Pope Leo XIV has made artificial intelligence a defining concern of his young papacy, repeatedly arguing that technological progress must not outrun human dignity. In May, he established a Vatican AI commission and used his first encyclical to call for technology to be “disarmed” before it could dominate humanity.¹

That warning intensified in the weeks that followed. The pope cautioned against a “paradise of machines” taking over daily life and said researchers’ alarms about AI should be taken seriously. “We have to keep working. We can’t sit back and pretend nothing is going to happen,” he told reporters.¹

On Friday, addressing artists and curators in Vatican City, Leo brought the argument directly into the cultural arena. Search engines may deliver “thousands of instantaneous answers,” he said, but they merely recycle what already exists and tend to give people what they already want. The result, in his view, is a danger of censorship and homogenisation rather than genuine cultural discovery.²

His central claim was sharper still: “There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one,” between art and a machine’s statistical calculation from millions of existing images. “Algorithms lack the spark of humanity,” he wrote, while calling for an alliance between the Church, artists and cultural institutions to safeguard what is human.³

The Vatican’s position lands amid an industry fight that has already touched Hollywood labour disputes and copyright battles. AI optimists argue image and video tools can speed routine work and help with ideas; critics counter that they can displace creatives, mimic personal styles and train on work without consent. The pope has clearly chosen his side: machines may generate pictures, but he says they cannot create art in the fully human sense.²