Someone recently asked me, “Is it OK to use AI to summarize Pope Leo’s new encyclical letter on AI?” It’s a humorous question, but one worth asking.
Chatbots like Claude or ChatGPT can easily reduce “Magnifica Humanitas,” which runs to more than 100 pages, to a few paragraphs.
Reading such an AI-generated summary might seem like an efficient way to glean a few of the pope’s insights.
But one of the main points of Pope Leo’s letter is that efficiency is not always the most important factor in human life.
This is particularly true in education, which the pope observes is “a long journey requiring patience, which therefore needs time for development and for engagement with reality beyond appearances.”
There is a reason for the length of the encyclical – the pope wants to educate us about the Christian vision of human dignity and social life before teaching us how to apply this vision in the field of AI.
It takes time to develop this vision, and it takes time for a reader to understand and engage with it.
Artificial intelligence might promise a shortcut, but Leo warns that when we use these tools, “The speed and ease with which answers or summaries can be obtained risk extinguishing the desire to ask questions, which is a process that bears fruit only over time.”
Even if AI were to quickly give us the “answers,” we might find that we have not yet learned to ask the questions that prepare us to understand them.
Reading “Magnifica Humanitas” in its entirety will help us to avoid this superficial engagement with the issues it addresses.
Meet the author
Another reason to prefer the full document over an AI summary is that reading Pope Leo’s writing is a way of encountering Pope Leo himself.
As the pope pointed out in a recent address to the Vatican Publishing House, reading is a way of encountering other human persons – the author and other readers of the same work.
In this way, “a book is a bridge to others, a source of dialogue that enriches us, a stimulus to expand our own perspective.”
Human beings use language not just to transmit information but to form relationships.
As “Antiqua et Nova” (“Ancient and new”), another Church document on artificial intelligence, observes:
“As social beings, we seek relationships that involve mutual exchange and the pursuit of truth, in the course of which, people ‘share with each other the truth they have discovered, or think they have discovered, in such a way that they help one another in the search for truth.’”
In contrast, while “Generative AI can produce text, speech, images and other advanced outputs that are usually associated with human beings,” this technology “must be understood for what it is: a tool, not a person.”
Because it is not a person, a generative AI model cannot be an author.
It cannot share with a human reader the truth it has discovered, because it does not know what truth is.
It cannot join the reader in a shared quest for wisdom, because it has no desire for wisdom.
Mimicry, not a shared search
Such tools only mimic human speech by reproducing statistical relationships among words commonly seen in texts written by human authors.
But a book or an essay written by a human author uses language to build a relationship with its readers, making them partners in a shared search for wisdom.
If we reduce Pope Leo’s writing to an AI summary, we will lose our chance to join him in this conversation.
Pope Leo notes that education in the use of AI involves knowing not only how to use the technology but also when not to use it.
He identifies education as an area where we should exercise particular restraint in the use of such tools.
And the pope urges us to read books not only to gain information but also to encounter others.
We can follow his advice by reading his encyclical rather than being satisfied with AI summaries or social media excerpts.
This will require effort and patience.
But it will teach us to think carefully and deeply about human dignity, development and social life in the age of AI.
It will educate us in the wisdom of the Church, which is deeper and richer than summaries and excerpts can communicate.
It will prepare us for the slow, patient work of building a civilization of love.
— Father Peter Ascik is pastor and rector of St. Patrick Cathedral in Charlotte.