The Pope Has Thoughts on AI Art—And They’re Not Flattering

Pope Leo XIV said Friday that there is an “ontological difference” between human art and what machines generate, and that the Church wants to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to “safeguard our humanity.”

The pope posted the message on X, where he has shared AI warnings before.

“There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity,” the Pope wrote.

“Ontological” is philosophy-speak for what something fundamentally is, as opposed to how it looks. His point is, essentially, that a painting by a person and an image from a model can look alike and still be totally different things. He says that gap exists before any question of style.

His reasoning is blunt. A machine, he wrote, works through “statistical calculation” built on millions of images made by others.

In plain terms, AI image generators are trained on enormous collections of existing pictures, learn which patterns tend to show up together, and predict what a new image should look like. There is no hand and no lived experience behind the result.

He didn’t use the term, but this is the fight over “AI slop”—low-quality AI content produced in bulk, which Merriam-Webster named its 2025 word of the year. The pope is saying the problem isn’t only quality, but what the thing actually is.

A pope with a long AI file

This isn’t a one-off. In May, Pope Leo released his first encyclical—a formal teaching letter to the whole Church—titled Magnifica Humanitas, on protecting people in the age of AI. It argued that technology is never neutral and that data should be treated as a common good.

The same month, the Vatican set up an AI commission spanning seven Vatican bodies, meant to coordinate how the Holy See’s offices approach AI, including internal policies on its use.

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On Sept. 25 the Pope told French authorities at the Élysée Palace in Paris that he found it indispensable to make AI the subject of his first encyclical. In the Paris speech, he also warned that science and technology without guidance from conscience can steer people away from the good.

There is a wrinkle. In April, Pangram Labs’ AI-detection extension flagged several posts from his own X account as likely AI-generated. The Vatican didn’t respond to requests for comment at the time.

Detectors are shaky. In 2024, ZeroGPT labeled the U.S. Declaration of Independence 97.93% AI-generated, according to that report. In July, a firm called Proudly Human said a collection of Leo’s speeches and writings on education and AI earned its human-authored mark, per its press release.

Over the past couple of years the question “who made this?” is turning into a legal and money question. In March, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Thaler v. Perlmutter, leaving in place an appeals court ruling that copyright—legal ownership of a creative work—requires a human author, in a case over art made entirely by an AI system.

Artists have been voting with their feet, too. Cara, a portfolio network built to keep AI images out, reached nearly 900,000 users by June 2024.