Vatican, 27 January, 2026 / 8:25 pm (ACI Africa).
In his first message for the 60th World Day of Social Communications, Pope Leo XIV warns that artificial intelligence and digital technologies can undermine human relationships and distort reality unless they are guided by responsibility and rooted in education.
The pope’s message, titled “Preserving Human Voices and Faces,” emphasizes the uniqueness of every person and the need to protect what he calls the “sacred” signs of human identity in an era increasingly shaped by AI-generated content.
“Our faces and voices are unique, distinctive features of every person,” Pope Leo XIV writes. “Faces and voices are sacred.” He states that safeguarding them ultimately means “safeguarding ourselves,” since the challenge posed by AI is “not technological, but anthropological.”
The pope cautions against surrendering human judgment to algorithms and automated systems, particularly those built to maximize engagement on social media. “Although AI can provide support and assistance in managing tasks related to communication, in the long run, choosing to evade the effort of thinking for ourselves and settling for artificial statistical compilations threatens to diminish our cognitive, emotional, and communication skills,” he writes.
The pope also highlights new risks in online interaction, noting how difficult it can be to tell whether one is engaging with a real person. “As we scroll through our feeds, it becomes increasingly difficult to determine whether we are interacting with other human beings or with ‘bots’ or ‘virtual influencers,’” he writes, warning that chatbots can be used for “covert persuasion” and may “become hidden architects of our emotional states.”
