Gandalf, Picasso and MLK: Cultural references ground Pope Leo’s AI warning

Pope Leo XIVGandalf, Picasso and MLK: Cultural references ground Pope Leo’s AI warningThe pontiff’s message is clear — in the battle for righteousness, human beings must remain at the center of civilization, not sidelined by AI.Listen to this article with a free account00:0000:00Add NBC News to GooglePope Leo issues new warning on artificial intelligence01:43Get more newsLiveonShareAdd NBC News to GoogleMay 26, 2026, 12:49 PM EDTBy Claudio LavangaROME — It took a little over a year for Pope Leo XIV to write the 42,000 words of his first encyclical, which deals with the safeguarding of human dignity in the age of artificial intelligence.Subscribe to read this story ad-free Get unlimited access to ad-free articles and exclusive content.Arguably, with the right prompt, it would have taken ChatGPT, Claude AI, Copilot or any number of AI chatbots only a few minutes to write just as many words based on the whole history of Catholic social teaching.But that’s exactly one of the points the pope is making in the document released Monday: While AI “often surpasses human intelligence in speed and computational capacity,” he writes, it merely imitates human intelligence. It does not draw directly on the most human of traits and ideals like love, compassion, creativity, genius and a desire for justice.Aside from the guidelines Leo provides in the encyclical — an official pastoral letter addressed to bishops but also often meant for all Catholics — this document leans on accessible cultural references as he calls for AI to be “disarmed.”The normally self-effacing pontiff shows off his expansive knowledge of literature, art and culture in the document, which is unusually readable for a broad modern audience and references the likes of Picasso, J.R.R. Tolkien’s wizard Gandalf and the seminal movie “Schindler’s List,” among many others.He points out how “authentic culture and art” resists what he calls the “normalization of evil,” and cites as examples Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 as...