Pope Leo XIV tells AI: you have no soul — and the Vatican is putting the receipts on the blockchain of morality

Pope Leo XIV said Friday that there is an "ontological difference" between human art and what machines generate, and that the Church wants to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to "safeguard our humanity." Posting on X, where he has previously shared warnings about artificial intelligence, the pope wrote: "There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity." "Ontological" refers to what something fundamentally is, as opposed to how it appears. His point is that a painting by a person and an image produced by a model can look alike and still be entirely different things, with the gap existing prior to any question of style. A machine, he wrote, operates through "statistical calculation" built on millions of images made by others; AI image generators are trained on large collections of existing pictures, learn which patterns tend to appear together and predict what a new image should look like, with no hand and no lived experience behind the result. The dispute he referenced is the fight over "AI slop," low-quality AI content produced in bulk that Merriam-Webster named its 2025 word of the year.

The statement is not isolated. In May, Pope Leo released his first encyclical, a formal teaching letter to the whole Church, titled Magnifica Humanitas, focused on protecting people in the age of AI. It argued that technology is never neutral and that data should be treated as a common good. The same month, the Vatican established an AI commission spanning seven Vatican bodies to coordinate how the Holy See's offices approach artificial intelligence, including internal policies on its use. On Sept. 25 the pope told French authorities at the Élysée Palace in Paris that he found it indispensable to make AI the subject of his first encyclical, and warned that science and technology without guidance from conscience can steer people away from the good.

A complication has emerged. In April, Pangram Labs' AI-detection extension flagged several posts from the pope's own X account as likely AI-generated; the Vatican did not respond to requests for comment at the time. Detectors have produced well-known false positives, including a 2024 ZeroGPT report labeling the U.S. Declaration of Independence 97.93% AI-generated. In July, a firm called Proudly Human said a collection of Leo's speeches and writings on education and AI earned its human-authored mark, according to its press release. In March, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Thaler v. Perlmutter, leaving in place an appeals court ruling that copyright, meaning legal ownership of a creative work, requires a human author.