Magnificent humanity challenged by the digital revolution

By Fr. Shay Cullen

The strong and clear challenge posed by Pope Leo XIV in his first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity),” is declaring the sacred value of every human life. It’s a strong statement of moral value that asserts the dignity and rights of every person. It comes at a time when people, especially women and children, are being deprived of their humanity and treated as objects to be exploited and abused, their rights eroded or denied. Human lives are damaged almost beyond repair by a new kind of tyrant. Not the human one that maims and kills, but a powerful, electronic one that has begun invading the mobile phones — and by extension, the hearts and minds — of thousands of children and other vulnerable people. It is called artificial intelligence (AI).

AI can be a great tool for education, research, programming machines, and computers, but it’s also a dangerous one that can be used to harm, exploit and oppress people. In the hands of unscrupulous tycoons and pedophiles, it can be abused for mass digital manipulation and exploitation, and for making child-abuse materials. It can also be used to program drones and other aircraft, as well as lethal weapons in autonomous warfare. Pope Leo makes clear the dangers inherent in AI abuse.

Government agencies around the world use AI algorithms to discriminate against some people. These algorithms can be designed to identify and systematically eliminate or block certain people from gaining access to education, employment, loans and health care. AI programs can discriminate based on a person’s color, race, social status, and educational or ethnic background. This is what is behind the social justice crisis that Pope Leo talks about in his encyclical. It puts people, and their dignity and rights, before digital power and challenges the tycoons who use AI without control or constraint to earn billions of dollars. The AI-based decisions made on the data collected from people are “tainted by prejudice and injustice,” the pope says.

What Pope Leo is saying is that the tech tycoons have a monopoly of powerful technology programs, and billions of people are now dependent on them. These tycoons are in control of the content that people read, listen to and experience. Many have been manipulated and exploited by these AI programs. This is what Pope Leo is denouncing. The AI-driven algorithms used by the tycoons are gathering personal data and working like secret law enforcers, treating people’s private lives as raw material to be exploited, owned, and monetized without their participation or consent. Pope Leo considers this massive collection of personal information a digital form of imperialism, calling it “digital neocolonialism.”

Using the AI capabilities of their search engines, these tech companies acquire, through their platforms, the personal health records, genetic data, and demographic information of millions of people, especially in politically weaker or developing nations like the Philippines, where users are unaware they are being digitally exploited every time they open their computers or mobile phones. Their data is used to train predictive AI models that expand this exploitation and generate profit for corporations through advertising, and even political manipulations to influence elections. Connectivity between people through their social media platforms may be helpful, but they do not, in general, serve humanity.

‘Mere cogs in a system’

Some corporations are using AI to gather personal information on millions of people and sell this to corporations and government agencies for surveillance use. Other bad actors can also use that information to harass and threaten, and blackmail or extract money or sexual favors from other people, especially children. It can be said personal privacy is almost nonexistent for millions of people using AI-driven tools. This is what Pope Leo is challenging in “Magnifica Humanitas.” He clearly denounces a business mindset that reduces people to commodities, in which every human choice is dictated exclusively by measuring efficiency and profit. Pope Leo warns that this reduces human beings to “mere cogs in a system” and risks making society view vulnerable lives — like the sick, elderly or impoverished — as less useful, even disposable.

Among those leading the AI industry and promoting the technology’s benefits for humanity is Chris Olah, co-founder of the company Anthropic, which developed an AI tool called Claude AI. It’s an AI assistant capable of highly advanced reasoning, document analysis, and math. Olah joined Pope Leo in the Vatican Synod Hall, where he said AI companies must follow an ethical code of conduct, and AI developers must be held accountable.

“We need informed critics who will tell the labs when we are failing. We need moral voices that the incentives cannot bend,” Olah said, speaking for AI developers with a moral conscience and living by a code of ethics. Olah acknowledged that computer scientists cannot alone determine ethical boundaries. He said the driving forces behind these developers were not of a spiritual or ethical nature, but were continuously influenced by “incentives,” such as ambition, competition and financial pressure. He also said companies like his needed structured moral guidance to guard against “incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing.”

Doing the “right thing” is to develop AI software that can serve humanity and protect both children and adults by detecting, blocking and erasing damaging child-abuse images. The work of the Preda Foundation is helping young victims of sexual abuse, in which 12- and 13-year-old boys rape 6-year-old girls. The abusers have been influenced by easily available sexual-abuse images viewed on their phones. Pope Leo, in “Magnifica Humanitas,” explicitly warned that providing personal mobile devices to children at too early an age without supervision “exacerbates their vulnerability to online exploitation, grooming, and extortion.”

We can add to that the moral corruption of the youth over the AI-driven internet that cannot distinguish right from wrong and is driven by AI-generated images to sexually assault children. Pope Leo said modern corporate AI algorithms were designed to propagate and display images that would attract viewers, especially young ones, to buy digital connections to get online and view the illegal images. This is designed to maximize profits.

The addiction of children and adults to social media platforms and illegal content is a corrupting influence that must be stopped. Some countries like Australia and Indonesia have passed legislation restricting minors from accessing social media platforms, and more nations are planning similar measures. The Philippines should do likewise to protect its children and national dignity.