The Pope Wrote About AI. Or Did AI Write About the Pope?
Pope Leo XIV's new encyclical on artificial intelligence might have been partially written by the very thing it warns against.
Bildnachweis: Image via source article. Used under fair use for news commentary. · source
Sixty-two percent. That's the portion of Pope Leo XIV's new AI encyclical that one analysis flagged as potentially AI-generated. I'll be honest, when I first saw that number, I laughed out loud.
The setup
So here's what happened. The Pope released this big document called Magnifica Humanitas on Monday, all about how artificial intelligence affects humanity. Standing next to him at the announcement was Christopher Olah from Anthropic, the Claude people. The encyclical warns that "use of AI is never a purely technical matter: when it enters processes that affect people's lives, it touches on rights, opportunities, status and freedom."
Good message. Hard to argue with it.
Then someone named Linch Zhang over on the LessWrong forum ran the text through Pangram, which is one of those AI detection tools. The results were, well, awkward. Some paragraphs scored between 40 and 100 percent likely to be AI-written. The Verge picked up the story.
The tells
Look, I spent over a decade at Kuka watching engineers try to pass off vendor documentation as their own work. You learn to spot the signs. According to Zhang's analysis, the encyclical uses the word "genuinely" way more than previous papal documents. That's apparently a Claude fingerprint (the Anthropic model, not some guy named Claude at the Vatican).
Now, I should say these AI detectors aren't perfect. I've seen them flag human writing as AI and miss obvious bot text. We don't know for certain what happened here. But the timing is, how do I put this, not great. You've got the Pope warning about AI's impact on human dignity while potentially using AI to write the warning.
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