Pope Leo XIV denounced art generated by artificial intelligence in an address to artists and curators at the Vatican on Friday, telling his audience that the Catholic Church needs them to “distinguish human art from what is produced by machines.”
The pope spoke in the Consistory Hall at a meeting organized by the Vatican’s Dicastery for Culture and Education, which published the address; a condensed version was posted on the papal X account. He said the Church hoped to renew its alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard what he called the human element of culture.
“There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others,” he said. “Algorithms lack the spark of humanity.”
He compared image generators to search engines that “offer us thousands of instantaneous answers” but “merely return what already exists and tend to give us what we already want.” The risk of censorship and homogenization in art, he said, is a “great danger.”
The remarks continue a theme of Leo’s pontificate since he became head of the Church in 2025. He warned last month against losing humanity to a “paradise of machines,” and in May he issued a 42,300-word encyclical on artificial intelligence centered on human dignity that addressed the technology industry directly. His position has drawn criticism from Peter Thiel, the PayPal co-founder.
The industry has taken note. Anthropic has lobbied the Vatican to reconsider its position on nonhuman consciousness, with little success, according to The New York Times. Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Meta and xAI all sell tools that generate images, and disputes over that technology helped drive the 2023 strikes by the Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA, which cited fears that A.I. would displace workers, copy personal styles and violate copyright.
Europe has already written a version of the pope’s distinction into law. Since Aug. 2, the European Union’s A.I. Act has required machine-readable labels on synthetic images, audio, video and text, with fines of up to 15 million euros or 3 percent of global turnover. But the law relaxes its disclosure rules for artistic and satirical work, and content that a person has meaningfully reviewed needs no label.
The markings have also proved fragile. Anthropic introduced a text watermark on Aug. 2 and tools to strip it appeared within days. A watermarked label records how an image was made; it does not settle the question the pope raised on Friday, whether a machine’s product counts as art at all. The first A.I. image to deceive the public at scale, in 2023, was a fabricated picture of a pope wearing a white puffer coat.