Discussion

• NewsMax.com Jim Thomas on x

  Interior Chief Hits Pope Leo for ‘Editorializing’ AI

• @tomekkorbak Tomek Korbak on x

  the Church looking at AI and saying “Babel” is scrutiny that frontier labs deserve. similarly, the Church has spent 2000 years saying human dignity precedes productivity, which is what many people will need to hear soon. those roles might require the gravitas of an ancient

• @firstadopter Tae Kim on x

  Three strikes, you're out Anthropic. 1. Deceitful about the lobster trap AI GPU story. 2. Deceitful about how ChatGPT ads work in their Super Bowl commercial. 3. Deceitful to the Pope, anthropomorphizing LLMs to garner support for regulation (conveniently positioning themselves

• @ch402 Chris Olah on x

  Remarks on Magnifica Humanitas

• @gldivittorio @gldivittorio on x

  Bar [image]

• @davidsacks David Sacks on x

  The Pope rightly warns that AI must serve human dignity, not become a tool of domination or exclusion.  But if we hand governments sweeping power over AI development in the name of safety, how do we prevent it from being used to censor, surveil, and control citizens — as Orwell f…

• @daniellemorrill Danielle Morrill on x

  What if every major religion was just a way to deal with scaling complexity

• @tomsteyer Tom Steyer on x

  Pope Leo is right: The AI era demands moral clarity and urgent action from leaders everywhere. We can't allow AI to be a technology that turns billionaires into trillionaires while putting millions out of work. Read my plan here: https://tomsteyer.com/...

• @deanwball Dean W. Ball on x

  Humanity is building machines that will be smarter than we are at things we care about, things in which take individual and collective pride, domains of thought we originally invented and discovered. This will enable incredible things, but no honest person can deny that this will

• @mikeisaac Rat King on x

  pope already winning over catholic dads... [image]

• @mattyglesias Matthew Yglesias on x

  It is not surprising to see that the Pope endorses a lot of superstitious mind/body dualism about artificial intelligence but it's still wrong, even as he is also raising a lot of good points about some of the risks at play.

• @deanwball Dean W. Ball on x

  Reading the encyclical, I am reminded that the Vatican is fundamentally a city-state on the continent of Europe, and that its elites, which of course include the Pope himself, cannot resist the myopic preoccupations of the Eurocrat.  This document would be much improved if it wer…

• @mikeisaac Rat King on x

  the monkey's paw in Peter Thiel's possession just curled one of its fingers

• @krishnanrohit Rohit on x

  Agree with Dean.  I skimmed the encyclical, it was quite low perplexity.  Hit the usual points: - We don't know how the technology works - Hopes and prayers - We should go slow so someone can do something - Dignity in work, AI doesn't have a soul - AI is biased - AI uses a lot of…

• @clubconcrave @clubconcrave on x

  Pope Leo quotes Gandalf in encyclical debut: “It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to [i…

• @ledermanharvey Harvey Lederman on x

  I disagree with important aspects of this and may discuss those later, but for today: this is a beautiful, humane document that speaks to challenges many of us are grappling with every day, without words or concepts for what we are feeling, or ideas about how to act. It's

• @deanwball Dean W. Ball on x

  The encyclical is Western academia/NGO “AI doesn't *really* think but it *is* racist” at its core, with little bits of tegmark/FLI talking points sprinkled incoherently on top.

• @roybahat Roy E. Bahat on x

  Wrote up a few thoughts on the Pope's encyclical on AI this morning. He frames less as about *the technology* as about who controls it. Cites the story of Nehemiah (which was new to this Jew, despite being in the Torah) about how the community organized to rebuild.

• @packym Packy McCormick on x

  Anthropic has secured the Mandate of Heaven.

• @creebeauvoir Cree on x

  the Pope quoting The Lord of the Rings in his first encyclical is going to do more for AI safety discourse than all the years of frontier lab governance posts [image]

• @leahmcelrath Leah McElrath on x

  Pope Leo quoting Tolkien in his encyclical on AI seems like a pointed reference for the tech oligarchs who have appropriated LOTR for their own ends.

• @sethbannon Seth Bannon on x

  The Pope's AI encyclical is a call on builders to deeply consider the impact of what they're building on civilization. “Technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it.” Therefore builders “bear a particular […

• @alexandermccoy4 Alexander McCoy on x

  I appreciated how @Pontifex inculcates against the “pro Tech vs Luddite” false binary, and makes clear the choice we face with A.I. is about governance and whose interests the technology serves. The whole thing is quite readable, & worth reading for yourself!

• @jbsdc Justin Slaughter on x

  Reading the new AI encyclical, I'm struck by how the Pope describes how we should achieve a common good for society. It's basically the most neoliberal vision of a common good conceivably possible: a culture of shared responsibility and aligned civil society. [image]

• @rnaudbertrand Arnaud Bertrand on x

  This is utterly ridiculous clickbait. What actually happened: the Pope released a 235-page encyclical saying AI needs to be “disarmed” and should NOT be used to “secure geopolitical or commercial dominance” ( https://www.vatican.va/...). Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei explicitly

• @pontifex Pope Leo Xiv on x

  In the era of #ArtificialIntelligence, when human dignity is threatened by new forms of dehumanization, ours is the pressing duty to remain profoundly human. We must lovingly safeguard the grandeur of humanity bestowed upon us and revealed in its fullness in Christ, the splendor

• @jj_poff Jeremiah Poff on x

  While none of us know the particulars, the Church forging a public facing relationship with a private company raises significant concerns that cannot easily be dismissed. At minimum, it gives the impression (true or false) that Anthropic is influencing papal teaching on AI.

• @aphysicist Aaron Slodov on x

  anthropic has been saying this for 5 years and still nothing. big snooze fest. the sad thing is how many normies will see this now. maybe they don't realize how much damage they're doing.

• @haydnbelfield Haydn Belfield on x

  A genuinely historic document. This will anchor a key wing of the global debate over advanced AI and how we choose to govern and use these vast new capabilities. We will be talking a lot about this over the next decade

• @pontifex Pope Leo Xiv on x

  Yet, a bright possibility emerges: that of building together, of transforming diversity into a resource and of making listening and dialogue the common ground upon which to cultivate justice and fraternity.

• @pontifex Pope Leo Xiv on x

  We must, then, avoid the “Babel syndrome,” namely the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak, a uniformity that neutralizes differences, and the pretense that a single language — even a digital one — can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data

• @pontifex Pope Leo Xiv on x

  Therefore, the primary choice is not between a “yes” or “no” to technology, but rather between constructing Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem; between a power that claims to dominate the heavens and a people who work together in the presence of God to rebuild the walls of fraternal

• @pontifex Pope Leo Xiv on x

  The Holy Spirit challenges us today regarding our relationship with technology and the ongoing digital revolution. Technology has the power to heal, connect, educate and protect our common home; but it can also divide, exclude and generate new forms of injustice.

• @pontifex Pope Leo Xiv on x

  In the abstract, technology in and of itself is not a solution to humanity's problems, just as, in and of itself, it is not inherently evil. In practice, however, technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise it, finance it, regulate it

• @pontifex Pope Leo Xiv on x

  Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together.  In Jesus Christ, this humanity in its grandeur becomes the Way, the Truth and the Life, opening…

• @markdistef Mark Di Stefano on x

  Now we're cooking [image]

• @catholicourtney Courtney Mares on x

  Anthropic's Chris Olah at the Vatican press conference to present Pope Leo XIV's encyclical on AI: “There is a real possibility that AI will displace human labor at very large scale. If that happens, supporting those displaced will be a moral imperative of historic proportions.” …

• @catholicsat @catholicsat on x

  Pope Leo XIV addresses the development of doctrine in his Encyclical on AI, and apologises for the Church's role in the slave trade: “In the development of her doctrine, the Church has gradually come to a deeper awareness of the gravity of these issues. It is true that past [imag…

• @guzik_paulina Paulina Guzik on x

  Christopher Olah, a Canadian billionaire businessman and researcher who co-founded AI giant Anthropic, sitting in the Synodal Hall and speaking next to Pope Leo said, closing his speech: “I'd like to close with a request. We need more of the world - religious communities, civil […

• @linchzhang Linch on x

  Significant fractions of Magnifica Humanitas, the Pope's new encyclical on AI, appears AI-generated or AI-assisted. Maybe Claude specifically, judging from the repeated references to 'genuinely." Kinda interesting!

• @guzik_paulina Paulina Guzik on x

  “Magnifica Humanitas,” Pope Leo's first encyclical on safeguarding a human person in the time of artificial intelligence is more than an encyclical on AI. It's a “chapeau bas” to humanity. A tribute to human intelligence, the way humans think and communicate, and a call to [video…

• @christopherhale Christopher Hale on x

  In leaked audio recordings, Peter Thiel revealed he told JD Vance to ignore Pope Leo XIV on moral issues, including the development of ethical AI. Calling Leo XIV the “woke American pope,” he also suggested the American pope was a tool of the Antichrist. Now, Pope Leo XIV is

• @benjamindekr Benjamin De Kraker on x

  They should release PopeGPT where we can chat with an AI Leo about this.

• @trbrtc Christiaan Triebert on bluesky

  “The pope is really doing the Lord's work here, and I say that as an atheist.  There are so few institutions left on planet Earth that have the gravitas, strength, communal network to take on this phenomenon, which is trying to become inevitable and superhuman.” www.nytimes.com/2…

• @chrisdillow Chris Dillow on bluesky

  The Pope's point that “use of AI is never a purely technical matter” (www.vatican.va/content/leo- ...), echoes longstanding leftist analysis, eg Braverman: “technology... is produced by the social relation represented by capital”.  The eclipse of heterodox thought was harmful to …

• @matthew.flux.community Matthew Sheffield on bluesky

  The pope becoming an insightful AI pundit is really a fascinating thing to see.  He's not buying the hype, but he's not being a hater either.  —  Magnifica Humanitas is the kind of work that only intellectually serious religions can make.  Reactionary Christianity makes human slo…

• @clarajeffery Clara Jeffery on bluesky

  42,000 words is a lot.  About as long as Shane Bauer's undercover prison guard piece.  Longer than most McPhee's pieces.  10K words longer than Hershey's Hiroshima.  Only Langewiesche's WTC cleanup piece—spanning 3 issues of the Atlantic—is longer. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/25/w...

• @matthew.flux.community Matthew Sheffield on bluesky

  3/3 Here is the encyclical, in which he explicitly argues that AI is the “res novae of our time.”  That Latin term means “new things,” FYI.  —  This is a really good document that avoids needless debate over LLM sentience (they have none), but also acknowledges the power of the t…

• @simonwillison.net Simon Willison on bluesky

  When I woke up this morning I didn't think I'd be spending a bunch of time today getting familiar with Catholic theology, but here we are.  Notes on Pope Leo XIV's encyclical on AI. simonwillison.net/2026/May/25/ ...

• @karenhao Karen Hao on bluesky

  The Pope has weighed in: AI isn't magic.  It's currently produced by a deeply exploitative, extractive supply chain.  It challenges human dignity; could fuel a new colonialism.  And among the greatest challenges of our time will be to redirect its path of development.  —  www.vat…

• @dieworkwear Derek Guy on bluesky

  An excerpt from Pope Leo XIV's encyclical this morning.  —  The full text can be read here:  —  www.vatican.va/content/leo-...  [images]

• @drsurekhadavies @drsurekhadavies on bluesky

  (Even someone in as different a field as) the Pope gets it: “In practice, however, technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it.”  —  www.vatican.va/content/leo-...

• r/nottheonion r on reddit

  Citing Gandalf, Pope Leo says we must “disarm” AI

• r/Christianity r on reddit

  Citing Gandalf, Pope Leo says we must “disarm” AI

• r/lotr r on reddit

  Citing Gandalf, Pope Leo says we must disarm AI - Ars Technica

• r/nottheonion r on reddit

  Citing Gandalf, Pope Leo says we must “disarm” AI

• r/OpenChristian r on reddit

  Pope Leo XIV signs Magnifica Humanitas, stating that “AI should be disarmed” in war an “instrument of domination”

• r/TrueAnon r on reddit

  The Popes manifesto on AI

• r/slatestarcodex r on reddit

  Magnifica Humanitas (Encyclical of Pope Leo XIV, 15 May 2026)