His Holiness the Woke Pope Questions the Morality of AI

I was raised Catholic, and I took to it pretty well for a while. I was an altar boy, did a couple of church hangouts, and even thought I was going to be a priest at some point. Then, I got a job. It wasn’t just that the only time I, a high schooler, could work was on weekends (so I pretty much stopped going to church). My new job exposed me to more people. Once outside of my little Catholic bubble, I started to see that lots of people believed lots of things, and they all sounded made up.

Leaving home to go to college eroded my belief in Catholicism even further. More people meant more competing points of view, meaning I was less likely to believe any of them. If anything, I learned that, not only was I not Catholic, I’m just not a very spiritual person (but more power to ya if ya are, as long as you’re not a jerk about it). All of that is to say, I didn’t think I would ever find myself pumping my fist in agreement about anything the Pope had to say, regardless of which one said it. But, baby, my fist is pumpin’!

Pope Leo XIV, the first Pope from the United States, has often been called the Woke Pope by his detractors, because he’s fairly liberal for a religious figure. He still doesn’t believe in gay marriage, but he supports immigrants and doesn’t like wars, nationalism, or JD Vance, so all the worst people yell about him when he doesn’t affirm their bloodlust. Now, he’s speaking out about AI, and y’all, this may surprise you, but he’s not a fan of the idea that the information spouted by AI models could be controlled by a handful of dickheads with God complexes.

“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,” Leo stated in an encyclical released yesterday (according to Deadline). He went on to write that, “It is not enough to invoke ethics in the abstract; robust legal frameworks, independent oversight, informed users and a political system that does not abdicate its responsibility are required. A more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few.”

Now look, it is not lost on me that a man who leads a church that has a set of morality rules which were created by whichever dudes got to write that version of the Bible, lamenting the idea of a select people having control over what is and isn’t moral is pretty rich. However, the White Sox fan has a point. AI is often presented as the sum of human consciousness, but it is constantly manipulated by those who control it, and, frankly, it cannot be trusted. Also, this repudiation by the Pope could lead to more of the public swaying the right way.

All the same people who want the Pope to have some good old-fashioned American bloodlust won’t be happy with this development, but they weren’t going to unless he said something to the effect of “Grok is my homie.” But I know that there’s a good chance that if I tell my mother that the Pope said AI is bad, she will agree, and there are a lot more people like her than the folks who currently control AI.