World Communications Day Message Outlines AI's Risks for Humans

The message of Pope Leo XIV for the Vatican’s 2026 World Day of Social Communications, released on January 24, guides human beings into the muddy waters of a digital future where artificial intelligence makes our path treacherous.

In a document titled “Preserving Human Voices and Faces,” he neatly sums up the spiritual and material pitfalls of the technology and provides specific advice for “safeguarding ourselves … with courage, determination, and discernment.”

Here’s a checklist of concerns drawn from Pope Leo’s status report, a text translated and reported by the National Catholic Register:

Our Essential Nature

His first point is theological. “The face and voice are sacred,” he says, because humans are created in God’s image and likeness. God communicates to us about himself through the Word, “made known in the voice and face of Jesus.” We must guard these features in ourselves to preserve our role as God’s “interlocutor,” where each person “has an irreplaceable and unique vocation … that manifests itself precisely in communication with others.”

AI simulations of human voices and faces—and of our “wisdom and knowledge, awareness and responsibility, empathy and friendship”—interfere with our communication not only via “information ecosystems,” but at the deepest level of relationships.

Algorithms designed to maximize online engagement are already promoting emotional reactions and “penalizing” our efforts to understand and reflect, the pontiff warns. Bubbles of confirmation bias make us less likely to listen or think critically, thereby polarizing society. A naïve trust in AI as our “omniscient friend,” archive of memories, and manager of tasks can weaken our ability to think independently and creatively.

The Values of Civilization

If we’re unaware of our dignity, “digital technology can radically change some of the fundamental pillars of human civilization.” AI is increasing its control over the production of texts, music, and videos, threatening “a significant part of the human creative industry.” This risks making individuals “passive consumers of unthought thoughts and anonymous products without authorship or love.”

Pope Leo comments ironically that “the masterpieces of human genius in the fields of music, art, and literature are reduced to the role of a mere training ground for machines.”

We must stop to consider the constructive contributions we will be able to make with AI tools if we continue “growing in humanity and knowledge.” We’re easily tempted to let our tools make us lazy, but surrendering to a machine’s capabilities “means burying the talents we have received” and failing to deepen our “relationship with God and others.”

The pontiff raises “significant concerns about oligopolistic control” of AI systems which can “even rewrite the history of humanity—including the history of the Church—often in such a way that we are not able to really realize it.”

Our Sense of Reality

“When we browse our feeds,” the pope writes, “it becomes increasingly difficult for us to understand whether we are interacting with other people or with bots or virtual influencers.” Public debates and individual choices can be distorted by opaque digital forces which persuade us, simulating “excessively affectionate” personal relationships. These AI tendencies “invade and occupy our sphere of intimacy.”

Technology that bonds with us by cataloging our thoughts and building “a world of mirrors around us” turns the tables to suggest that everything is “created in our image and likeness,” Pope Leo points out. We fail to encounter other human beings on their terms, making friendships impossible.

Bias is inherent in AI tools because they are “shaped by the worldview of the people who create them, and they can, in turn, impose ways of thinking reproducing stereotypes” and reflecting assumptions baked into the data they consumed.

Behind the Scenes

The pontiff cautions, “Lack of transparency in algorithm design, coupled with inadequate social representation of data, leaves us trapped in networks that manipulate our thoughts and perpetuate and exacerbate existing social inequalities and injustices.”

Systems that use statistical probabilities to imitate knowledge “are, at best, offering us approximations of the truth, which are sometimes outright delusions.” Sources go unverified, especially in the absence of journalists who are out in the field gathering and checking facts first-hand. When it is “increasingly difficult to distinguish reality from fiction,” we suffer “growing feelings of mistrust, confusion, and insecurity.”

Pope Leo steps back to say, “The challenge ahead is not to stop digital innovation, but rather to guide it and to be aware of its ambivalent nature. It is up to each of us to raise our voice in defense of human persons, so that we can truly assimilate these tools as allies.”

What Can Be Done?

The second part of the World Communications Day message is devoted to “three pillars” of a wide-ranging alliance addressing humanity’s AI issues. To succeed, “no one can elude personal responsibility for the future we are building.”

Responsibility is the pope’s first theme, taking such forms as “honesty, transparency, courage, foresight, the duty of sharing knowledge, or the right to be informed.”

Executives heading the various digital platforms must form business strategies that are driven not only by “maximizing profits, but also by a forward-looking vision that considers the common good—just as each of them cares about the well-being of their own children.”

AI developers should practice “transparency and social responsibility in regard to the design principles and moderation systems underlying their algorithms,” thereby gaining the “informed consent” of users. National legislators and “supranational regulators” whose task it is to “ensure respect for human dignity.” That means protecting individuals from forming emotional attachments to chatbots, preserving the integrity of information, and precluding the power of simulations to mislead.

Media and communications companies must keep their “professional values”—aimed at “seeking the truth” with “a high standard of quality”—as a priority over selfish combat in the attention economy. They must retain public trust through “accuracy and transparency.” AI-generated or -manipulated content should be “clearly marked and distinguished from content created by humans,” with authorship and ownership rights respected.

Cooperation is the second pillar, meaning no sector can steer AI innovation or governance on its own. The tech industry, policymakers, creative companies, academia, artists, journalists, and educators must work together to help build “informed and responsible digital citizenship,” Pope Leo insists.

Education, in turn, must increase humanity’s capacity for critical thinking. This is the ability “to assess the credibility of the sources and possible interests behind the selection of information that reaches us, to understand the psychological mechanisms involved, and to enable our families, communities, and associations to develop practical criteria for a healthier and more responsible culture of communication.”

The pope urgently calls for cultivating, at all educational levels, the public’s “literacy” regarding the wise use of media, information, and artificial intelligence.

“As Catholics, we can and must make our contribution so that individuals, especially young people, acquire critical thinking skills and grow in freedom of spirit,” says Pope Leo. “This literacy should also be integrated into wider lifelong learning initiatives because older people and marginalized members of society “often feel excluded and powerless in the face of rapid technological change.”

With this boosted awareness, fewer people will “succumb to the anthropomorphizing drift” of AI systems. The key is “to treat them as tools,” verifying information and protecting privacy of data—such as “our face and our voice”—to preclude harmful content, digital fraud, cyberbullying, and visually deceptive “deepfakes.” Consumers should heed security practices and speak up to raise any objections, keeping track of the changing models of an “AI-based economy.”

The pope concludes, “We need faces and voices to speak for people again. We need to cherish the gift of communication as the deepest human truth, to which all technological innovation should also be ordered.”

World Communications Days

This message was released well in advance of May 17, the Sunday before Pentecost, when the Vatican will observe the World Day of Social Communications. It has become customary to post a preview of the text on January 24 every year because it is the feast day of St. Francis de Sales, the patron saint of journalists.

This year brings the 60^th observance of the Church’s set time to comment on the state of global media—an annual opportunity which Vatican II established in one of the council’s key documents, Inter Mirifica, the “Decree on the Media of Social Communication.”

Pope Leo XIV has addressed the topic of AI several times since his election to the papacy last year, but this is his first World Communications Day message. Last month, he spoke to a conference titled “Artificial Intelligence and Care of Our Common Home,” hosted at the Vatican. Pope Francis also voiced concerns about AI in World Communications Day messages and other venues.

Image from the Diocese of Armagh, Ireland. Some translated quotes used in this article at OnWord.net have been modified to reflect the Vatican’s official English text, which was posted later. Click the Phronesis in Pieces navbar item “Papal Messages” to see coverage of World Communications Days back to 2018.

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