Returning to Sacredness in the Age of A.I.

The Pope calls for "faces and voices to speak for people again"

Visitors of the Sistine Chapel (WikiCommons)

On January 26th, Pope Leo XIV announced that the theme for this year’s World Day of Social Communications would be “Preserving Human Voices and Faces.” In a brief and elegant message, the Holy See warned against the dangers of AI and attention capture technologies dominating our digital media landscape. The challenge before us, he writes, “is not technological, but anthropological.”

The World Day of Social Communications was announced in 1967 by Pope Paul VI to celebrate the role of new media technologies in spreading the Gospel. If this purpose seems at odds with the Church’s traditionalist orientation, that’s the point. The fifty-year history of the campaign is a kind of long-running acknowledgement that, in the face of technological change, “a merely censorious attitude on the part of the Church … is neither sufficient nor appropriate.” As Pope Pius XII argued in 1957, media technologies are “gifts of God.”

In that light, Leo’s recent announcement strikes a notably alarming tone. Across two-thousand-some words, his message is an effective and concise rundown of digital technology’s threats to human flourishing. AI systems’ ability to produce texts, music, and videos turns us into “passive consumers of unthought thoughts.” The unconditional affection of chatbots risks deteriorating the fundamental goodness of human relationship. And machine learning systems have proven to reproduce the bias of their makers (is Leo reading Safiya Noble?). He even condemns the media companies that service “algorithms designed to capture a few extra seconds at any cost.”

In response to these harms, the Pope calls for greater responsibility from corporate and political leaders, widespread cooperation to implement safeguards, and education aimed at a healthier culture of communication.

So far, so good. But what’s most impressive about Leo’s message is the elegance of his central claim: “Faces and voices are sacred.” God created us in his image, he writes, and to confuse the human likeness for its digital simulacra is to invite the dissolution of human relationship altogether.

Broadly speaking, the genre of tech criticism tends to deploy a kind of rigorous, methodical thinking that meets the scientific rationalism of Big Tech on its own turf. Leo’s readiness to invoke “sacredness” without any apparent need for justification shows the special ability of religious thought to rise above that critical tug of war and reveal its limitations.

“We need faces and voices to speak for people again,” he writes. In doing so, Leo makes a decisive comment on techno-accelerationist speculations about AI as a window into the divine: When we are talking with the machines, he suggests, we are not talking with God. He also returns our attention to a simple fact: no matter what you call it, the humanity that we are trying to protect is right here, waiting to be beheld, in the presence of the person beside you.

Leo’s message – one of the first of his pontificate – could not be better-timed. As public discourse around AI widens in its senseless gyre, the announcement is a reminder for the faithful and the secular alike that, in the blast zone of our splintering reality, institutions committed to absolute truths are uniquely equipped to contain the damage.

— Peter Schmidt
Editor-in-Chief