Critics of AI-generated art have powerful new allies in the Pope, the Bishop of Rome, the Primatus Italiae, and the Supreme Pontiff of the Church of All Nations.
As part of his call to protect human art from the invasion of AI, Pope Leo XIV elaborated in a post on Friday morning about the spiritual differences between art created by humans and art created by machines.
“In this age of artificial intelligence, there is an urgent need to distinguish between human art and machine-generated art,” writes Servas Servorum Dei. “Between art and what a machine can produce through statistical calculations based on millions of images created by others, there is an ontological difference before an aesthetic difference. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity.”
Pope Leo XIV provided a more detailed statement on AI in an encyclical in May, emphasizing the importance of human dignity in an increasingly automated world.
But that hasn’t stopped AI companies from lobbying the Pope. According to a recent New York Times report, Anthropic has been actively lobbying the Vatican to reconsider its position on non-human consciousness, but apparently with little success.
