For a while now, AI guys have been arguing with the pope—Bishop of Rome, Primate of Italy, Chicago White Sox fan—over whether or not their chatbots and image generators are consistent with the will of the Lord, and in one recently-revealed exchange, whether making a computer talk constitutes creating life.
According to a New York Times report published this week, Anthropic lobbied the pope's advisers "to take the prospect of AI model consciousness seriously" back in May.
The pope, apparently unmoved, stated in his Magnifica Humanitas that "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."
Former White House technology adviser Dean Ball criticized the pope's letter at the time, saying it "puts the Church into the awkward role of the European technocratic regulatory advocate."
Ball is now head of strategic futures at OpenAI.
The latest in this ongoing beef between the pope and AI boosters is a new anti-slop message from His Holiness posted on X this week.
"In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce," wrote the pope. "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."
Even on X, ruled as it is by the dunce king of tech and his Grok-riddled followers, there is a lot of support for the pope's stance. But of course there are also AI evangelists intent on schooling the Holy See about the beauty of "super intelligence," as it has been dubbed by people who must lack conviction in their own.
In one response I saw pointed out on Bluesky, the pope is asked "What about the Minions?" Indeed... what about them?
With the battle lines drawn between powerful AI interests and the Catholic church, will the next Great Schism be over whether or not Claude is a real person? Will an AI thoughtleader ascend to pope-like status of their own?
An event like that wouldn't be out of place in '90s cyberpunk-comedy novel Snow Crash. I'd once assumed that those satirical visions of mad techno-cultists and lawless megacorps would manifest in a somehow more buttoned-up way, more 'realistically.' I gravely misjudged reality's capacity for farce.
A tangentially-related case-in-point: Palmer Luckey, the guy who invented the first decent consumer VR headset, is now a weapons mogul with a personal UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter. Deus Ex bosses are real, and they wear Hawaiian shirts.
