The Pope Wrote About AI. Or Did AI Write About the Pope?

It's like when I was at Kuka and we'd get safety consultants who'd show up to audit our robot cells while checking their phones and walking under active arms. The irony writes itself.

So what

Here's the thing that actually matters to me. I don't care much about papal politics. What I care about is that this is exactly the kind of situation we're going to see more of in industrial settings. Someone uses AI to draft a safety procedure. Someone uses it to write a risk assessment. Someone uses it to generate training materials. And nobody checks whether the AI understood the actual engineering constraints.

I called my old colleague Frank (he's still doing integration work in Munich) and asked what he thought. He said half his customers are already using ChatGPT to write their robot cell documentation. "They think it saves time," he said. "Then we find errors in the safety distances."

The Pope's encyclical being partly AI-generated is funny. A safety manual being partly AI-generated is how people get hurt.

What happens next

The Vatican hasn't commented on the AI detection claims, at least not that I've seen. Anthropic's involvement in the announcement is interesting (they're positioning themselves as the "responsible" AI company), but it remains unclear whether they had any role in drafting the document itself.

The tech industry reactions have been mixed, according to The Verge's follow-up coverage. Some folks think the document will be influential. Others are more skeptical.

Me? I think we're going to look back on this moment as sort of representative of where we are right now. Everyone's using these tools. Nobody wants to admit it. And the tools themselves are, basically, good enough to fool a lot of people but not good enough to fool everyone.

That 62 percent number might be wrong. The detection might be flawed. But the fact that we're even having this conversation about a papal encyclical tells you something about where things are headed.

I just hope the people writing my robot safety documentation are being more careful than the Vatican.

Aisha Patel · 3 hours ago · 6 min