I’ve been writing a response to the Papal encyclical on AI. Here it is.
I made a bluesky thread summarizing it if you prefer:
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He turns specifically to this passage, a favorite of evangelical fundamentalists, to emphasize the necessity of belief in Christ
That is interesting. In an American Pope, the Church is getting some evangelical cross-pollination? 
Something historians will be writing about for sure!
Yet it would be unthinkable for me to begin a work with that message.
Well, technically, an Encyclical is addressed only to the Bishops and through them to the Catholic faithful. Given that audience, I read it as a reminder of their shared beliefs and common ground before getting to the more spicy subject at hand. While you might never hesitate to simply jump straight into a controversy, his is not a bad rhetorical strategy.
The problem is rather that a letter specifically addressed to the Bishops of the Catholic Church is then marketed by the Church as if it is relevant to “all of humanity.” This slippage between the (elite, male) “shepherds” standing in for the “flock” of the faithful, who are seen as representing the whole of humanity shows the hierarchy that they think in.
If a person chooses to act along lines condemned by the Catholic Church—for example, by failing to worship the required god, or by loving someone of the same sex—they lose their moral dignity and diminish their humanity. This doctrine, reasserted in 2024, provides a throughline from the Doctrine of Discovery to the encyclical
Exactly. This is the fundamental problem with an “outsiders are eternally damned” theology. You force yourself into a position of calling certain people inferior, subhuman. No matter how much you try to “well, actually” a different category of “dignity” on top of it, you always end up with a two-tiered system of dignity which isn’t that “universal” after all.
And yes, when Theravādins do it it’s just as reprehensible.
These ketamine-induced narcissistic delusions characterize a culture dissociated from reality, grown unhinged, decadent, and extremely dangerous.
The pope should have just come out and called for governments to confiscate these guys’ wealth in order to save their souls 
Camels and needles and give unto Caesar and all that. 
That would have been much more fun!
ignores the entire field of AI criticism, while silently adopting their arguments as his own
An excellent point. What are they afraid of?
“chose homogenization over communion”
I’m surprised you didn’t point out the irony here that the patriarch of an evangelical religion which preaches the inferiority and eternal damnation of outsiders is chastising Silicon Valley for being insufficiently pluralistic.
an invasion of their lands by a people absent for generations, sponsored by the mighty Babylonians.
Well played, sir!
pleas for moderation when what is needed is the overturning of the tables.
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That’s my suspicion. I wondered whether he opened in this way to appeal to those who dismiss him as a woke Pope.
But I mean.
I really don’t know, it’s puzzling to me. He has whole departments, he could have just said, “we need some citations” and they’d be added in a morning.
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Well, it might be, but I doubt this is the case with the Pope’s citing of John 14.6. Post-Vatican II Catholics, influenced by encyclicals like Lumen gentium, don’t normally read this verse in the way that it’s read by evangelical or fundamentalist Protestants.
Whereas the Protestants will take the “…except through me” part to mean that everyone who dies as a non-Christian is damned, for Catholics it means that even when a non-Christian is saved (which Lumen gentium grants is possible) it should still be understood as having come about through the grace of Christ.
So though both readings are in a sense exclusivist, the Catholic one is much less sharp in its boundaries.
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Great essay, bhante. The arguments and information used here are good enough that I’m already considering using this as a source to dissuade people from supporting/using AI in and of itself.
I never got around to reading his article in full but the fact he seemed to have only cited one Saint that wasn’t a pope (iirc St Augustine, and only once) and only seemed to talk about its downsides in particular areas made me skeptical of it and the generally very positive reception it’s had.
But I do have a serious gripe with the language used in this particular section:
These ketamine-induced narcissistic delusions characterize a culture dissociated from reality, grown unhinged, decadent, and extremely dangerous.
I think the language and sentiment here is genuinely ableist (something otherwise completely out of character for the essay), and it made it kind of hard for me to take the rest of the article seriously.
Going out of order:
narcissistic
The term ‘narcissistic’ has historically been used exactly as you use it here, and long before it was ever used to name Narcissistic Personality Disorder (presumably because its connotations do generally fit the symptoms). But today the term ‘narcissist’ also means ‘a person with NPD’ and using it and/or the related ‘narcissistic’ unintentionally contributes to a widespread conflation of the terms in people’s minds which has helped shape pop psych notions of narcissists as ontologically evil, abusive people with no regard for others and no intention to self-improve rather than as real people with a debilitating mental illness.
Consider the colloquial use of terms like ‘psycho’ (for ‘crazy’), ‘sociopath’ (for ‘an unempathetic, self-interested person’), ‘bipolar’ (for ‘erratic’), and to a lesser extent the more opaque ‘OCD’ (for ‘perfectionist/ism’), ADHD (for ‘inattentive’ or ‘hyperactive’) and autistic (for ‘stupid’ or ‘socially unaware’) and how those contribute to the oversimplification of those diagnoses of ASPD, BD, OCD, ADHD and ASD respectively as well as the dehumanisation, stigmatisation and in some cases demonisation of individuals with those diagnoses.
You bring up in your essay that people tend to view AI as a tool, and view the ethical consequences of the tool and their use of the tool as separate because it falls outside the responsibility of the user.
I think a similar mindset is often applied to language, which is a tool like any other, and like AI use this can occur even if the individual in question thinks they really are conscious of the ethical implications of their actions (in this case, actions by mind). But regardless of whether you think one word was really worth all this fuss, people do make mental associations based on how and where people use terms, and normalising the use of the term in this context does have a very real effect on people with NPD.
I’ve known people with NPD! I’ve known the people who are affected by the terms being used like this, and I know how strongly they feel about their use because of the undue stigmatisation and stereotyping of the disorder that comes from it.
ketamine-induced
I also think that your coarse allusion to Elon Musk’s ketamine addiction here is directly ableist toward those who struggle with drug addiction (that is, Substance Abuse Disorder). I personally struggle with self-harm and have gone through periods of addiction thereto, and seeing this dismissive treatment of those struggling with addiction, especially expressed by a respected monk and ostensibly a moral authority, is particularly disappointing to me. I don’t think even the fact that the people in question are essentially modern-day supervillains makes their addictions something to diminish and point to as a direct cause of their actions. The three poisons are right there!
delusions
I don’t know if the use of ‘delusion’ here is ableist in and of itself, but the terms ‘delusion’ and ‘delusional’ have ableist connotations because they contribute to a greater semantic broadening/simplification of the term which unintentionally puts down people who experience delusions as part of a mental illness, brain trauma, etc. and leads to people thinking delusions are their fault or something to be fixed as they would be if they fit the way they themselves use it. Putting this right next to other language inextricably linked to mental illness certainly doesn’t help isolate it from this connotation.
So, it would be good to reconfigure this section so as to avoid ableist language and emphasise a more cogent point that doesn’t deride people for their addictions, like how Musk’s ketamine addiction goes against the facade he tries (and fails) to keep up of a strong, smart, put-together ‘great man’ as part of his patriarchal, fascistic emphasis on his personal traits and betrays the fact that he is really weak-willed, impulsive and completely ordinary, rather than (hyperbolically?) blaming it for his and others’ ‘narcissistic delusions’.
I don’t know. I’m aware this probably sounds like hypersensitive nitpicking but I do feel like this kind of thing has very real impacts.
I don’t think this was intentional, but unfortunately using language like this can have unintentional consequences that go past your original intent and as Buddhists we should probably try our best to avoid language that contributes to the diminishment of mental illnesses and their symptoms.
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Thanks for that clarification.
I appreciate the feedback, but I honestly feel that there reaches a point where language itself is disabled. This isn’t a passage about addiction or mental illness, it’s about “a culture”. Unless you have a concrete suggestion, I’ll leave it as is.
Incidentally, if you haven’t read the linked essay, I highly recommend it.
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Having finished reading the entire essay,I found many things in it that were eye opening to me, as a former devout christian.
I’s quite striking to take a second look at some of the stories presented in the Bible, and do it as someone who does not identify with the perspective from which they were written.
Thank you, bhante
With metta, in gassho
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Me too! I’ve read the Bible before, but a long time ago, and couldn’t recall anything about Nehemia specifically. In fact I almost ignored that part of the encyclical, taking it on face value, then I thought, hmm, might as well check it out.
Acc. to Biblical scholars, it’s likely the first exile of the Israelites to Egypt was purely mythical, whereas the Babylonian exile—which happened around the time of the Buddha—was real.
I used to be a Jehovah’s Witness. I used to know the Bible inside-out.. I have to admit, after 25 years, I’ve forgotten much.
You made some fantastic points in there in the Tower of Babel section, and the Nehemia part.
Coincidentally, I just saw a small snippet of an interview with the lady they call the mother of the settlement movement (or something like that) in Israel, and when asked about the palestinians, her answer was that there is a clear protocol regarding that: what Joshua did.. fight everyone who wants to fight, displace those who reject the sovereignty of the government and the rest, can stay if they obey.. 
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really. ok.
Right. The thing is, the story of Nehemia, i.e. the second arrival of Israelites in Jerusalem, is dubious, but the first incursion under Joshua is truly horrifying. It’s systematically pro-genocide.
all the Israelites returned to Ai and killed those who were in it. Twelve thousand men and women fell that day—all the people of Ai.
That day Joshua took Makkedah. He put the city and its king to the sword and totally destroyed everyone in it. He left no survivors.
And so for Libnah, Lachish, Gezer, Eglon, Debir, Negev, and on and on the slaughter goes. It’s the most vile text imaginable, no concern for the people there at all. It’s not like, say. the Mahabharata, which ultimately justifies war, but only after agonizing endlessly over the morality of killing.
It gets worse: the aggression of the local people was deliberately caused by Yahweh so he’d have an excuse to kill them all (Joshua 11:20). That’s how the “chosen people” got their holy land.
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Yep.. and apparently, that’s the blueprint for what’s happening now or what they want to accomplish…
Thank you, Bhante.
I believe the Buddha was the greatest being who ever lived; that his virtue, compassion, and wisdom supersede that of any god; that his path leads to a truly transcendent liberation ungraspable by a theist trapped in the illusion of eternal existence. Yet it would be unthinkable for me to begin a work with that message.
It’s disappointing to me that the Silicon Valley bros (and their enablers) largely ignore the Buddhist position when they fashion their platforms for ethical discussions. Some will argue that this is a false characterization.
However I’ve not observed the Buddhist position represented – the Buddhist lens which you speak to in the essay. American Buddhists who are now speaking about AI (including some Theravada monastics) seem to do it gingerly and as if they have not thought through what’s going on here. Frankly they seem like they’re in la-la land and I’m having a tough time respecting their voice.
Likely there is a co-dependent relationship happening between monastic centers and financial supporters whose income derives from high-tech. I’m not saying anything new. Anything high-tech now requires using AI as a work tool at least. As a federal government contractor, I am required to take an AI training within the next few weeks as a condition for retaining my clearance. Thankfully not a federal employee anymore or I would have to speak to it in annual performance reviews.
This is not a “both sides” situation. Buddhists are not in a symmetrical relationship with colonizing religions. We did not invade Christian countries. Nor did we subjugate their peoples, destroy their civilizations, rape their women and children, genocide their population, or steal their wealth. We committed no offence or crime against them. We simply rejected their god, and that was quite enough.
The ongoing interfaith movement here in the US comes from the progressives. Ironically, the only way a Buddhist can show up is if they talk in secular terms around compassion or social injustice – they can’t talk on their own terms. No one talks to the elephant in the room which is that Christianity could never be in a symmetrical relationship with Buddhism and vice versa for the reasons you state and a handful of others. If AI were to show up on the agenda, the elephant would darken and honest conversations would have to happen.
Yet the Dignitas infinita thinks of us only as candidates for conversion.
Progressive Christians who increasingly refer to themselves as ex-evangelicals are probing for ways to disavow themselves of the conversion mandate. But, as hard as one tries, it’s nearly impossible to read the four gospels and not read the subtle (if not obvious) mandate to obtain the eternal, personality-driven heavenly state of existence. The “or else” part figures prominently in the first three and becomes hazy in the gospel of John. I doubt the historical Jesus spoke this way.
I also recognize that those texts were not written to offer a systematic and liberating practice for freedom from suffering. I mean, the historical Jesus came from the Jewish tradition which does not offer that or even pretend to.
I don’t even regard the Pauline theology the same as what we glimpse in the gospels. Unfortunately it’s the Pauline religion that claimed authority and devolved into the tyrannical Roman Catholic church. No, it’s not evangelical but the conversion mandate is core to the whole thing.
It preserves in an amber of silicon the bigotries of yesterday.
Thank you.
They want to return to the Doctrine of Discovery and treat the whole world, and indeed the Universe, as resources for their extraction. AI gives them the tool they need. This is why I believe the Magnifica humanitas fails. It expresses grave moral concerns regarding AI in fields as diverse as employment, democracy, education, warfare, ecology, family, slavery, and society. These moral concerns are real and by themselves should be more than enough to reject the technology. Yet they are merely symptoms of an underlying drive called by the Buddha vibhavataṇhā, the “craving for annihilation”. The AI field, uniquely among all the endeavors of humanity, is obsessed with building the technology that will annihilate humanity and replace it with a machine. This, surely, is the gravest heresy possible, yet the Magnifica humanitas alludes to it only vaguely under the rubric of transhumanism and posthumanism.
I’m so done with the “tool” analogies. Here is where you pivot from the Stochastic Parrots essays and plainly state rejection. Unless I’m missing something? I realize that those essays started with the case for making SuttaCentral 100% AI-free. Then you build a case for regulation (toward the end). But this feels like a pivot. I for one am happy with it (if I’m reading you correctly).
These ketamine induced narcissistic delusions characterize a culture dissociated from reality, grown unhinged, decadent, and extremely dangerous
I read the Taija Mars McDougall article you linked to. I am stunned. I really had no idea about what that drug does. It’s more than unsettling that Elon Musk AKA world leader wannabe take-no-prisoners I-am-god-guy is moving chess pieces while under the influence of this drug.
Leo chose to present the encyclical alongside a co-founder of Anthropic, Chris Olah, whose wealth as of writing is listed by Forbes at 1.2 billion just last year. The other Anthropic co-founders all show a similar trajectory. Anthropic’s presence aligns with its marketing as the “ethical” AI firm, but in reality it is every bit as catastrophic as any other AI
I am, well, speechless. I didn’t know this. How could this be? I have to remind myself that Leo was not simply a parish priest in a small Peruvian town. He has always been a mover and a shaker in Roman Catholicism. He is American. One cannot ignore the potentiality of AI bro money sponsoring the Roman Catholic enterprise. Even the US Vice President wants in. Heck, young bro priests are now starting to infiltrate US parishes with their potent macho messages for white men who seem lost.
…courting them at a “nominal cost” of $1/year, claiming they “worked proactively to deploy our models to the Department of War and the intelligence community”.
Yes, this is the outdated US federal procurement rule that the government can’t buy anything for free. So just buy it for $1. (Literally, it’s the standard.)
AI defenders often argue that it is “just a tool”, falsely implying that a tool is somehow ethically neutral. The encyclical rightly criticizes this notion:
The Pope’s text calls not for abolition of AI but for governance. Not for demolishing the Tower of Babel, but for health and safety regulations so it is built properly. In this, he aligns himself with the “responsible” wing of the AI industry, including Anthropic itself. The call for regulation is a fig leaf, a cover to create the illusion of responsibility, while allowing the AI industry to proceed with its manifestly irresponsible goals.
Also, the Pope trying to reconcile the Hebrew Bible with its personality-driven divine tribal preferences and governance “methods” with the gospel of John seems like a slippery slope. They just don’t mesh well. For certain the Hebrew Bible doesn’t mesh well with the Pauline religion – in effect, what is the basis for Roman Catholicism.
When they say that AI is inevitable, they are saying that humanity has no choice. I reject this—it is the logic of an abuser. We cannot prevent the harms of AI so long as we debate on their terms.
Thank you.
Is the AI industry not simply one den of thieves, whose sole form of income is the appropriation of the work of others? Should we not bar them from using humanity to traffic their wares?
The historical Jesus I respect is this one, the one who tore through that materialist so-called temple. As well as the one who responded to women so tenderly.
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Hi, Bhante 
As a criticism of Christianity, of unethical views held by the Catholic church, or of the pope’s takes on artificial intelligence for their merits as such, the article seems fair enough. The objections at the beginning, on the other hand, seem misplaced.
Please forgive me, but I’m a bit baffled that at the outset the article seems to critique the pope of the Catholic church for making Christian arguments in an address to Christians? Is the pope not allowed to cite Christian scripture from a Christian perspective? He’s not a secular leader. Of course, one can rightly critique the position of pope and so on. But that is not how the article frames its initial objection.
The qualms with citing John are also, with all due respect, frankly strange. Christians are free to believe that the gospel of John is divinely inspired no matter the precise authorship or date of the text, just as Buddhists are free to believe that Buddhist scriptures contain genuine conversations originating from divine beings that historians would not corroborate. It is much more reasonable to presume that the pope believes this standard doctrine than to position him as even somewhat deceptively quoting a Johannian passage. Text-critical and historical methodologies are limited in scope. They conduct research only under certain parameters and as such can only offer evidence for hypotheses fitted to those methods, which do not include arguing for or against the divine inspiration behind a text’s human authorship.
The majority of Biblical scholarship has been and continues to be conducted by believing Christians, many of whom believe that the holy spirit inspired and guided the hands of human authors, despite the limitations placed upon those authors by time, place, and so on. From a Christian perspective, there’s no reason to think that the synoptic gospels are not simply intended to present a different theological message than John and vice versa, alongside a plethora of other theories that would justify John as reliable scripture without denying Biblical scholarship.
All of this is to say that, whereas the article essentially accuses the pope of bad faith in citing scripture, this appears to reveal itself under scrutiny as just another plain qualm with standard Christian beliefs argued for under an unfair guise.
I’m not a Christian, obviously. But I sincerely find it perplexing that the literal pope would be criticized just for the mere fact of doing, y’know, his job? Right from the beginning, the article seems shocked and offended that this Christian epistle addressed to Christians by a Christian makes an argument with Christian axioms. And again, I’m not saying we can’t critique the job of the pope as such.
I imagine the piece would cohere better if it simply addressed the points in and of themselves, either as a critique of Christianity, of the AI arguments, or both. It’s compelling and useful to read a Buddhist perspective on problematic views and practices in the church. This would make the properly argued points stronger, within the domain that your opinion can best offer, rather than making what seem to be no more than unfair accusations of deceit and lack of scope in an intentionally focused document.
With metta! 
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literal pope would be criticized just for the mere fact of doing, y’know, his job?
This might be an Australian think I don’t know how catholic appears elsewhere but like in whispers around my family I heard it said you would vote labor and criticise the pope - like it was part of the keeping faith. At least in my family that was a thing. (criticising the pope for the mere fact of being the pope).
Around the dinner table, sure! We can have fun and get upset But when writing an essay, to start out by insinuating something along the lines of “Can you believe the pope cites scripture that Buddhists don’t find authoritative???” is not particularly convincing, especially when followed by an uninformed theological criticism of the scripture itself. But hey, I’m just giving honest feedback that I think would help the essay. Since Bhante seems unafraid to dish it, I trust he can take some as well 
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That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that starting with an exclusivist and supremacist message is a choice. And I explain the background because most Buddhists don’t know that stuff. The argument is not that the Pope is citing things I disagree with, the argument is that he chooses to align himself with a thread that connects to colonialism and from there to AI extractivism.
Yes, that’s been my experience. There’s a lack of moral clarity. Not saying that’s everyone of course. I don’t really know much about what’s happening. But so far as I’ve seen that’s the case.
If anyone wants a letter of religious exemption from workplace AI, I’m happy to write one.
Interesting, it’s not exactly the same here in Oz. Basically, what happened was the right (which we call “Liberals”) opposed multiculturalism. But once we had a whole bunch of people here from different backgrounds, they realized that many of them have conservative social views. So having done everything to keep them out, they then started talking to them about same sex marriage. So now a lot of interfaith events are actually co-opted by the right, things like pro-Zionism, anti-women’s rights, trans erasure, etc. Not all, but I’d say half.
So now I’ve learned to be wary of being drawn into agendas like this.
Yes, my position has evolved. Every day I seem to come across another AI absurdity and get more confirmed in my belief. On the one hand, regulation is better than nothing. But i really think we need a Butlerian Jihad, better sooner than later.
Me too, it’s one of those pieces of writing that stick with you. I read it when it came out, then looked it up and reread it a few time. Positively haunting.
It’s not as if they don’t know. Of course they do, they’re the Vatican!
Sure, yes, it’s everywhere.
Ugg.
I get why he’s doing it. There’s been a conscious push among Christian to rehabilitate the Hebrew Bible, to counteract the lazy denigration of the “Old Testament”. But yeah, a puzzling choice.
I hope so! That episode is recorded in all the Gospels, so it’s likely to be true.
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Thank you for sharing the link, Bhante. As always, your article was an absorbing read. I agreed with your critique of the current Pope’s privileging of Christians. However, perhaps it tilted by an epsilon in the direction of privileging the Buddhist faith. Our fingernails aren’t that clean either. Does any religious group have sufficiently clean fingernails to sit in moral judgment of others?
I disagreed with your AI critique: You begin with:
“AI is forever rooted in the past. Its input is, by definition, old data, representations of stale reality. And this is why its output is relentlessly misogynistic, racist, and transphobic. It preserves in an amber of silicon the bigotries of yesterday. That is its function. And that is why it is marketed as the future, while being embraced by ever more extreme conservatives who long to return to the slave-owning, colonizing, woman-subjugating past of their imagination, when trans people magically disappeared and brown people were ground underfoot, and antediluvian patriarchy reigned supreme over humanity’s moral horizons.”
How is AI forever rooted in the past? The raw content is updated continuously. The world changes; the LLM has to reflect those changes, otherwise it would be of no use to anyone. Do I not read Dickens , Darwin and the Madhyamaka because they are rooted in the past?
And about “relentlessly misogynistic, racist, and transphobic”. Relentlessly? It is precisely because the first chat AIs (Microsoft’s infamous Tay & Sydney) exhibited these tendencies that the current programs have guardrails. These safeguards aren’t all that reliable and they are very much dependent on human curation, but they have made LLMs safe enough to use for a great many things. For example, it takes considerable effort to extract information on committing suicide. Anyone asking an LLM about trans rights or LGBTQ+ oppression will probably get far more thoughtful answers than if they were to ask their friends, elders, or so-called religious leaders.
Agreed, many biases and harmful stereotypes are echoed in the program’s answers. Such echoes are also found in the Pope’s encyclical, in the Oxford English Dictionary, in religious holy books, in parental instruction, in school education, in company policies and national obsessions. It is also found in Buddhist teachings. Should we do away with all these institutions? Or do we trust that people, properly loved and given moral guidance, will leave the world better than they found it?
Of course, if stoning people or witch-drowning or bear-baiting once again becomes socially approved, then LLMs will adjust to reflect that moral change. That is what these clumsy quicksilver dumb brilliant programs are: a mirror of our human knowledge, interests, histories, strengths and frailties. If the mirror shows the person standing before it, is the solution to shatter the mirror and abuse its manufacturers?