Pope Leo builds the Church’s case that an A.I. output is not art

Pope Leo XIV told artists and curators at the Vatican last Friday that what machines generate differs from art before any question of how it looks.

“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,” Leo said in an address published by the Holy See Press Office.

The remark condensed an argument Leo has developed across three major statements this year: a January message on communications, his first encyclical in May and the October 2 address, which cites the encyclical by paragraph.

His January 24 message for the World Day of Social Communications warned against “settling for artificial statistical compilations.” The encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” calls machine learning “a form of statistical adaptation based on data and feedback, which can be very effective, but does not imply inner growth.”

The January message named the art world directly.

“In recent years, artificial intelligence systems have increasingly taken control of the production of texts, music and videos,” Leo wrote. “This puts much of the human creative industry at risk of being dismantled and replaced with the label ‘Powered by A.I.,’ turning people into passive consumers of unthought thoughts and anonymous products without ownership or love.”

“Meanwhile, the masterpieces of human genius in the fields of music, art and literature are being reduced to mere training grounds for machines,” he wrote.

The message said A.I.-generated content should be “clearly marked and distinguished from content created by humans.”

It said “the authorship and sovereign ownership of the work of journalists and other content creators must be protected,” and it listed artists among the groups that must help shape A.I. governance.

The October 2 audience at the Apostolic Palace was for participants in “The Art of Possibility: Weaving Together,” a meeting promoted by the Vatican’s Dicastery for Culture and Education. The Holy See Press Office did not publish a list of the artists and curators who attended.

Leo thanked them for their work on the Holy See’s Venice Biennale pavilions. These include the 2024 pavilion inside the women’s prison on the island of Giudecca, which Pope Francis visited.

"For my part, I also say to you today: the Church needs you," Leo said Friday. "This is especially true in this age of artificial intelligence, in which we urgently need to distinguish human art from what is produced by machines."

They also include this year’s “The Ear is the Eye of the Soul,” curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Ben Vickers, which runs through November 22, Vatican News reported.

“Algorithms lack the spark of the human,” Leo told them.

That paragraph names three works it says have taken on “an almost prophetic significance.” It reads Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony “as a desire for unity,” Picasso’s Guernica “as a denunciation of dehumanization” and the film Schindler’s List “as a call not to consign the past to oblivion.”

“So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships, and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean,” Leo wrote.

The same section of the encyclical—a formal pastoral letter written by the pope to provide official teaching, reflection and guidance on contemporary matters—says such systems “do not understand what they produce.”

Paragraph 111 compares software developers to artists.

“Just as the creator of an artistic or literary work must consider the values it conveys, so developers are called to embed values in their projects with due seriousness,” it says.

Leo’s October 2 warning against “homogenization” also traces to the encyclical, which opens by describing the Tower of Babel as a project that “chose homogenization over communion.”

It warns against “the pretense that a single language, even a digital one, can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance.”

The Rev. Antonio Spadaro, undersecretary of the Dicastery for Culture and Education, wrote in Commonweal in June that art surfaces throughout the encyclical “never merely as ornament.” His dicastery promoted the October 2 meeting.

Spadaro wrote that the French and Italian editions of the encyclical describe restraint in using A.I. as a form of fasting.

Leo presented the encyclical himself on May 25 in the Vatican’s Synod Hall. There he called for A.I. to be “disarmed,” likening it to the Church’s decades of work on nuclear disarmament, his prepared remarks show.

“Today we find ourselves facing a transformation of similar magnitude, with perhaps even greater consequences,” Leo said. He was comparing A.I. to the industrial upheaval that prompted Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical “Rerum Novarum.”

He thanked Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah by name. He said that “in the name of the Church” he accepted Olah’s “invitation to walk together.”

Olah’s prepared remarks described A.I. models as built from human expression.

"They are grown, on a structure modeled after the brain, on an enormous inheritance of human thought and speech," Olah said. He said the models "are made from us, from our words."

Olah said Anthropic’s researchers “find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief, and unease.” He added, “I don’t know what that means, but I think it warrants ongoing discernment.”

Days before the launch, Olah read an advance copy of the encyclical and proposed pulling Anthropic out of the event over its position on machine consciousness, The New York Times reported, citing a Vatican organizer.

The encyclical also addresses how companies build values into their models.

“We cannot be satisfied with merely calling for the moralization of machines — the so-called ‘alignment’ of A.I. with human values — without also having the courage to insist on a further condition: the possibility of openly discussing the ethical frameworks involved and subjecting them to shared standards of social justice,” Leo wrote in paragraph 107.

“Otherwise, those who control A.I. will impose their own moral vision, which will become the invisible infrastructure of these systems. A more moral A.I. is not enough if that morality is determined by a few.”

Anthropic released an 84-page “constitution” for its Claude models in January, written primarily by company philosopher Amanda Askell, the Times reported. The company is preparing an updated version, the Times reported, citing two people familiar with the plans. Anthropic declined to comment to the Times on any update.

Olah told the Times that Anthropic would not use the encyclical specifically to further train Claude.

Leo’s argument also overlaps with a broader critique of the technological systems that increasingly mediate cultural institutions.

Urgent Matter previously reported on a paper in the journal Horizons by independent scholar Matthew Hale. Hale argues that two habits of thought, “conceptualism” and “instrumental reason,” reinforce each other and hollow out institutions.

Conceptualism treats abstract concepts as reality. Hale draws it from Bernard Lonergan, a Jesuit theologian.

Steven Umbrello, a research fellow at the University of Turin, tied paragraph 99 to Lonergan’s analysis of human knowing in a May 25 reading of the encyclical for the Catholic publisher Ascension.

Hale told Urgent Matter that machine learning is technology built almost entirely for conceptualization.

Instrumental reason, the second habit, treats everything as a tool. Hale said that left unchecked, it reduces people to tools as well.

The encyclical’s chapter on technology describes a “technocratic paradigm” that lets “the logic of efficiency, control and profit alone” shape decisions, reducing “human beings to mere cogs.” It warns that people risk being “evaluated principally according to the outcomes they produce.”

Elsewhere it calls “particularly insidious” the idea “that every person must earn or justify his or her own worth.”

Hale’s framework, as Urgent Matter reported, helps explain why museums cut curators and educators while citing attendance. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston answered criticism of its 33 layoffs in January with attendance figures.

Leo closed his October 2 remarks on cultural workers by quoting his September 25 address to UNESCO in Paris.

“Promoting education, science and culture is impossible without at the same time improving the lives of men and women who are engaged in these activities,” he said.

Urgent Matter is reader-supported. Please consider subscribing to support independent arts journalism.