Pope Leo XIV stated on Friday that there is an "ontological difference" between human art and content generated by machines, and that the Church hopes to rebuild alliances with artists and cultural institutions in order to "preserve our humanity."
"Before even reaching the level of aesthetics, there is an ontological difference between what art can create and what machines can generate through statistical calculations based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity," wrote the Pope.
"Ontology" is a philosophical term that refers to what something essentially is, rather than how it appears. What the Pope meant was essentially that a painting created by a human and an image generated by a model, even though they may look similar, are essentially completely different things. He believed that this difference precedes any issue of style.
His reasoning is quite straightforward. The Pope wrote that machines work through “statistical calculations” based on millions of images created by others.
In simple terms, the AI image generator is trained on a vast collection of existing images. It learns which patterns tend to appear together and then predicts what a new image should look like. Behind this process, there is no human intervention, nor any real-world experience involved.
He didn't use that term, but what he was actually referring to was “AI slop” – that is, mass-produced low-quality AI content, which Merriam-Webster has rated as the word of 2025. What the Pope means is that the problem lies not only in the quality, but also in what it actually is.
A Pope who has long followed AI
This is not a one-time statement. In May, Pope Leo issued his first encyclical—a formal teaching letter to the entire Church, titled “Magnifica Humanitas,” with the theme of protecting humanity in the era of AI. The encyclical argues that technology has never been neutral, and data should be regarded as a public good.
In the same month, the Vatican established a AI committee that encompasses seven different Vatican institutions, with the aim of coordinating how various offices of the Holy See handle AI, including internal usage policies.
On September 25th, the Pope stated to the French authorities at the Elysee Palace in Paris that he deemed it indispensable to choose AI as the theme of his first encyclical. In his speech in Paris, he also warned that science and technology without the guidance of conscience could lead people away from goodness.
However, there is a detail here. In April, AI of Pangram Labs flagged several posts on his own X account as possibly generated by AI. At that time, the Vatican did not respond to requests for comment.
However, detectors are not reliable. According to relevant reports, in 2024, ZeroGPT labeled the American Declaration of Independence as being 97.93% generated by AI. In July, a company named Proudly Human stated that a set of Leo's speeches and writings about education and AI were given the label of "human author," based on the company's press release.
In the past few years, the question "Who wrote this?" has gradually turned into a legal and financial issue. In March, the United States Supreme Court refused to take up the case of Thaler v. Perlmutter, upholding the ruling of the appellate court that copyright—the legal ownership of creative works—requires a human author; this case involved artistic works created entirely by the AI system.
Artists are also voting with their feet. Cara is a collection network aimed at excluding AI images, and as of June 2024, it has nearly 900,000 users.
