Pope Horrified by Catholic Plan to Create AI Version of Him for the Masses

"It’s going to be very difficult to discover the presence of God in AI."

If anybody is thinking of making an AI version of the Catholic pope, please don't.

That's the message from the newly-minted Holy Father himself, Pope Leo XIV, who emphatically slapped down the idea of a digital simulacra masquerading as himself.

"Someone recently asked authorization to create an artificial me so that anybody could sign on to this website and have a personal audience with 'the pope,' but this artificial intelligence pope would give them answers to their questions, and I said, 'I’m not going to authorize that,'" he said.

"If there’s anybody who should not be represented by an avatar, I would say the pope is high on the list," he continued in an excerpt for a planned biography, according to Crux, a Catholic media outlet.

Let's face it: the whole idea is perverse, especially since AI models tend to hallucinate. Imagine an AI pope suddenly going off the rails and recommending you steal your church's collection plate. (That's a sin, by the way.)

Leo also slammed a deepfake of himself falling down some stairs as well as other fraudulent news ginned up by AI.

The pope also called attention to how "extremely rich people" are putting loads of money into AI while "ignoring" humanity's needs.

"If the Church doesn’t speak up, or if someone doesn’t speak up about that, but the Church certainly needs to be one of the voices here, the danger is that the digital world will go on its own way and we will become pawns, or left by the wayside," he said, hastening to add that he's not entirely against AI technology.

When another excerpt of the biography was released, Pope Leo made news when he criticized the countless piles of money mercurial bad boy billionaire Elon Musk has accumulated for himself. Musk responded on the social media platform X with a Bible verse that poked at the pope.

"'Why do you see the speck in your neighbor's eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?' (Matthew 7:3-5)," he posted.

Something tells us this won't be their last skirmish, especially since the stakes are so high.

"It’s going to be very difficult to discover the presence of God in AI," Leo said in the biography excerpt, which is a direct criticism of people like Musk who are developing AGI.

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