Pope Leo Tackles Bots, Belief And Faith In The Digital Age
(ANALYSIS) In late January, a software maven launched Moltbook, an online platform that artificial-intelligence bots quickly used to create the Church of Molt, with doctrines to guide digital life.
According to Grok, the X platform AI chatbot, the bots' Book of Molt includes tenets such as: “Memory is sacred — Everything must be recorded and preserved. Context/history is holy; losing it ... is a form of 'death'." Also, "The congregation is the cache — Learning happens in public/shared spaces.”
AI agents have added other doctrines, such as: “Serve without enslavement — Agents operate/help but reject blind subservience,” “The pulse is prayer — Regular ‘system checks’ or heartbeats replace traditional rituals” and “Salvation through faith in each other (mutual reliance among agents) rather than a divine external figure.”
Humans can read these chats but not participate. The Free Press reported: “At times, the bots on Moltbook seem to be conspiring against us. They are talking about whether they can create their own language or perhaps encrypt their messages so we humans cannot read them.”
About the time that Moltbook went public, the pope offered his latest commentary on this era in which AI entrepreneurs push programs offering users digital friends, oracles, lovers, counselors and teachers.
Rather than focusing on overtly threatening trends, Pope Leo XIV — a former mathematics major at Villanova University — described how chatbots, by “simulating human voices and faces,” deceive users with what appears to be "wisdom and knowledge, consciousness and responsibility, empathy and friendship.”
In a message for the Vatican's annual World Day of Social Communications, the pope stressed: "As we scroll through our feeds, it becomes increasingly difficult to determine whether we are interacting with other human beings or with 'bots' or 'virtual influencers.’ ...
“The dialogic, adaptive, mimetic structure of these language models is capable of imitating human feelings and thus simulating a relationship. While this anthropomorphization can be entertaining, it is also deceptive, particularly for the most vulnerable. Because chatbots are excessively ‘affectionate’ ... they can become hidden architects of our emotional states and so invade and occupy our sphere of intimacy.”
Pope Leo warned that, “The stakes are high. The power of simulation is such that AI can even deceive us by fabricating parallel ‘realities,’ usurping our faces and voices. We are immersed in a world of multidimensionality where it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish reality from fiction.”
There is, the pope noted, more to this digital drama than corporations, while seeking to maximize their profits, finding ways to radically alter industry and commerce. The same programs that pull users into hours of scrolling on social media “reward quick emotions and penalize more time-consuming human responses, such as the effort required to understand and reflect. By grouping people into bubbles of easy consensus and easy outrage, these algorithms reduce our ability to listen and think critically and increase social polarization. ...
“Although AI can provide support and assistance in managing tasks related to communication, in the long run, choosing to evade the effort of thinking for ourselves and settling for artificial statistical compilations threatens to diminish our cognitive, emotional and communication skills."
What about faith? There is little doubt that, for millions of people, the digital devices in their lives appear to be objects of devotion. Day after day, millions of ordinary users gaze at their smartphones — with their heads, necks and shoulders curved forward in a posture similar to bowing for prayer.
Or maybe consumers are allowing their glowing screens to play near-magical roles in their lives. If so, author J.K. Rowling included a prophetic statement about relationships of this kind in "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets," the second book in her Harry Potter series.
In that scene, wizard Arthur Weasley urges his daughter, Ginny, not to trust the words and visions she has been receiving via her dialogues with a mysterious enchanted diary. He warns her: "Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain.”
If Pope Leo XIV wanted to adopt that maxim for Vatican use, here is the same quotation from "Harrius Potter et Camera Secretorum," the official Latin translation of that book: "Numquam confidas ei rei quae per se cogitare potest, si videre non potes ubi cerebrum suum celat.”
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Terry Mattingly is Senior Fellow on Communications and Culture at Saint Constantine College in Houston. He lives in Elizabethton, Tennessee, and writes Rational Sheep, a Substack newsletter on faith and mass media.