(OSV News) — At the heart of Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas” (“Magnificent Humanity”), is the conviction that in the age of ever-advancing artificial intelligence, technological innovation must be subordinate to human dignity.
For David Kirchhoffer, director of the Queensland Bioethics Center at the Australian Catholic University, the encyclical’s call for humanity to remain at the heart of the digital revolution must translate to concrete regulations that facilitate moral accountability.
“There is a real danger of people giving up their moral responsibility to AI or having it taken from them,” Kirchhoffer told OSV News on May 25. “For this reason, practically speaking, all AI development and application should have human oversight built into it, especially at key decision points, and moral responsibility should rest with these agents.”
In “Magnifica Humanitas,” Pope Leo called for measures to ensure an economy that “favors human dignity,” first and foremost through transparency and accountability.
Influence of data and algorithms
“When data and algorithms influence credit distribution, personnel selection or access to services and opportunities, it is necessary that decisions be understandable, contestable and subject to oversight, so that individuals are not reduced to mere profiles,” the pope wrote.
Echoing the pope’s concerns, Kirchhoffer, a theologian specializing in morality, ethics and the concept of human dignity, told OSV News that the “danger is that AI can present me with plausible answers to seemingly complex questions of law, ethics, medicine and so on.”
“Unless I have the expertise to pick up the inaccuracies and check these answers, there is a real risk of following bad advice or simply wasting my time on useless endeavors,” he said.
Furthermore, “the development of AI cannot and should not mean that we stop seeking new knowledge and finding new answers in that uniquely human way,” Kirchhoffer said, adding that knowledge should be “discovered by human inquiry” and not simply be produced by a large language model, or LLM, a type of AI trained on data to generate text.
“The AI, especially LLMs, will only ever be as good as the information it is trained on,” Kirchhoffer said. “There are so many gaps in our knowledge and ethical biases in our existing knowledge for all sorts of reasons, that we need to constantly pursue better knowledge using the criteria appropriate to the field of inquiry to generate high-quality knowledge that is ethically better, as well as intellectually better.”
The ‘Babel syndrome’
Pope Leo also warned against the “Babel syndrome,” which he noted was characterized by idolatry of profit, uniformity that neutralizes differences and the reduction of human mystery to data.
“The risk of dehumanization — of building a future that excludes God and reduces the other to a means — is an ancient and ever-new temptation that today takes on a technical guise,” the pope wrote.
Asked what policies regulators should create to prevent the “Babel syndrome” from dictating AI development, Kirchhoffer said the “solution is less about regulating the AI itself and more about guiding what we value in society.”
“The ‘Babel syndrome’ itself feeds off a reductionist view of the human person, of human society, and of human value,” he explained. “As long as we continue to measure economies only on productivity or GDP, as long as we think of success merely in economic terms, as long as we think of life as good only if it is useful, we will generate societies that will ‘train’ AI in our own reductive image.”
Loss of diversity, excellence
He also warned that the worst part “is not merely the loss of diversity, but the loss of excellence.”
“We settle for ‘good enough’ in the name of efficiency. AI, as it is developing now, despite its evident promise, tends to fall victim to this mediocrity in the end,” he told OSV News.
The concrete action needed to be taken by regulators, Kirchhoffer continued, needs to “focus on educational policies that value human intelligence and creativity” and “that promote human understanding through the humanities and critical thinking.”
“The antidote to the ‘Babel syndrome’ is the same as the antidote to the alienation of industrialization: meaningful participation in the creation and enjoyment of real human goods,” he said.
An environmental imperative
“Magnifica Humanitas” also raised significant concerns about the AI industry‘s environmental impact, noting the massive resources needed to sustain it.
“Current AI systems require enormous amounts of energy and water, significantly influencing carbon dioxide emissions, and place heavy demands on natural resources,” the pope wrote, calling for the development of “more sustainable technological solutions that reduce environmental impact and help protect our common home.”
The environmental impact of AI, Kirchhoffer noted, is a “significant problem” that is “largely invisible to most users of AI.”
“It is so easy to use that, like turning on a light, we hardly think of the environmental impact of AI,” he said.
Calling for a “carrots and sticks” approach that incentivizes good practices and punishes bad ones, Kirchhoffer told OSV News that developing more “sustainable AI solutions” is not only feasible, but necessary.
“Humanity cannot afford to destroy itself. It’s as simple as that,” he said. “And so, every AI developer and user should seek to use their human ingenuity to find solutions that will enable the benefits of AI without the costs.”
Junno Arocho Esteves is an international correspondent for OSV News. Follow him on X @jae_journalist.
