to literally think for themselves was fairly self-evident.

But the Pontiff’s latest AI warning goes beyond scholastic cheating and creative writing abilities. The Pope’s new encyclical (a Vatican document that addresses major moral or social issues), Magnifica Humanitas, notes that:

“Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together.”

Of course, this refers to humanity’s pride and hubris, with the implication being that if AI’s development is concentrated in either a few companies or nations, that “a more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few”.

One could easily point the finger at China’s DeepSeek chatbot, which is trained on the People’s Republic’s more…sanitized version of history. But the Pope is less concerned with the left-right divide and international geopolitics than bringing as many nations to the table as possible.

For better or worse, the Pope’s main objective is ensuring that AI’s development is spread across all interested parties and that its shared ethical standards are “rooted in social justice” and environmentally sound.