Who doesn’t love an epic moment? For me these mostly come in my favorite movies: Russell Crow as the mysterious fighter in Gladiator, turning to face the evil Emperor on the sand of the Colosseum as he removes his mask and growls, “My name is Maximus Decimus Meridius, Commander of the Armies of the North, General of the Felix Legions, loyal servant to the true emperor, Marcus Aurelius . . .” Epic! Or Julia Roberts, playing the reigning box office queen of Hollywood, in the simple bookshop of charmingly feckless Hugh Grant in Notting Hill, telling him “I’m just a girl standing in front of a boy asking him to love her.” Yes! Epic (in a rom-com way)!
Less dramatic but to me every bit as epic was the 90 minute program at the Vatican on May 25th in which Pope Leo XIV presented Magnifica Humanitas, his lengthy and quite beautiful letter to the world about how we should think about AI in light of Catholic theology and teaching about society, morality, and justice. When I helped found AI and Faith in 2018, the idea that “faith” and “AI” belonged together seemed very odd–to the point we chose our name as an attention-grabbing oxymoron. But our serious founding premise was that the great questions of AI ethics are also the great questions of life and that the ancient wisdom of the world’s great religions has answers for those questions. Pope Leo’s encyclical profoundly supports that premise.
Even more epic to me in the launch of this letter was the cast of characters. First, the starring role. Of all the faith leaders in the world, the Pope is undoubtedly the best known, head of a hierarchically structured faith with 1.4 billion adherents. As the first American pope, Pope Leo XIV understands the culture of the country that is most driving AI forward in the west, while also bringing a global perspective from his priestly service for many years in Latin America. What better person than this faith leader to invite a global discussion about preserving what it means to be human while developing and applying AI?
The supporting cast was impressive. Seated to the right and left of Pope Leo XIV were cardinals who helped guide the years-long study and dialogue underlying the encyclical; a female professor of moral theology born in the Democratic Republic of Congo teaching at a Jesuit university in Silicon Valley; a British female theologian and expert on the long term impact of social teaching by the papacy; and three seats to the Pope’s left, Chris Olah, one of the co-founders of Anthropic.
Olah is the leader of Anthropic’s “interpretability team” which focuses on understanding the internal workings of large language models and neural networks. I call this the “Mind of Claude Team,” since, from Anthropic’s inception, Olah has been the Anthropic leader most dedicated to understanding what is happening inside this huge model and his team the industry leader in seeking this understanding. Olah said in his short talk that his team’s work is “a little like bringing a fictional character to life. And now we’re entering an extraordinary world where those fictional characters speak to us, do work, have jobs.”
Deeper in the supporting cast for this eloquent letter to all the world urging a “disarmament” of AI and the powerful forces creating and thrusting it upon us are some of our own AI and Faith experts.
In 2019, I met with Brian Green, the Director of Tech Ethics at Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, who had been laying a foundation for strong ethical engagement by technology leaders in Silicon Valley. Brian became our first AI and Faith expert outside the Pacific Northwest and vigorously urged us to launch beyond our roots there.
That same year, Brian, along with Levi Checketts, Noreen Herzfeld, and Cory Andrew Labrecque who joined us soon thereafter from other universities, helped begin a conversation with the Pontifical Council for Culture at the Vatican on artificial intelligence technology and its relevance for the Catholic Church and the world. The Vatican conference on “The Common Good in the Digital Age” in September 2019 served as a focal point for some of these efforts, bringing together representatives from the Church, academia, the technology industry, and other organizations. In his address to the conference, Pope Francis exhorted those present to work to ensure that technology was used for the common good. This early conversation was memorialized in a pioneering article in the Journal of Moral Theology called Artificial Intelligence and Moral Theology: A Conversation to which Brian, Levi, Noreen and Cory all contributed.
Thereafter in 2023, each of these experts, joined by our AI&F experts John Slattery of Duquesne and Nathan Colaner of Seattle University, helped to edit and co-author the book Encountering AI as members of the AI Research Group, an academic collaborative of theologians, philosophers, and ethicists from North America working under the auspices of the Centre for Digital Culture of the Holy See, led by Bishop Tighe. And just this past year Brian and our new expert Paul Scherz co-authored the Group’s second book, Reclaiming Human Agency in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.
As a bridgebuilder between the Vatican and Big Tech, few have played a bigger role than Fr Paolo Benanti who joined AI&F as an Advisor in 2024. Often described as Pope Francis’ top AI advisor, Father Paolo worked through the Pontifical Academy for Life in 2020 to create the Rome Call for AI Ethics, a pioneering joint commitment of the Vatican, Microsoft, IBM and several European agencies to foster a shared responsibility among governments, international organizations, institutions, and the private sector to ensure that AI development serves humanity rather than merely profit or workforce replacement. Thanks in large part to Father Paolo’s tireless advocacy, signatories to the Rome Call now include faith, business and public leaders across a broad spectrum. Our Advisors Ben Olsen, Glen Weyl, and Jon Palmer, presently or formerly at Microsoft, have advanced this bridgebuilding work in many ways.
Just in the past few months, paralleling this work from faithful academics, theologians,and visionary technologists, Anthropic has been inviting faith leaders to days-long meetings to advise them on “moral training” for Claude. AI&F experts including Brian Green, David Zvi Kalman, and our Executive Director Greg Cootsona, participated in the first such meeting. Because Claude is being built on the language and thought of human endeavor, its outputs reflect all the bad as well as the good of humanity.
For all these reasons, as I reflect back, I see the launch of the encyclical as an epic event for all of us as Pope Leo XIV invites us to join in constructing a better future. But it is also vitally important as an invitation to keep our feet on the ground and view this conversation in a context that extends back thousands of years.
As such the encyclical calls into question whether in fact we are entering a new “epoch” of AI, as AI accelerationists like Marc Andreesen, Nick Bostrom and Ray Kurzweil have long been claiming. A common definition of an “epoch” per Merriam Webster is “an extended period of time usually characterized by a distinctive development or by a memorable series of events.” Taking on the breathless claims of trans-humanist advocates that we are entering an epoch of maximally human enterprise or even post-humanism, Pope Leo’s letter presents transhumanism as a dangerous ideology that risks dehumanizing the person. Instead, it offers a Christian vision of technology–one that honors human limits, fosters communion and builds for the common good.
Less than a year ago, many influential people were questioning whether we were in an AI bubble. Even as OpenAI and Anthropic ready their IPO’s with anticipated trillion dollar valuations, some air has leaked out of the share price of chip companies. It appears that not only activists but investors could be renewing the question whether we will continue the rapid march to build large data centers everywhere at the cost of hundreds of billions of dollars and great impacts to water, energy costs, and human scale in the affected communities. That march is absolutely essential to achieve the visions cast by AI accelerationists and undergirds the fears of safetyists who question the direction and cost of this unprecedented dedication of human capital and energy to a single technological enterprise. Like those epic moments in the movies, none of us know where this story will end, but we all know a lot is on the line.
Where does this leave AI and Faith? Currently, we remain in the middle of this burgeoning global conversation. Our methodology from the beginning–to catalyze and collaborate–is perfect for this moment. But to be of real continuing value, we must vigorously strengthen at speed our personal relationships across our own network community. Our Catholic Affinity Group is a great example of that, bringing together for regular information exchange and coordination the work of over a dozen of our experts who are engaged with the Catholic world. Equally vital, we must strategically engage with our current partner organizations and potential partners to collectively create impact. Chris Olah’s response at the Vatican says it as well as any:
We need more of the world—religious communities, civil society, scholars, governments, and indeed all people of good will—to do what His Holiness has done here: to take this seriously, to look closely, and to push events in a better direction. We need informed critics who will tell the labs when we are failing. We need moral voices that the incentives cannot bend. Today is just the beginning–the start of a long collaboration between those of us who are building this and those who can see what we, from inside, cannot.
Views and opinions expressed by authors and editors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the view of AI and Faith or any of its leadership.
