How Will Pope Joining AI Debate Shift The Landscape For Publishers?

BusinessMediaHow Will Pope Joining AI Debate Shift The Landscape For Publishers?ByHoward Homonoff,Contributor.Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. Leading writer, opinion leader and expert witness in media industryFollow AuthorJun 02, 2026, 08:53am EDT--:-- / --:--This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more.This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more.This illustration picture shows Pope Leo XIV Encyclical Letter "Magnifica Humanitas", focused on the rise of artificial intelligence, in The Vatican on May 25, 2026. (Photo by Alberto PIZZOLI / AFP via Getty Images)AFP via Getty ImagesContent publishers are fighting a multi-front battle – it might not be hyperbole to call it existential - before courts and regulators to protect their business from the onslaught of AI. Two recent reports – including one from an unexpected “higher authority” in the Vatican – may help shape that ongoing struggle.The double whammy from large language models (LLMs) like Google Overviews, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and Perplexity is the years of unauthorized use of copyrighted materials to help train their models and the subsequent destruction of publisher audiences from publisher material providing the foundation for answers to AI prompts. For publishers who have long relied on Google Search as a tool to drive awareness and reader engagement, LLMs are wreaking havoc. As I noted back in February, the click-through rate for links embedded in Google Overviews drops 95-96% compared to traditional Google searches. For now, the devasting impacts for media content from LLMs are primarily borne by text-focused publications. But the threats to video will ramp up as LLMs will get better and better at scraping video as well. First, they came for the publishers, and who was there to speak for them? The Pope Weighs InI did a check of my Forbes archives and I’m fairly sure that there have been no pontiff references in the last twelve y...