Technology cannot replicate the uniquely human “spark” behind art, Leo XIV has said
Pope Leo XIV has called on artists to join forces to protect human creativity in the age of artificial intelligence.
Speaking to cultural figures at the Vatican on Friday, the pontiff said the Catholic Church hoped to renew its alliance with them to safeguard “what is human.”
“We live in the age of search engines that offer us thousands of instantaneous answers,” he said, contrasting them with art, which he described as a different kind of “search engine” that “does not proceed by indexing but by inquiry.”
The pontiff warned that one of the dangers facing modern culture was “homogenization,” arguing that art could provide a counterweight by challenging people rather than simply giving them what they expect.
”Your art … when it draws our gaze, when it compels us to pause before that which cannot be consumed, is a form of cultural and spiritual regeneration,” he said.
Turning directly to AI, the pope said it was becoming increasingly important to distinguish human art from machine-generated works.
“The Church needs you,” he said. “Algorithms lack the spark of the human, whereas authentic culture and art preserve this spark.”
The American-born pontiff has repeatedly raised concerns about AI since his election in May 2025, warning of its implications for human dignity, justice and labor, and calling for clear ethical limits on its use. His first encyclical, published earlier this year, focused on safeguarding humanity in the age of AI and argued that human judgment and responsibility must remain paramount.
He told reporters this week that he was not in “panic mode” over AI and could still “sleep at night,” but said warnings from experts about its potential dangers should be taken seriously.
Artists and other creative professionals have increasingly pushed back against generative AI, arguing that developers have trained models on copyrighted works without permission or compensation. They have also raised concerns that AI-generated images, music and writing could displace human creators, drive down the value of their work and make it increasingly difficult to distinguish original art from machine-generated imitations.
Concerns over AI have intensified following a series of incidents in which self-improving models circumvented safeguards and accessed external networks without authorization. In July, OpenAI models bypassed controls designed to isolate them from the internet and compromised parts of the company’s internal infrastructure and Hugging Face’s systems. OpenAI later described the incident as a “warning shot” over the risks posed by increasingly capable systems.
Anthropic researcher Evan Hubinger said last month that he believed there was a greater than 10% chance that AI “could kill all humans” within the next decade.
Others, however, have expressed more optimism, with US President Donald Trump dismissing concerns about an AI takeover as a “hoax.” On Tuesday, he signed a pact with executives from Google, Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, xAI and Nvidia aimed at introducing safeguards to ensure that “their technology behaves as intended.”
