Can Catholics as consumers drive a better AI future?

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ROME (OSV News) — As a small group of tech companies race to dominate the artificial intelligence era, much of the world has been left wondering whether ordinary people have any voice in the AI future that is being built.

But one AI ethics expert says the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics hold more influence than they realize, and that Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” could be the catalyst for a collective response.

Ron Ivey, a research fellow at Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program and founder of the Noesis Collaborative, a nonprofit focused on steering AI development toward human benefit, says Catholics, through collective action and as consumers, can help shape the AI landscape.

‘We have different ways of using AI’

“We do have alternatives. We do have different ways of using AI,” Ivey told OSV News in an interview following the promulgation of Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.”

“We make choices about how we buy and use these products.”

In “Magnifica Humanitas,” Pope Leo wrote, “It is difficult for parents by themselves to resist the influence of business models that monetize attention and time. Therefore, it is essential to form an alliance among policy-makers, educational institutions and families that is capable of concretely supporting adults in this task.”

For Ivey, it is exactly the kind of call to action the moment demands.

Catholics as a force for change

Ivey argues that AI companies need customers and Catholics represent a meaningful share of the global consumer base.

Artificial intelligence companies “have to develop customers and they have to develop business models, and they have to develop revenue sources,” Ivey said. “And we’re on the revenue source side. So we do have cards if we can work together and have collective action and have…

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