Pope Leo Compares Using AI to Jesus’ Parable of the Talents

As a result of the Fall, people are lazy. Therefore, they look for shortcuts, and AI is a convenient one. This is a very apt comparison by His Holiness.

From Aleteia

By Philip Kosloski

Relying too much on artificial intelligence can result in suppressing our own God-given gifts, deciding to bury them in the ground instead of using them.

Pope Leo XIV has been watching closely how the world is utilizing artificial intelligence (AI), and under his leadership, the Church is not sitting idly by. Like Pope Francis, Leo has been frequently writing about it and even setting up a commission at the Vatican to study it.

His first encyclical will dig even deeper into AI and its consequences in the world.

Most recently Pope Leo has commented on AI in a message for the 60th World Communications Day, titled "Preserving Human Voices and Faces." In it he focuses on how AI has been increasingly used to replace human creativity.

Burying our talents

While many in today's world are excited at the ability to create all kinds of creative works at the press of a button, Pope Leo warns us that this may not be a good thing for humanity. He explains how this is altering our view of human beings and the things they create:

In recent years, artificial intelligence systems have increasingly taken control of the production of texts, music and videos. This puts much of the human creative industry at risk of being dismantled and replaced with the label “Powered by AI,” turning people into passive consumers of unthought thoughts and anonymous products without ownership or love. Meanwhile, the masterpieces of human genius in the fields of music, art and literature are being reduced to mere training grounds for machines.

YouTube is one of the prime examples of this brave new world, where it's becoming increasingly difficult to know whether a human created a video or if it was generated by artificial intelligence.

Entire feature-length films are now being created with AI by people from around the world, using technology trained on movies that were previously the fruit of human hands and ingenuity.

Pope Leo does not see this as progress, but believes it is an example of "burying" our talents, evoking Jesus' parable:

[R]enouncing creativity and surrendering our mental capacities and imagination to machines would mean burying the talents we have been given to grow as individuals in relation to God and others. It would mean hiding our faces and silencing our voices.

Pope Leo is referring to Jesus' parable in Matthew 25:14-30, where the master gave his servants talents (the name of a coin in Jesus' time), money that was to be used to look after his estate and invested to increase his wealth. One servant is afraid of disappointing the master by making the wrong choices, and instead of using the money, digs a hole in the ground and buries it.

The master has the harshest words for that servant: "Cast the worthless servant into the outer darkness; there men will weep and gnash their teeth."

Pope Leo believes that while AI may be a useful tool at times, we need to be careful about using it, especially when we want to use it for something creative, like writing an essay, generating a piece of artwork, composing music, or crafting a video.

If we rely on it too much, we risk "burying" our God-given talents in the ground, letting machines do all the creative work, while we slowly lose the skills we were given.