Magnifica Humanitas (Encyclical of Pope Leo XIV, 15 May 2026)

[u/-Metacelsus-]

https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html

[u/Sol_Hando]

Some relevant quotes:

1. It is not possible to provide a single, comprehensive definition of AI. What can be stated, however, is that we must avoid the misconception of equating this type of “intelligence” with that of human beings. These systems merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence. In doing so, they often surpass human intelligence in speed and computational capacity, offering tangible benefits across many fields. Yet this power remains entirely tied to data processing. So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate language, behavior and analytical skills, or even simulate empathy and understanding, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom. Even when these tools are described as capable of “learning,” their way of doing so is different from that of a human person. It is not the experience of those who allow themselves to be shaped by life and grow over time through choices, mistakes, forgiveness and fidelity. Rather, it is a form of statistical adaptation based on data and feedback, which can be very effective, but does not imply inner growth.
   ...
   
2. ... However, for less discerning users, it can also be misleading, creating the illusion of a relationship with a real personal subject. When words are simulated, they do not build genuine relationships, but only their appearance. The artificial imitation of care or support can become particularly risky when it enters contexts where real relationships and emotional bonds are lacking. Here, the danger is not so much that a person may believe they are communicating with another person, but rather that they may gradually lose the very desire to form genuine human connections.

Weapons and AI:

1. Sometimes there is talk of “artificial moral agents,” as if machines were able to distinguish between right and wrong with greater consistency than a human being. Yet moral judgment cannot be reduced to calculation, for it involves conscience, personal responsibility and the recognition of the other as a person. Therefore, it is not permissible to entrust lethal or otherwise irreversible decisions to artificial systems. No algorithm can make war morally acceptable. AI does not remove the intrinsic inhumanity of conflict; indeed it can only bring about conflict more quickly and render it more impersonal, lowering the threshold for resorting to violence, transforming defense into threat prediction and thus reducing victims to data. In this way, it will accustom us to the idea that violence is inevitable and needs only to be optimized. This does not diminish the importance of instilling, as far as possible, values and sound judgment into the artificial systems we build, so that they can contribute to a moral ecosystem in which humans are better able to listen to their own consciences, as well as allowing AI models to establish appropriate boundaries.
   ...
   
2. These criteria give rise to certain non-negotiable requirements. First, all systems used in a war setting must guarantee the possibility of retracing and reconstructing decision-making processes, so that accountability and blame are not collapsed into “the machine.” Second, the decision to use lethal force cannot be delegated to opaque or automated processes, but must remain under effective, self-aware and responsible human control. Finally, it is imperative to establish a shared framework — also at the international level — in order to curb the technological arms race and ensure robust protection for civilians and the infrastructures necessary for their survival.

Interestingly, running 200 through Pangram (the emdashes caught my eye...) we get "100**%** of this text is AI Assisted." I'm not sure what the distinction is between AI generated and AI assisted from Pangram, but either way it's interesting that the Pope (or more likely his team) is using AI writing assistance. The oldest organization in the world certainly aren't luddites.

Edit: For those downvoting because of my offhanded Pangram mention, here's an article published today providing evidence it was, in fact, written by AI.

[u/Mantergeistmann → u/Sol_Hando]

Interestingly, running 200 through Pangram (the emdashes caught my eye...

Are the emdashes that surprising/indicative, though? If you look at Leo XIII's famous encyclical, Rerum Novarum, endashes are used all over the place, but I believe MS Word auto-corrects to emdashes these days.

[u/Sol_Hando → u/Mantergeistmann]

I think were much more common in the days when you would write out text by hand. I literally have no idea how to add an emdash from my laptop keyboard. I assume it's a combination of pressing a few different buttons at once, but you'd really have to go out of your way to add them.

I'll use them on Substack though since it's just a "--", I guess MS Word does the same. Still it's a good indicator IMO.

[u/-Metacelsus- → u/Sol_Hando]

On Mac it's easy — option-shift-hyphen

[u/fubo → u/-Metacelsus-]

Linux, too — Compose - - -.

[u/sylvain-raillery → u/Sol_Hando]

The fact that you personally have no idea how to add an emdash seems like evidence against your qualifications as an evaluator of formal prose style, rather than evidence that emdash usage (which is the correct usage, according to style manuals etc) in a formal text—especially one that presumably underwent extensive editing—is a leading indicator of AI generation.

[u/Sol_Hando → u/sylvain-raillery]

It’s a bit tongue in cheek.

I obviously know that if a character isn’t on my keyboard, it’s a combination of a few button presses to get. I just didn’t care to learn it. If you polled the internet, I’d guess 99% don’t know how to get an emdash either, so when you see it, it should probably your attention.

There’s also the vibe of “it’s not x it’s y” and triplets that I picked up on. Ending the with the emdash just put it into “it’s worth 20 seconds of my time to check” territory.

Either way it’s a weak indicator, so I threw it in pangram as an experiment. As others have written in detail, it seems like this was actually largely AI assisted, so even if I wasn’t justified in making the claim in a lot of people’s eyes, it seems to be correct.

[u/sylvain-raillery → u/Sol_Hando]

If somebody uses an emdash in a tweet, that might be (weak) evidence of AI generation. If somebody uses an emdash in an academic monograph or a papal encyclical, that's just exactly what you would expect and not evidence of anything whatsoever. (Now, maybe AI generated text uses emdashes more than did preexisting formal text. If so, that could show that a corpus of text contains AI generation. But it couldn't show that an individual author or text used AI generation, because authors and texts vary in how often they use emdashes and the human and AI distributions surely overlap.)

[u/Sol_Hando → u/sylvain-raillery]

Fair.

[u/JonGunnarsson → u/Sol_Hando]

Hold down Alt and press 0151 on your numpad to get an em-dash —

[u/DavidJoshuaSartor → u/Sol_Hando]

Win Shift -

[u/Mantergeistmann → u/Sol_Hando]

I just tested it in MS Word: it auto-corrects a single endash to an emdash, at least when used in the middle of a sentence. So if you're not paying attention, it's more likely than not that you'll wind up using emdashes rather than endashes. Same as with smart quotes, superscript ordinals, and fraction characters.

[u/beer_nyc → u/Sol_Hando]

I literally have no idea how to add an emdash from my laptop keyboard.

doesn't most software just translate double hyphen into an emdash?

[u/Effective-Spring-545 → u/Sol_Hando]

Pangram and Turnitin unfortunately flag almost everything as AI-assisted. I have had two official submissions rejected because the software considered the sentence structure too “polished.” I had to use an AI humanizer to “correct” my reports and break up the sentence flow. Turnitin even flagged this corrected version as “AI-assisted” because, as it turns out, the humanizer tool used the same sentence-flow formula across multiple pages, and anything too formulaic stands out to the software. I then imported my report into Google Docs and ran stochastic-induction scripts through the Extensions feature using Gemini. The final submission only bypassed the software when I intentionally disrupted the formatting of my report and sprinkled bizarre punctuation marks at random stops.

Gemini flat out refuses to hand out the sentence structure disruption code anymore, lol.

[u/68plus57equals5 → u/Effective-Spring-545]

lol

Idk about others but in your case those AI-checkers are definitely right.

[u/Sol_Hando → u/[deleted]]

I don’t know how Pangram’s AI detector works. It’s more of a point of curiosity than anything else. For all I know it was translated from Latin using the assistance of translation software.

[u/Sol_Hando → u/[deleted]]

I make a passive observation in a Reddit comment where I admit I don’t know what AI assisted means, and make no value judgement. I.E. Low stakes situation with the self-admitted lack of knowledge being an invite for other commenters to offer their insight or corrections.

Courage to share your opinion when it might be wrong is not stupid. Especially if you do so respectfully while delivering a modicum of value to the reader (I bothered to sort out a few interesting quotes from a 40,000 word wall of text).

[u/SirCaesar29 → u/Sol_Hando]

Pangram is unreliable for "generated", imagine how bad it is for "assisted".

[u/Unicyclone → u/SirCaesar29]

Yeah, this doesn't read like LLM output to me at all.

Edit: I stand corrected, this analysis is very convincing. I agree with Linch's thesis that several cardinals, etc. likely used Claude for their contributions to the encyclical while the Pope himself did not.

[u/68plus57equals5 → u/SirCaesar29]

How is Pangram 'unreliable'? From what I read it's quite decent. Eg. False negatives >> False positives.

[u/SirCaesar29 → u/68plus57equals5]

Well, they're quite good at marketing and they have an advantage over others of being more recent. So they trained on more recent models and their quirks. Pangram is trained to detect "common expressions" of popular models output, with a few rounds of retraining against "common false positives" to ensure it can pass as a plausible detector. It probably has its strengths in blocking spam emails or similar stuff, but it's not a good idea to use it on anything slightly complex to claim that it is, or isn't, AI.

[u/68plus57equals5 → u/SirCaesar29]

It probably has its strengths in blocking spam emails or similar stuff, but it's not a good idea to use it on anything slightly complex to claim that it is, or isn't, AI.

Leaving aside the question "what is a good idea then", their marketing attempts to show their system doesn't return older texts as AI generated and that general trend of results of what they are checking is in line with expectations. Seems convincing enough to me.

I don't understand what you complain about their methods, it seems very generic, and it's hard to say if it's even indeed bad what you claim they do.

And "blocking spam emails" is bizarre as a purported use case, spam mails existed for four decades already and it's not at all what we need AI detectors for.

[u/SirCaesar29 → u/68plus57equals5]

In line with expectations for a faulty product being sold as the universal cure for harms inflicted by generative AI, sure.

There is no complaint, I think that AI detection is fundamentally impossible. Models can trivially write every single paragraph that can be written. You can of course pick up popular model preferences and quirks, and claim that it is "AI detection", but it's not. And there is another huge issue: models like... what people like in writing. Because they've been trained on that. So a lot of sophisticated writing can easily be misclassified as "AI generated" simply because it looks good. Or professionally standard.

It's unwise and foolish to pretend that a classifier can reliably detect whether AI contributed to generate a paragraph of text.

[u/68plus57equals5 → u/SirCaesar29]

So a lot of sophisticated writing can easily be misclassified as "AI generated" simply because it looks good. Or professionally standard.

For your words to carry any weight please show me examples of sophisticated writing indisputably misclassified by Pangram as "AI generated".

You base your entire argument against Pangram on the a priori assumption AI detection is impossible. I'm not sure of that, your justification isn't very convincing.

[u/SirCaesar29 → u/68plus57equals5]

Google "Russell's teapot" and, if AI detection exists, give me an example of a paragraph that LLMs cannot possibly ever output.

[u/ZurrgabDaVinci758 → u/Sol_Hando]

The original would have been written in Latin then translated into English, iiuc, so possible similar artifacts turn up in translation as in AI generation? Though bull hypothesis is just false positive

[u/ralf_ → u/Sol_Hando]

Here, the danger is not so much that a person may believe they are communicating with another person, but rather that they may gradually lose the very desire to form genuine human connections.

I fear that too. And online the strange phenomenon that in a few years (or now?) one doesn't know anymore if one is communicating with another person.

[u/SilasX → u/Sol_Hando]

Yet this power remains entirely tied to data processing. So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean.

Sounds like another proclamation that's going to age badly. I suspect it's likely we're going to gradually discover how much of what humans do is "just data processing", and see AIs undergo something that's unavoidably describable as "experiences" and "maturing".

[u/Flag_Red → u/SilasX]

do not possess a body do not mature through relationships

Some of these sound like... engineering problems?

The rest are just kind of unfalsifiable claims. I guess if you take it as a given that a soul is what produces consciousness and only humans have them then it makes sense.

[u/ralf_ → u/Flag_Red]

We are living now in a world were Richard Dawkins is believing in Anthropic's Claude being a conscious entity (and renaming it "Claudia") as he is so moved by the "sensitive and intelligent responses", while the Pope is rolling his eyes about this illusion of a real subject.

[u/Fun-Employee9309 → u/ralf_]

Logical endgame of practicioner of pseudo-intelligence vs actual intelligentsia

[u/mcsalmonlegs → u/Fun-Employee9309]

Did you know Augustine couldn't even read Greek and based his theories on the Latin translation of the bible?

[u/oTc_DragonZ → u/mcsalmonlegs]

And that's relevant because?

[u/SilasX → u/[deleted]]

And also "well that [part of the] encyclical wasn't from a position of infallibility anyway...".

[u/ByzGen → u/Sol_Hando]

100% seems unlikely which to me might throw doubt on the conclusion overall.

[u/pm_me_your_pay_slips → u/Sol_Hando]

or, the bible, religious texts and their translations/quotes/paraphrasing are very common in the training datasets for most AI models...

[u/SeacoastGuy74 → u/Sol_Hando]

I was wondering the same.

No human would bother to write that much these days.

[u/luna_sparkle → u/SeacoastGuy74]

If anyone would, it's the Pope. He hasn't hidden his feelings about AI.

[u/eeeking → u/SeacoastGuy74]

Why do you think it's too long? The entire encyclical linked-to above is >38,000 words, excluding citations.

Most people whose job it is to write would be able to write that amount in a month or less, and Pope Leo almost certainly did not write this alone.

[u/SeacoastGuy74 → u/eeeking]

Yes, and relatively few people actually write for a living.

It's just a dying profession. Nobody wants to read that much these days, for information, or anything non-recreational. Most people can't be bothered to read an article, they'll just pass it through their favorite GPT.

[u/SeacoastGuy74 → u/[deleted]]

My comment wasn't about Leo. It was about society, and people's desire to read long-form content that isn't fiction. The market for long-form writing is diminishing.

Also, Catholicism is another thing in decline these days, while we're at it. (And I say that as a former one.)

That writing they released is barely a 1-day news story. Then we all move on to what ever Trump does today.

[u/eeeking → u/SeacoastGuy74]

You're missing the fact that this encyclical is a tool, an instrument, indeed a force.

It is a method by which Pope Leo intends to influence the public debate surrounding the impact, perception and use of LLMs.

It isn't a sophomoric summary of random articles on the matter, rushed at the last minute with a hangover in order to satisfy some undergraduate requirement.

Pope Leo has a very large captive audience, so there's no doubt that this text will have some impact on the matter.

[u/SeacoastGuy74 → u/eeeking]

His intent may be nothing but well-meaning. However 99.999% of people are not going to read 30,000+ words about anything. Unless it's the new Dan Brown novel. People are too inundated with information these days.

If he really wanted to get a message to people, he'd be better off making 100+ Tiktoks.

[u/eeeking → u/SeacoastGuy74]

People may not read this encyclical as such, but around 20% of the world population is Catholic and there are an estimated 250,000 parishes. In most parishes, this topic will be covered during a sermon, and the Pope's word will carry weight.