Pope Leo XIV said Friday that there is an "ontological difference" between human art and machine-generated output, adding that the Church wants to renew its alliance with artists and cultural institutions to "safeguard our humanity."
He posted the message on X, where he has previously shared warnings about artificial intelligence.
"There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity," the Pope wrote.
As framed in the report, the point is about what something fundamentally is, not just how it appears. A painting made by a person and an image produced by a model may look similar, but in his view they are not the same kind of thing. That distinction comes before any argument over style.
How Leo described machine-made output
Leo's reasoning was direct. He said a machine works through "statistical calculation" built on millions of images made by other people.
In practical terms, AI image generators are trained on vast collections of existing pictures, learn which patterns tend to appear together, and then predict what a new image should look like. The report says there is no hand and no lived experience behind the result.
Decrypt noted that Leo did not use the phrase himself, but the argument overlaps with the fight over "AI slop," a term used for low-quality AI content produced at scale. Merriam-Webster named it its 2025 word of the year. The Pope's point, as the report put it, is that the issue is not only quality, but what the output actually is.
Part of a broader AI stance
This was not a one-off statement. In May, Pope Leo released his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, a formal teaching letter to the whole Church focused on protecting people in the age of AI. It argued that technology is never neutral and that data should be treated as a common good.
That same month, the Vatican set up an AI commission spanning seven Vatican bodies to coordinate how the Holy See's offices approach AI, including internal policies on its use.
On Sept. 25, speaking to French authorities at the Élysée Palace in Paris, Leo said it was indispensable to make AI the subject of his first encyclical. In that Paris speech, he also warned that science and technology without guidance from conscience can steer people away from the good.
Detection tools have also touched his own account
There is also an irony in the story. In April, Pangram Labs' AI-detection extension flagged several posts from the Pope's own X account as likely AI-generated. The Vatican did not respond to requests for comment at the time.
The report also stressed that such detectors are unreliable. In 2024, ZeroGPT labeled the U.S. Declaration of Independence 97.93% AI-generated, according to the cited report. Then in July, a company called Proudly Human said in a press release that a collection of Leo's speeches and writings on education and AI received its human-authored mark.
Authorship is becoming a legal and commercial question
Over the past couple of years, the question of who made a work has increasingly become a legal and financial one. In March, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Thaler v. Perlmutter, leaving in place an appeals court ruling that copyright, meaning legal ownership of a creative work, requires a human author. The case centered on art made entirely by an AI system.
Artists have also been making their preferences clear through where they publish. By June 2024, Cara, a portfolio network built to keep AI images out, had reached nearly 900,000 users.