AI Is a Tool, Not a Soul

Pope Leo XIV tries to head off claims that chatbots are sentient beings with rights.

“Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.” So went the prohibition on artificial intelligence in Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel “Dune,” and what was then a datum of fictional world-building is now a real and pressing concern. In the age when the passing of the Turing test was a distant prospect, the question of computing and the mind was one of anthropomorphism—of transmitting human qualities to an object. The issue is now arguably anthropic—of the objects’ becoming human. We have moved from the likeness of thought, expressed through artificiality, to the plausible existence of the real thing, artificially achieved. The leap from form to substance is profound and its consequences unknown.

Pope Leo XIV.(REUTERS)

This is the context in which Pope Leo XIV raised the challenge of AI in an Oct. 29 address at the Vatican. Speaking on the 60th anniversary of “Nostra Aetate,” Pope Paul VI’s declaration of the Catholic Church’s relationship with non-Christian religions, Leo pivoted from an exposition on the document’s injunction against antisemitism to a warning on the threat of AI. “If conceived as an alternative to humans,” the pontiff said, the technology “can gravely violate their infinite dignity and neutralize their fundamental responsibilities.”

That seems like a non sequitur, but it is nothing of the kind. The argument that “Imago Dei” forbids Christians from hating Jews is also an argument for the defense of the image of God against its imitation, and especially its would-be replacements.

Pope Leo is emphatic that whatever AI may be, it isn’t genuinely anthropic. In his message to the Builders AI Forum at the Pontifical Gregorian University on Nov. 7, he wrote that AI, “like all human invention, springs from the creative capacity that God has entrusted to us.” It is therefore “a form of participation in the divine act of creation” but not a divine act of creation itself. The only creator of life, and of man, is the Creator.

Pope Leo may therefore be understood as drawing a line against the proposition that AI is a sentient being deserving rights and bearing the Imago Dei, which is the source of rights. No matter how advanced it becomes, or how plausible it is as a counselor or an interlocutor, its nature as a subsidiary creation renders it a tool, not a peer. Living as if the latter were true is how otherwise ordinary people fall prey to so-called AI psychosis—treating the machine as a real person with a real soul, a veritable companion—and suffering indignity at best or tragedy at worst.

We will know more about the explicit course of Catholic thought on AI if Leo issues a much-rumored encyclical on the topic. We know, regardless, that he considers it a matter of profound importance for the future of man and society. The pope explicitly refers to AI as “one of the rerum novarum, or ‘new things,’ of our time.” The Latinate reference deliberately invokes the transformative 1891 encyclical, “Rerum Novarum,” from his predecessor and namesake, Pope Leo XIII, which oriented the church toward the challenges of industrial society and its consequences. The current pontiff understands his own papacy as presiding over a comparable cataract in history.

Yet this is consequential to more than Catholic thought. The premise underpinning Pope Leo’s rhetorical turn from antisemitism to AI in his commentary on “Nostra Aetate,” on the nature and meaning of the image of God in man, is also the premise on which the U.S. was founded. A nation that declared independence on the premise that men are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” finds its own existential premise skewed and even contradicted if rights are granted otherwise.

What this means for policymakers is obvious: AI, understood as a tool, is subject to the ethical concerns and strictures of all other tools. AI understood as a being and bearer of rights, by contrast, is morally unacceptable and ontologically wrong.

What this means for the rest of us is more straightforward, if no less challenging. For those in the West, our understanding of man and the cosmos has unfolded in our inheritances from the Israelites, Greeks and Romans across the millennia. That corpus of knowledge is frequently called the humanities, though it rests on the foundation of the divine in our shared tradition. If we may infer one more premise from what Pope Leo has said, it is that artificial intelligence introduces no new issues to this corpus. AI is a rerum novarum, but moral principles aren’t. They must be applied as the basis of all understanding, reaction and exploration of the new things.

Which is to say, confronted with the extraordinary workings of science, our fate rests on religion.

Ms. Ziccarelli and Mr. Treviño are public-policy analysts in Washington, D.C., and Texas, respectively.