Pope Leo issues harrowing warning about AI in first major teaching

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Pope Leo has waded into the debate over artificial intelligence to call for AI to be ‘disarmed’, calling out the ‘culture of power’ around this new technology in his encyclical.

It’s the public letter the Pope writes, originally to his bishops but over time it’s become more of a wider announcement of his stance on matters, and the first one of Pope Leo’s time in the Vatican has tackled a number of topics including AI, slavery and war.

Speaking about the dangers of artificial intelligence and how it needs to be ‘disarmed’, Pope Leo said: “The word is strong, I know, but deliberately chosen because this moment needs words capable of attracting attention.”

He wrote that while ‘technology should not be considered, in itself, as a force antagonistic to humanity’ since it has improved people’s lives over the years, he warned that waves of human progress ‘revealed the ambiguity of tools that can cause harm when not oriented toward the good’.

Warning that AI and its power were largely concentrated in ‘private’ hands, Pope Leo said that ‘makes it even more challenging to discern, govern and direct such power toward the common good’.

The Pope said AI needed to be ‘disarmed’ (ALBERTO PIZZOLI/AFP via Getty Images)

“Disarming AI means freeing it from the mentality of ‘armed’ competition, which today is not limited simply to the military context, but is also an economic and cognitive phenomenon,” he further wrote.

“This entails a race for ever more powerful algorithms and larger datasets, driven by the desire to secure geopolitical or commercial dominance.

“To disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern. To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity.

“It means freeing technology from monopolistic control and opening it to discussion and debate, therefore making it human-friendly and restoring it to the plurality of human cultures and ways of life.

“Our task today is not only…

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