Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical is really about being human because it begins where most artificial intelligence (AI) debates stop: with ordinary people trying to live through technological change.

The parent watching a child drift toward algorithmic companionship, the teacher wondering whether students are still learning to think, the worker managed by a system no one can explain, and the elderly person asking whether usefulness has become the new measure of worth. These human characters are on the front line of the technological revolution. Regardless, AI commentary often ignores them. In Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo asks what happens to the human person when technology begins to define an increasing number of aspects of their lives.

The encyclical’s central claim is that AI should never be confused with the mystery of human intelligence. Pope Leo acknowledges that AI can imitate certain intellectual functions and surpass human beings in speed, scale, and other capabilities. But he draws a line: these systems “do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain,” and they lack moral conscience. For example, a machine may generate language about grief without grieving, produce advice about friendship without being a friend, or compose seemingly moral arguments without bearing moral guilt. A society that forgets the difference between a person and a system will eventually ask people to live like systems.

Pope Leo’s warning is powerful because, in the advanced technological age, many things tempt humans to reduce the person to a measurable output. If intelligence is treated as the whole of humanity, then AI can appear to be a rival species rather than a tool. But the person, in the Christian vision Pope Leo defends, is embodied, relational, free, wounded, responsible, and capable of love. This is why the encyclical is not just a theological note to a technological debate but a challenge to the debate’s hidden anthropology.

The most human danger of AI may be that it offers the perception of companionship without the demands—and sometimes, the pain—of love. Simulated empathy might be useful in limited settings, but when artificial intimacy enters the spaces left empty by loneliness, family breakdown, or lack of communities, the phenomenon raises worry. Pope Leo’s sentence is stark: “When words are simulated, they do not build genuine relationships, but only their appearance.” That warning speaks to children encountering digital companions before they have experienced relationships or formed mature judgment, and to adults who may find frictionless simulation easier than difficult friendships or the reality of denial. The danger is that people may lose the appetite for real human connections, which can be difficult and demanding, in favor of AI companions that tell users what they want to hear.

Pope Leo’s encyclical speaks especially to those who fear that AI will make them less necessary, less visible, or less valued. Workers hear this when automation promises higher efficiency but delivers insecurity. Educators hear it when instant answers threaten to replace the struggle through which learning becomes knowledge, and the process of learning is forming character.

Students do not only need instant information; they need the capacity to form judgment, reason morally, understand history, cultivate memory, and wrestle with permanent human questions. This is what mainly distinguishes human educators from AI-based learning. In addition, this is why the liberal arts may become way more important in the age of AI. At the very moment when colleges and universities have weakened the humanities and treated education as workforce credentialing, students most need the kind of formation that teaches them what cannot be outsourced to machines or automated by AI. For example, learning aesthetics, recognizing beauty, interpreting a poem, understanding symbols and images in a text, reading between the lines, and experiencing the revealing moment of catching a double meaning are all activities that generative AI may imitate, but cannot truly inhabit. These skills may seem less profitable than generating content or analyzing mass data, but they are part of our core character as human beings. Pope Leo warns against efficiency becoming the ultimate measure of human value.

Importantly, Pope Leo is not opposed to innovation and technological change; his criticism is more about us humans than about machines. He does not ask society to abandon AI or pretend that medicine, education, accessibility, scientific research, and public services cannot benefit from it. His warning is that a tool becomes dangerous when it is anthropomorphized. However, when the speed of an answer is mistaken for wisdom, or when artificial companionship replaces human connection, technological progress begins to deform the people it is supposed to serve.

Because AI increasingly shapes real lives, Pope Leo insists that responsibility cannot be lost to the machine. Algorithms may influence who gets a job, a loan, a benefit, an educational opportunity, or a reputation, and for the ordinary citizen, the question is whether there is anyone to appeal to when the system gets it wrong.

The deeper purpose of Magnifica Humanitas is to recover care as a measure of civilization. Pope Leo writes that “the quality of a civilization is measured not by the power of its means, but by the care it is able to offer,” a sentence that should be read not only in Rome, Brussels, or Washington, but at kitchen tables and in classrooms, hospitals, workplaces, and homes.

Care is where the ordinary gestures of humanity become visible: reading to a child, sitting with an elderly parent, comforting the sick, teaching patiently, forgiving failure, and remaining present when presence is costly. These acts do not scale like software or run on hardware. They are the grounds of human flourishing. In this sense, Pope Leo’s encyclical is also a message to educators. Classrooms are not merely places where information is transferred or credentials are earned. At their best, they are places where young people learn attention, patience, memory, judgment, friendship, gratitude, and responsibility. Homes and classrooms, therefore, become the first places where society must teach the difference between technological assistance and human replacement.

In the age of AI, that may be exactly the reminder the world most needed from the pope.

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