The Pope’s Got a Point, and That’s Absolutely Terrifying

Right, so the Pope—bless him, lovely bloke, probably—has come out swinging at artificial intelligence like it’s a pinball machine in a church basement that won’t stop ringing. “Disarmed,” he says. DISARMED. As if AI is wandering around Vatican City with a concealed weapon, looking to nick the communion wine and the Pope’s fancy hat collection.

And you know what? He’s actually onto something. Which is mad, because usually when the Catholic Church weighs in on modern technology, they’re still working through their feelings about the printing press.

Let me be straight with you: I’m not a religious bloke. I couldn’t find a rosary in a Catholic gift shop if my life depended on it. But Pope Leo (and yes, that name alone is a power move—they’re bringing back the heavy artillery, numerically speaking) has managed to articulate something that Silicon Valley billionaires and their cheerleaders have been tap-dancing around like they’re auditioning for Strictly Come Dancing.

The thing is, AI isn’t evil. It’s not going to grow sentient and decide humanity’s best served medium-rare. That’s Hollywood nonsense, innit. But the use of AI? The way we’re deploying it? The incentives baked into it like chocolate chips in a biscuit? Yeah, that’s where the trouble lives.

Here’s the problem, and I’ll try not to sound like I’m reading from a manifesto written by a paranoid geography teacher: AI, as it currently exists, is fundamentally designed to maximize engagement, profit, and control. It’s a tool built by people with specific goals, trained on data that reflects centuries of human bias, and deployed in systems that reward speed over accuracy, engagement over truth, and shareholder value over, well, basically everything else.

The Pope’s talking about “disarming” it—about stripping away the bits that make it dangerous. And that’s actually a sophisticated point wrapped in religious language, which is basically the Pope’s whole thing, innit. He’s saying: this technology has power, and power without ethics is just a weapon with a better marketing department.

Think about it. We’ve got AI systems now that can:

  • Generate convincing fake videos of people saying things they never said
  • Predict which prisoners are “likely” to reoffend (spoiler: they’re usually the ones who were already marginalized)
  • Decide who gets a mortgage, who gets hired, who gets flagged as suspicious
  • Manipulate what information billions of people see every single day

And who’s in charge of these systems? Mostly lads in California who think “ethics” is a TED talk they watched once. I’m not saying they’re villains—most of them probably genuinely believe they’re making the world better. But good intentions and billion-dollar incentive structures don’t always point in the same direction, do they?

The Pope’s basically saying: “Oi, hold up. Before we let this genie completely out of the bottle, maybe we should think about what we’re actually doing here.” And that’s not Luddite nonsense. That’s wisdom. That’s the kind of thing you’d expect from an institution that’s been around for 2,000 years and has seen empires rise and fall. They’ve learned a thing or two about what happens when you give power to systems without proper guardrails.

Here’s where it gets interesting though, and this is where I reckon most people miss the plot: the Pope isn’t saying we should ban AI or smash the computers or return to quill pens and carrier pigeons. He’s saying we need to be intentional about it. We need to ask hard questions about what we’re building, who it serves, and what we’re willing to sacrifice to have it.

That’s radical in today’s tech landscape, where the default answer to “Should we build this?” is always “Yes, and we’ll figure out the consequences later if we have to.”

The problem with AI isn’t AI itself—it’s that we’ve built it in a system where the people making the decisions have every incentive to move fast, break things, and worry about the human cost later (or never). We’ve created a situation where a handful of companies control systems that affect billions of people, and we’re all supposed to just trust that they’ll do the right thing. Which, as my nan would say, is about as likely as finding an honest used car salesman at a car boot sale.

And look, I get it. AI can do genuinely brilliant things. It can help doctors spot diseases, help scientists understand climate change, help people with disabilities communicate and navigate the world. The technology itself is neutral—it’s what we choose to do with it that matters. But we’re not really choosing, are we? We’re sleepwalking into it while the people with money and power make decisions for us.

The Pope’s calling for “disarmament”—for taking the weaponizable bits out of this technology before it’s too late. Not shutting it down. Disarming it. Making it less useful as a tool for manipulation, surveillance, and control. Which, funnily enough, would probably make it more useful for actually helping people.

So here’s my hot take: the Pope’s right, and it’s absolutely wild that we needed a 2,000-year-old religious institution to point out what should be bleeding obvious to anyone paying attention.

We need regulation. Real regulation, not the “we’ll police ourselves” rubbish that tech companies always peddle. We need transparency about how these systems work. We need to stop treating AI like it’s inevitable and unstoppable, like we’re all just passengers on a train with no brakes. We need to ask: who benefits from this? Who gets harmed? And are we okay with that?

Because if we don’t, we’re not building the future. We’re just building a more efficient version of the present, with all its unfairness baked in and running at machine speed.

So good on the Pope, basically. Took him a while to catch up, but when he finally weighs in, he’s got something worth saying.

Now if only anyone in power would actually listen.

Sources & Attribution

Content type: opinion
Topic: Pope Leo says AI must be ‘disarmed’ in first major teaching - BBC
Generated: 2026-05-25
Model: OpenRouter (via Nova Journal pipeline)

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