Pope Leo XIV wrote 42.3K words on human dignity in the age of AI. (But Ellipsus has written over 65K words on the topic since 2023. 💪)
Solidarity is a weird thing… all of a sudden you’re seeing the Pope on your dash and the tea is… piping hot? (To offset the Vatican.va link, here's a tl;dr from The Onion.) ... Look at him go!
(Disagreements with his Holiness aside, it’s great to see a powerful figure power taking the side of the people.) ... EDIT: Wake up babe, a new Inquisition just dropped - apparently, not even the Pope can escape being wrongly accused by AI "verifiers."
the catholic church covers up child sexual abuse, lobbies for clemency toward abusive priests, bans gender-affirming care in its hospitals, blocks divorce access across entire countries, and tightens its position on abortion while hundreds of thousands of people are affected by those positions in ways that are immediate and material. these translate into denied healthcare, into legal systems shaped by ecclesiastical lobbying, into abuse survivors who were systematically failed and then watched their institution ask for mercy on behalf of the people who harmed them.
filing all of that under mere "disagreements" signals how unprincipled this reaction you perform is. this framing only holds if you've already decided that opposition to AI is the only relevant axis, and the actual politics, the actual institutional record, the actual people on the receiving end of church policy, gets brushed aside because it's inconvenient to the posts you want to make.
a position that evaluates institutions by whether they've said something useful about your issue, and brackets everything else as secondary, has no mechanism for discerning if praising what is among the most reactionary institution of our time making one statement that aligns with your interests while continuing to cause serious harm in every direction its power reaches is a good choice. the reflex of single-issue politics ends up celebrating an institution with a documented record of what it does with the dignity of people actually vulnerable to it, on the basis that it produced however many words useful to the discourse.
the only progressive thing a pope can do is resign, and that holds regardless of who occupies the position, because the institution is what causes the harm. no encyclical changes what the institution does with its hospitals, its political influence, or its internal handling of abuse. celebrating it because it produced 42,000 words that give the anti-AI discourse more ammunition treats the people harmed by church policy as acceptable collateral in a masturbatory culture war about technology.
