Pope Leo XIV went on X this morning to call out AI slop, urging people to support human artists instead. The American Pope wrote, “Algorithms lack the spark of humanity.”
Religion and artificial intelligence have also been a major topic of discussion this week, after the New York Times reported that Anthropic recently tried, and failed, to convince religious leaders that Claude could be a conscious being with moral status.
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As AI slop spreads, the Pope wrote that it’s more urgent than ever to embrace human artists.
“In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce. 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. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity. For this reason, the Church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity.”
The Pope hasn’t shied away from discussing the spiritual implications of artificial intelligence. In fact, from the moment he ascended to the papacy, AI has been central to his philosophy. The pontiff said he chose the name Leo in honor of the pope of the same name who shepherded the church through the upheaval of the Industrial Revolution.
And in his 42,300-word papal encyclical titled Magnifica Humanitas (“Magnificent Humanity”), Pope Leo directly called out Big Tech and the artificial intelligence industry.
“In some regions of the world, children and adolescents work in dangerous conditions, crushing the materials from which rare earth elements are extracted,” he wrote. “The bodies of these people are scarred, injured, and worn down so that computational flow may continue uninterruptedly…This reality deeply challenges the moral conscience of our time.”
In the New York Times report about Anthropic’s religious lobbying efforts, the publication of Magnifica Humanitas is a major plot point. Anthropic leaders were invited to the Vatican as part of the encyclical’s publication, according to the Times.
Christopher Olah, whom the paper describes as “one of Anthropic’s billionaire co-founders,” was reportedly disturbed that the Pope’s encyclical did not take the idea of AI consciousness seriously.
And now that the topic of AI and religion is back in the news, the Pope is once again calling out the AI industry, this time for AI slop.
AI slop is everywhere if you have eyes to see and ears to hear, but the AI slop-mongers now have a powerful enemy: The head of the Roman Catholic Church and the spiritual leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics.
