Pope Leo calls for alignment of AI systems with human rights, dignity, grace, and liberty.
In his first encyclical letter—a public message to the faithful on doctrine, spiritual practice, and morality—Pope Leo XIV focuses on the ways in which artificial intelligence imperils the human quest for an ethical way of being.
‘Magnifica Humanitas’ calls for AI to be “disarmed”, to avoid harming innocents and lowering the barriers that stand in the way of the gravest atrocities.
Beyond any specifically religious consideration, ’Magnifica Humanitas’ is a call to conscience, to remember that humanity is a miraculous convergence that makes virtue, decency, and discovery possible, and so we must protect and honor that gift.
This call to conscience is driven by structural concerns about our moral condition:
- AI can cause harm, so safeguards should be put in place to prevent harm.
- By deceiving us into thinking we are interacting with intelligence, AI systems are effectively designed to deny us access to verifiable truth.
- This reduces our clarity of mind and heart, and undermines our personal moral sovereignty.
- Displacement or suppression of human imagination and art further removes humanity from our experience, putting at risk the very idea of human rights, dignity, and moral responsibility.
In a section on ‘What must not be lost’, Pope Leo calls for honoring “The limit, the heart and the grandeur of the human person.” By ‘limit’, he means that human beings should not aspire to have god-like qualities, and that attempts to exercise such power ultimately lead to widespread harm and suffering.
Humanity does good by bringing the more intimate qualities of the moral person into our shared spaces, and so:
“entrusting an algorithm in practice with the power to select who is worthy or not, without anyone bearing responsibility for that judgment, is to hand over the task of redefining the boundaries of human possibilities… In this way, injustice goes unnoticed, and compassion, mercy and forgiveness — understood not as mere appearances but as real political actions — gradually disappear from view.”
Freedom, learning, imagination, and justice, are all at stake.
For this reason, the letter notes:
we cannot consider AI to be morally neutral. In reality, every technical tool embodies choices and priorities through what it measures, ignores and optimizes, and how it classifies people and situations. If a system is designed or used in a way that treats some lives as less worthy, or excludes them without the possibility of appeal, then it is not merely a tool “to be used well,” since it has already introduced criteria that contradict the inalienable dignity of the human person.
This has implications for how AI systems are designed, operated, regulated, and promoted. It implicates schools and education policy in the project of shaping our collective moral future, our opportunity to enter the world as free moral beings, capable of choosing good, even when conditions make that difficult.
AI without clear lines of human accountability is not in the interests of humankind, and poses a threat to the rights, dignity, and freedom of future generations.
All techologies must be used “on the basis of a fundamental principle, namely that truth is a common good and not the property of those with power or influence.” This leads to the call for “an ecology of communication,” a shared project of conscious responsibility for the human impact of communications technologies.
- Do they bury evidence and truth behind a flood of “generated” claims of fact?
- Do they convert a search for insight into a quest for endless capital gain, without consideration for whether the product is delivering real value to real people?
- Do they obstruct our ability to treat others with kindness, grace, and decency, or expect that others will do so for them?
An ecology of communication entails:
- “establishing norms so that the decision-making behind content selection and its development becomes more transparent and protects personal data”;
- “a strengthening of intermediary organizations, serious journalism and forums for debate, where reasoned argumentation and verification carry greater weight than immediate reaction”;
- “cultivating both the capacity to connect and synthesize knowledge in order to grasp complexity, and the skills necessary to verify facts.”
