Pope Leo XIV has intervened in the debate over artificial intelligence, warning that the technology must be treated as a tool rather than a being with rights to preserve human dignity.
The pontiff used an address on the 60th anniversary of Nostra Aetate to warn against viewing AI as an alternative to humans, reports The Wall Street Journal.
“If conceived as an alternative to humans,” the Pope said, the technology “can gravely violate their infinite dignity and neutralise their fundamental responsibilities.”
Divine creation
In a subsequent message to the Builders AI Forum at the Pontifical Gregorian University on 7 November, the Pope clarified the theological distinction between human and machine intelligence. He wrote that AI, “like all human invention, springs from the creative capacity that God has entrusted to us.”
He further defined the technology as “a form of participation in the divine act of creation” but emphasised it is not a divine act of creation itself.
The Pope described AI as “one of the rerum novarum, or ‘new things,’ of our time.”
This reference invokes the transformative 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum by his predecessor Pope Leo XIII, which addressed the societal challenges of the Industrial Revolution. By using this terminology, the pontiff frames the current technological shift as a comparable historical turning point requiring moral scrutiny.
