CBC Arts50%
Is the Pope starting an anti-Ai revolution? 63%
By Nathan Chizen0%
5/29/2026, 9:12:03 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 27 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Confirmation Bias, and Ambiguity (Equivocation), with In-Group Bias as the most egregious example at 17.1% saturation with 130 hits. Analysis detected 1,807 faulty-reasoning hits from 759 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 58.4% and a BS Rank of 63% (6,218 of 16,813 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 63.00% of the article peer group.
In his first encyclical, titled Magnifica Humanitas — Magnificent Humanity — Pope Leo took a stance against the use of artificial intelligence, stating that it “must be disarmed.”
Arriving at the same time when university students are booing their commencement speakers at the mention of AI and more celebrities continue to speak out against it, the Pope’s statement is gaining more attention than would be expected.
Today on Commotion, culture writer Amil Niazi and religious studies professor Judith Ellen Brunton join host Elamin Abdelmahmoud as they react to the Pope’s statement and the cultural shift that seems to already be underway.
We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity.
For the full discussion, listen and follow Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud on your favourite podcast player.
WATCH | Today's episode on YouTube:
Elamin: What was the core message of the encyclical?
Judith: Encyclicals are pretty common — every Pope will write interpretations of scripture in relation to the culture at the time.
This is a normal part of Catholic theology and the structure of the Catholic church.
But this is a rare cultural phenomenon, coming from the Pope having a warning that [is] a little different than the kind we've heard or the kind of fears and anxieties we've [had] around AI so far, which is not so much the fear that [a] the robot is going to come in and start taking over our lives and hanging out with our children and making our art and everything — even though those are valid concerns.
It's more a compromise of the human person themselves and the human community.
And that's kind of where he's targeting his critique and his uncertainty.
Elamin: There's a lot of people who maybe don't necessarily turn to the Catholic Church for guidance on how to think through these things.
But let me ask you, as you were reading this whole thing, what struck you about the Pope's message that AI threatens what it means to be human?
Amil: It's not often that I find myself being like, “Go off, Pope,” but I do find myself saying that.
What struck me was that it was not a call to the tech overlords to rein it in.
It wasn't a call [to] dial back our capitalist desires.
It was really speaking to the very soul of our nature, and what it is within the construct of AI that is antithetical to that nature.
I don't know what they often do in these, but it strikes me that it felt very much like an emotional plea for us to wake up and do something.
And when a Pope, someone who is communing with God Himself — or Herself — says, “Wake up, this is serious, this is something that could threaten your very humanity,” even as a non-Catholic — even as an atheist — I'm going to sit up and pay attention.
Elamin: To me, Judith, that's actually a really interesting dimension of this whole story… Do you think what the Pope has to say about this matters beyond the Catholic Church?
Judith: What's interesting about this is, is [that it’s] happening more as a cultural register than it is at an internal Catholic kind of community register, or [even] an evangelical register [if he were] trying to recruit people.
And in trying to recruit the whole human community, it has a different tone.
I think that the appeal — because it's the Pope — is [that] he has a different kind of authority than the kinds of authority we're used to listening to culturally.
And right now, we've been hearing a lot of these tech guys and a lot of capitalists and a lot of the people that we turn to for authority — culturally — at the moment, in the North American context, don’t speak from the human soul, or try to talk about a cosmological understanding of what's going on.
They're speaking in a different register — technological, economic, possibly political.
So here comes a voice that's not like those at all, and in some ways is addressing key people and communities not as economic agents or political agents, but as souls.
I'm registering from this cultural moment that people might like being addressed as more than just a worker or just a voter.
You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.
Panel produced by Jessica Low.
Analysis
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