Pope Leo XIV believes that artificial intelligence isn’t the best source for spiritual guidance. The new pope recently put to bed the question of if he would consider outsourcing himself to AI.
“If there’s anybody who should not be represented by an avatar, I would say the Pope is high on the list,” Pope Leo said. A recent proposal would have created an AI avatar of Pope Leo that Catholics could log on and chat with from anywhere. But the pontiff said in an interview that he had no intention of authorizing it.
That’s not to say he doesn’t support AI — he just thinks this isn’t a good use for it. “I’m not at all against artificial intelligence,” he said. “In the medical world, great things have happened because of AI, in other ways as well. Yet there’s a danger in this because you do end up creating a fake world, and then you wonder, what is the truth?”