When AI lies about Jews: A response to the pope’s encyclical – Israel & Jewish News

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May 29, 2026
/ JNS
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Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical on artificial intelligence, Magnifica Humanitas, warns that artificial intelligence is supercharging disinformation and fueling what he calls “hybrid” conflicts—wars fought as much in the realm of images and narratives as on physical battlefields. For many Jews, that description is not a thought experiment. It is daily life online.

Ask any Jewish student who has opened a phone after a flare‑up in the Middle East. AI‑curated feeds deliver a torrent of content about Israel and the Gaza Strip, much of it emotionally charged, context‑free and sometimes flatly false. Generative tools can now fabricate images and “eyewitness” accounts that never happened, while recommendation algorithms quietly learn that outrage about Jews and Israel is a reliable way to keep users engaged.

The pope is right to worry about what happens to truth when machines learn to tell convincing lies faster than humans can correct them. But for Jews, disinformation is not only a philosophical or civic problem. It is a security problem rooted in centuries of experience with blood libels, forged texts and conspiracy theories that have repeatedly spilled into violence.

Recent research bears this out.

A 2025 report by the Anti‑Defamation League found that some of the leading AI models show measurable anti‑Jewish and anti‑Israel bias, including generating classic antisemitic tropes and skewed accounts of the Israel‑Hamas conflict. Other studies describe “digital antisemitism” as the largest propaganda machine targeting Jews since the Holocaust, with social media and AI working together to push users toward increasingly extreme anti‑Israel and anti‑Jewish content. For example,…

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