The Vatican’s occupant has picked a side in the argument over machine-made pictures. In a Friday morning post on X, Pope Leo XIV drew a line between what people create and what software generates, describing the divide as one of being rather than taste. With AI everywhere, he wrote, telling human art from machine output has become urgent.
His argument rests on origins. An image assembled by statistical calculation over millions of pictures made by others, he wrote, stands in “an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one” from work a person creates. The phrase he landed on was unsparing: algorithms, he said, lack the spark of humanity.
The statement extends a theme from his May encyclical, which put human dignity at the center of a world increasingly run by automation. The Holy See is not alone in worrying, and artists have pressed copyright claims alongside moral ones.
Anthropic, meanwhile, has taken its case straight to the Holy See. A recent New York Times account describes lobbying aimed at getting the Vatican to rethink where it stands on non-human consciousness, and suggests the push has gained little ground.
