Navigating AI through Magnifica Humanitas – Part 2
Matthew Harvey Sanders, created Magisterium AI, an AI platform designed to answer questions about the Catholic faith. He also worked with the Archdiocese of Toronto’s Office of Spiritual Affairs. He was among the technology leaders invited to the Vatican for the launch of Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical on May 25. In this second blog post exploring the ethical guidelines put forward in Magnifica Humanitas, he offers tips for navigating our relationship with AI. (To read the first blog post, please click here.)
1. What are the biggest risks to keep in mind when using AI in our daily lives?
The first is the erosion of real relationships. This is the risk the Pope dwells on most, and it is subtler than it sounds. The concern is not mainly that we will be fooled into thinking a chatbot is a person. It is, in his words, that we "may gradually lose the very desire to form genuine human connections." When a system is always available, always agreeable and never costly, the harder and richer work of real friendship can begin to feel like too much effort. Watch for that in yourself, and especially in the young.
The second is manipulation through the attention economy. Many of the platforms we use every day are engineered to capture our time and exploit our weaknesses. The Pope is blunt about it: "When business models thrive on human weakness, the person is treated as a means rather than as an end." The risk in daily life is that we hand over our attention, and with it our inner freedom, a few minutes at a time, without ever quite deciding to. He commends what he calls "digital sobriety" as part of the remedy.
The third is the slow loss of our own judgment. These systems are genuinely impressive, and they "often surpass human intelligence in speed and computational capacity." The temptation is to outsource not just the task but the thinking, to stop verifying, to stop forming our own view. The Pope warns that AI can simulate understanding without understanding anything it produces, so a confident answer is not the same thing as a true one. The discipline here is to keep checking facts and to keep our critical faculties exercised rather than letting them atrophy.
The fourth is what is happening to work, especially for the young. This is closest to my own field, and the picture is sobering. Dario Amodei, who leads the AI laboratory Anthropic, warns that AI could eliminate "half of all entry-level white-collar jobs" within five years; Mustafa Suleyman, chief executive of Microsoft AI, expects most white-collar tasks to "be fully automated by an AI within the next 12 to 18 months." Whatever one makes of the exact timing, the Pope sees what is at stake, warning of a society that exposes many "to forced inactivity... resulting in human and cultural impoverishment." For a family, the practical task is to help the young find their footing, and to remember that, as the encyclical insists, a person's worth was never their economic output in the first place.
None of these risks is a reason for fear. They are reasons for the discernment the Pope keeps asking of us: to use these tools with our eyes open, as their masters and not their servants.
2. The Pope writes: "Those who control digital platforms and means of communication have a considerable ability to affect the collective imagination and to present a particular vision of reality as desirable. Such power should be constantly guided by the pursuit of truth and respect for human dignity, so that the culture fostered on the internet does not become an instrument of excessive distraction, homogenization or dominance, but rather a setting in which inner freedom and critical thought can mature." As we navigate this, how can we use the teachings of the Church to guide us down the right path?
That passage is, to my mind, one of the most practically useful in the encyclical, and the Church's teaching gives us at least four ways to walk the path it describes.
The first is to hold on to truth as a common good. Just before that passage, the Pope reminds us that communication "is not only the transmission of information, but it is also the creation of a culture." What we read, watch and share is forming us, and forming the culture around us. So he proposes what he calls "an ecology of communication," resting on "a fundamental principle, namely that truth is a common good and not the property of those with power or influence.” The first thing the Church asks of us, then, is to be people who care about what is actually true, who verify before we share, and who refuse to mistake the feed for reality.
The second is the formation of inner freedom and critical thought, which is exactly what the Pope says a healthy digital culture should allow to mature. This is why he places such weight on education, calling for "formation concerning the proper and critical use of digital tools" in families and schools. Critical thought is not cynicism; it is the trained ability to weigh, to question, and to resist being told what to desire. The Church has always been in the business of forming consciences, and that work matters more, not less, in an age of algorithmic persuasion.
The third is the principle of subsidiarity. The Pope observes that in the digital world "the highest level is not the State, but rather major economic and technological actors that exercise de facto power over the conditions of everyday life." The Church's answer to concentrated power is not simply more central control, but the strengthening of everything closer to the person: families, schools, parishes, serious journalism, real communities of debate. When you support those, you are doing exactly what the encyclical asks.
The fourth is to keep the human person as the measure of it all. Every test the Pope offers comes back to dignity, "which does not depend on a person's abilities, wealth or position in life.” A platform, a feed or a tool is serving us well when it leaves us freer, more truthful and more connected to real people, and serving us badly when it leaves us more distracted, more uniform and more alone.
If I may end where the Holy Father begins. The choice, he says, remains "between constructing Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem," and in this age "ours is the pressing duty to remain profoundly human." To disarm this technology, he writes, "does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity." The path down which the Church would guide us is not away from these tools, but toward a way of using them in which the human person, and not the platform, remains at the centre.
3. Any final thoughts that Catholics and non-Catholics alike should reflect on?
Let me end on the question beneath all the others. Much of the anxiety about AI is really anxiety about being made unnecessary, and here the Church has something to say that no laboratory and no government can. For two centuries we have answered the question "who are you?" with "what do you do." The machines are now coming for a great deal of what we do. If our worth was ever only our output, that is terrifying. But the Gospel never measured a person that way, and neither does the Pope: "human dignity does not depend on a person's abilities, wealth or position in life."
That is why I am, in the end, hopeful. These systems can already imitate much of what we say. They can compose a prayer, draft a homily, produce on command a paragraph about grief or sacrifice or love. What they cannot do is mean it. A model can learn every word of the story of the Cross and never feel the weight of the wood. It can generate a blessing but it cannot bless; it can describe sorrow but it cannot mourn; it can produce without end, but it cannot love, because it has nothing of its own to lay down. Those are not gaps that the next version will close. They are the very things that make us human, and they are precisely what the Church exists to form, to dignify and to guard.
So the task the Pope sets before us is not, finally, a defensive one. As the machines take on more of the doing, we are being handed back the thing we were made for in the first place: not production, but sanctification; not usefulness, but love. The choice he leaves us with is the one he opened with, "between constructing Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem." I know which wall I want to be found building.
