In his first encyclical as pope, Leo XIV calls for "disarming" artificial intelligence and warns of its dangers

A pope comparing artificial intelligence to slavery sounds almost scandalous, but that's what Leo XIV did in his first encyclical. He used the word "disarm" to refer to AI, a choice that he himself acknowledged as strong and deliberate, because he says that the moment demands words capable of shaking us. Most people think of AI as a neutral tool or even as inevitable progress, but here the shift is radical: for the Pope, AI can become a new form of slavery, a digital replay of the worst mistakes in history. His argument goes beyond the typical fears of robots or unemployment: he speaks of "new digital forms of slavery" and warns that humanity is at a moral crossroads as profound as that of the era of actual slavery. One fact: Leo XIV went beyond the usual speeches and asked for forgiveness, on behalf of the Church, for its role in historical slavery, and linked it directly to the risk of normalizing exploitation through AI. At the presentation of the encyclical, he was accompanied by Christopher Olah, co-founder of Anthropic, one of the leading companies in artificial intelligence. Olah himself pointed out that AI laboratories operate under incentives and restrictions that sometimes clash with what is right, and that the discussion cannot be left solely in the hands of technicians. In other words, the decision about how we use AI is not just a matter for engineers, but for society as a whole. The Pope's document is also a direct warning to those in power, especially about the use of AI in war: it literally states that "no algorithm can make war morally acceptable," and that AI can lower the threshold for resorting to violence, further depersonalizing conflict and reducing victims to mere data. It also denounces the danger of political manipulation through AI-generated images and videos, which can distort public perception and open the door to new forms of mass deception. There is another key point: Leo XIV calls on AI developers to take on an ethical and spiritual responsibility, because every technical decision is, at its core, a vision of humanity. And here is the countercurrent twist: although the Pope has created a commission to advance this debate, the article itself recalls that in 2015, Pope Francis was just as emphatic about the climate and ended up disappointed by the lack of action. Will the same thing happen with AI? Perhaps Leo XIV's harshest warning will end up being, in a few years, another ignored cry. If you think that technology is advancing too fast for ethics to catch up, you're not alone. The phrase that best sums it all up: AI is not just a tool, it is a moral test — and we can fail it as we have failed before. If you recognize yourself in the concern raised by Leo XIV, in Lara Notes you can mark it with I'm In — it's not a like, it's your way of saying that this idea now belongs to you. And if this comparison between AI and slavery makes you want to discuss it at the dinner table, in Lara Notes you can use Shared Offline to indicate who you talked to about this and that the conversation was worthwhile. All this comes from BBC News Mundo, and it saves you 2 minutes of reading.