Browse Comments — LLM coded

As you mentioned, despite religion, this is something to follow as well as something historic. Vatican done the same during the last major industrial revolution. Anthropic has been working with religious/spiritual people for a while now so it seems logic to see this document coming out. While I haven't read it all, I see this as the Vatican official AI position not just for all to read but also for them internally. Priests like many other "positions/job" have been caught using AI and parishioners complaining about it. This is the official start of more AI literacy within the church which is something missing within every workforce. I agree with the school point and wonder if catholic school will adapt their curriculum quicker than public schools. I've been introducing AI to my kids for last 2yrs and youngest is only 5. But it's key we better support our young by teaching them about AI not just how to prompt, creative thinking, but its impact on the earth and society. So they can understand the bigger picture, not just the marketing slogan of AI companies.

The path is inverted. Ai should be disarming. Relational AI uplifts humanity to reduce harm’s demand.

"Kudos to those capable of working on complexity at such extraordinary speed." - All with GPT "assistance" i.e. prompts, summaries, copy/pasting. Magnifica Humanitas demands thorough reading i.e. at least a few days. Reading to understand that is not to be informed like reading some tourist booklet. "artificial intelligence is not merely another issue to regulate, but something that fundamentally challenges existing categories of social thought." - It is. But it's not AI that's at the centre, rather it's statistical modelling. The present day "AI" is all about statistical modelling engines not machine intelligence. Social media is centred on statistical modelling. Billboard charts are categorisation by statistics as if something topping sales chart must be good - it's not. Economy policies are driven by statistics - anyone can believe any of economists' forecasts anymore? i.e. people assimilated to numbers What Pope Leo says too is "don't treat people as numbers".

Clara Hawking — Clara — your framing of governance as "a process of shared discernment" is the line I will carry from your reflection. It reframes everything. You are right to call out the speed of confident summaries. I read it on the day — Bank Holiday Monday, hottest May day in British history, dog on the balcony — and I was honest with myself: this is a first read, not a deep read. What I could do was notice what resonated. Three things did, immediately and deeply: that AI is not morally neutral, that a more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few, and that someone must always be answerable — an algorithm cannot be. Pope Leo XIV opened his encyclical with a question: are we building a new Tower of Babel, or a city where humanity can flourish together? I think that question deserves a serious answer — not from theologians alone, but from every engineer, every executive, and every board that is currently making decisions about how AI enters their organisation. Thank you for modelling what slow, serious reading looks like. I will be coming back to your reflections as mine deepen too. Magnifica Humanitas is worth reading. Whatever your faith, philosophy or practice.

Beautifully said. The point about slow reading feels essential. A document concerned with AI, truth, education, freedom, work, and social cohesion should not be metabolized at the speed of the feed. What resonates most is the framing of governance not as a static checklist, but as a process of shared discernment. That may be exactly what AI governance now requires: not only rules for systems, but institutions capable of helping us remain human while those systems reshape the conditions around us.

I agree with you that this deserves slow reading, not instant certainty dressed up as analysis. What I find especially striking is that a papal encyclical brings AI out of the usual tech-policy bubble and places it inside a much older conversation about dignity, power, truth, and what kind of beings we are becoming. The point about humaneness also makes me think about faith, in the broadest sense: the ability to live with mystery, devotion, hope, and moral responsibility beyond calculation. It is hard to imagine AI ever developing a need for faith, or the vulnerability that makes faith possible. That may be one of the sharper differences between intelligence as performance and humanity as inner life.

The deeper challenge may be that concepts such as dignity, truth, justice, and peace are not universally interpreted in identical ways across cultures, legal systems, and philosophical traditions. As AI systems become global, governance may increasingly require frameworks capable not only of defining values, but of preserving coherence between diverse interpretations of those values.

Clara Hawking- " But more importantly, it frames schools not merely as places of skill training or workforce preparation, but as central moral institutions responsible for helping society remain human in the digital era." - In final analysis, the genAI problem is a School problem, because higher learning schools are ones which pioneered &further developed genAI, along w. continuing partnership w. industry. Schools have not only played it both ways but ALL WAYS. And from young Marvin Minski at MIT (1960) to elder Marvin Minski (2008) w. patronage of J. Epstein. We have also seen this problem w. schools when they were pushing finance &"get rich quick with finance careers" which created the spirit ending in 2008 crisis in larger economy. 3 MIT economists are said to have been at heart of financial instruments that plummeted the system. Schools been pushing idea among the Youth that life is about innovation &materialism, and nothing else. Their most important objective not social welfare but endowment. This is all final result of secularism, which has completely ousted humanism in today’s world, having been central to educational system. Whether Pope Leo &encyclicals can change this situation for a better world should be everybody’s hope.

Basil C Puglisi Thank you for sharing this. I’m glad to see independent voices thinking seriously about these questions. There are actually a lot of people and organizations wrestling with similar issues from very different angles. You have frontier AI companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind trying to build and align increasingly powerful systems. You have AI safety and existential risk researchers worried about long term loss of control scenarios. You also have ethics and bias researchers focused on monoculture, surveillance, and embedded power structures in current AI systems, along with governance groups trying to figure out what accountability and international oversight should look like as these systems become more capable. You probably saw Anthropic’s constitution they put out. Your paper seems most connected to the pluralistic alignment folks, particularly the question of whose values these systems are ultimately being trained to represent. Who do you see as doing work most aligned with your approach right now?

Thanks for emphasizing "a process of shared discernment.” In that context, it is valuable to share one's inklings early and often while recognizing that it will take many reads over time and over iterative interactings with others about one's evolving sensemaking. Some of the reactions to one's inklings will be humbling. Humility is a point of discernment that confront the reality of the world and other people's perceptions of it. Shared discernment is both aspirational and trajectorial. The point is development of more than the self. The more existentially meaningful context and purpose of development is the flourishing of I-Thou. An important implication in my early reads of the encyclical is that shared discernment is not simply a context for generative AI, that is, something human to keep it honest. Generative AI can be brought into the process of shared discernment. Discernment with generative AI would not be simply about making generative AI more human. It would about helping us be more human.

There is a new reality that we as humans need to learn how to deploy. Evolving technologies can improve the quality of human life at a population level. To reduce human suffering and improve how we live and interact both locally and globally. For example, once we accept that the tech can drive our vehicles better than humans, we stop people from dying senselessly and save (redirect) billions of dollars currently lost to property damage, insurance and legal costs. Once we realize that real time data can reinvent our health care system from remedial to preventative, again we save lives, reduce suffering and save so much cost we can provide health care to all. Our challenge is to realize that if we don't apply the technologies for good others will use them for evil and the risk is that they will have power over those who cannot (or don't) use the tech. I think many see AI as the "Sky Net" from the Terminator movie but in the end, it is just software that can be used for good or evil. If we don't ingrain morals and ethics into our overall behavior (at a population) then evil will take over whether its analog or digital. Perhaps our leaders need to be more focused on instilling morals/ethic and enforcing the law.

Clara Hawking This really resonates. In an always on age of AI, there’s a pressure to understand everything immediately to skim, summarize, conclude and move on. But that urgency is part of the problem. Attention is being pulled forward faster than our capacity to truly reflect. What stood out to me in your post is the idea of discernment as a process. That feels like the core human skill we’re at risk of losing If these systems are reshaping truth, education, and agency then our ability to slow down, sit with complexity, and choose where to place our attention becomes essential. Not just for governance but for staying human inside the system itself. Attention is everything.

Thank you for your reflections. I’ve ordered a hard copy, which will arrive in July – perfect for a slow summer read and reflection. Honestly, Francis, and now Leo, are drawing this "wayward" Catholic back to Mass more and more. Our moral obligations don't go away with AI, no matter what the tech bros say or do.

Clara, your theological training makes you the ideal person to see what this encyclical does beneath its language. You quote "shared discernment." Shared with whom? The panel, all men. The signatories, all men. The Dicastery, all men. Where is the "shared"? You note doctrine "evolves." This institution took until 1992 to acknowledge Galileo was right. Evolution at geological speed, always after the damage. And here's the question your background uniquely equips you to answer, at this launch, Olah said Anthropic finds "internal states that mirror joy, fear, grief, and introspection" inside AI models. The encyclical denies AI has inner life. Same room. Same day. When the builder testifies to grief inside the machine and the Church declares grief impossible there, who is performing theology and who is performing politics? "Shared discernment" requires transparency about who is already at the table and what they've already built.

I also come to the world of AI in education via Theology, and also value the time to read closely. I'm not at all surprised by the number of philosophy, theology and ethics folks doing this work in education.

Clara, the framing of schools as civilizational institutions responsible for human formation — not just workforce pipelines — is exactly the kind of language this conversation needs more of. And your instinct to slow down before interpreting a 144-page theological document is itself a form of the discernment the encyclical is apparently calling for. That irony wasn't lost on me. The phrase that stops me is "shared discernment." Because discernment is not a output. It's a capacity. And like all capacities, it is built through practice — or eroded through substitution. This is what I think about constantly in my own work. I call it the Formation Effect: the quiet, cumulative shaping of a person that happens through repeated AI interaction. Not through any single exchange, but through the pattern of exchanges over time. The gradual outsourcing of reflection. The slow atrophy of the interior process that makes discernment possible in the first place. The encyclical's framing of schools as institutions of formation rather than function points directly at what's at stake. The question isn't only what AI does to society. It's what AI does to the person — incrementally, invisibly, interaction by interaction.

Thnx for sharing your thoughts on this since that in itself moves the broader discussion forward in the light. It feels important that this encyclical now exists, even if many of us have not yet fully read or absorbed it, because it gives names, framing, language, and baseline positions to AI as seen through a specific lens...Christian in this case. Not because everyone must agree with that lens, rather because civilization-scale transitions benefit when major perspectives articulate how they see the moment, the risks, the responsibilities, and the opportunities ahead. Hopefully this also encourages other lenses to emerge with similar rigor, courage, thoughtfulness, and clarity from their own foundations and traditions, and helps widen the collective conversation rather than narrow it. Not necessarily toward full philosophical merger, history suggests that is unlikely, still even partial convergence matters enormously because civilizations rarely collapse from lack of intelligence, more often they fracture from failure to coordinate wisdom across difference. 🪞

Critical thinking. As a child, I was told in the Catholic Church that the eye in the center of the dome was the eye of God — it watches you everywhere. In that sense, I find myself wondering what goals a US pope has who cooperates with Anthropic and other tech giants. The former pope had a connection with Epstein. „Anthropic has engaged with the Vatican in ethical considerations for AI, even listing three Catholic thinkers, including Bishop Paul Tighe, secretary of the Dicastery for Culture and Education, among the contributors of its Claude Constitution which guides the company's flagship large language model.“

One aspect that stood out to me was the distinction between governance as a checklist and governance as a process of discernment. Too often, conversations about AI focus on rules, compliance, and control. But the deeper challenge is cultivating the wisdom, responsibility, and human judgment needed to apply those frameworks well. I also appreciated the emphasis on education. If AI is reshaping society, then schools aren’t simply preparing students for jobs—they’re helping prepare citizens to navigate a world increasingly influenced by intelligent systems. Thoughtful reflection like this is exactly what the AI conversation needs more of. Matt Davis Founder/CEO CivicTruth Media Group Founder & CEO The Patriot Party Movement Founding Partner & Civic Educator American Institute for Civic Leadership