{"id":603304,"date":"2026-05-25T17:17:14","date_gmt":"2026-05-25T17:17:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/603304\/"},"modified":"2026-05-25T17:17:14","modified_gmt":"2026-05-25T17:17:14","slug":"pope-leo-says-ai-must-be-disarmed-in-first-major-teaching","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/603304\/","title":{"rendered":"Pope Leo says AI must be &#8216;disarmed&#8217; in first major teaching"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">It was &#8220;impossible not to feel deep sorrow when contemplating the immense suffering and humiliation endured by so many,&#8221; the Pope wrote, adding that he &#8220;sincerely asked for pardon&#8221; in the name of the Church.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Leo mentioned the slave trade in relation to AI, suggesting that the world was in danger of normalising the exploitation of people again &#8211; both in its production and in its applications.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Some of the Pope&#8217;s strongest imagery in the document related to slavery, warning parallels between the historical tragedy of traditional slavery and the emerging threats of &#8220;new digital slaveries&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">He suggested a risk of similar normalisation of exploitation and that humanity was at a similar moral crossroads.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Unusually, Pope Leo chose to present the encyclical &#8211; titled &#8220;Magnifica Humanitas&#8221; (&#8220;Magnificent Humanity&#8221;) &#8211; himself, at the Vatican, alongside AI experts including Christopher Olah, co-founder of US AI giant Anthropic.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">In remarks following the presentation of the encyclical, Olah said that every AI lab including his operated &#8220;inside a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">It would be a mistake to believe that matters of AI were best handled by computer scientists like himself, Olah added: &#8220;The questions raised by AI are bigger than the AI research community, not just in their implications, but also in their nature.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The Pope&#8217;s encyclical &#8211; which also acknowledged the many potential pitfalls in AI &#8211; is also a stark and direct message to those in positions of power about their responsibilities in kerbing the &#8220;threats&#8221; it poses.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">For example, the Pope condemned the use of AI in warfare, saying that reducing human control of weaponry makes it even harder to consider a war &#8220;just&#8221; and warned against launching an AI arms race.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It was &#8220;impossible not to feel deep sorrow when contemplating the immense suffering and humiliation endured by so&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":603305,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-603304","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603304","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=603304"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603304\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/603305"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=603304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=603304"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=603304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}