Pope Leo XIV is pitching a new kind of holy alliance: the Catholic Church and artists teaming up to keep human creativity from being drowned out by artificial intelligence. In a message posted on X on Friday, the pontiff argued that it's now "urgent" to tell the difference between art made by people and content spit out by machines, saying algorithms "lack the spark of humanity," per TechCrunch. He noted: "There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others."
The pope has become one of the more prominent global voices urging guardrails on AI. He has called for the technology to be "disarmed" so it doesn't dominate people's lives, released an encyclical on AI in May, and recently warned about a looming "paradise of machines." "This is a problem that, I think, we need to sit down and talk about," the American pope said earlier in the week, per the AP. "We can't just sit back and pretend nothing is going to happen."
That doesn't mean that the pope is freaking out about AI, either. "If someone were to ask me 'Am I in panic mode?' No, I'm not. I sleep at night," Leo said. "I do think that the concerns raised by many of the experts, specialists in AI should be taken seriously." The pope's comments landed the same week that the New York Times reported that AI company Anthropic has consulted religious scholars while training its Claude chatbot.
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