During World War II, bomber pilots would tell each other, “if you’re taking flak, you’re over the target.” Don’t demur, you’ve struck a nerve. Opposition, at times, isn’t all that bad a sign — if anything, it could point to something good, or at least true. Judged by that standard, the reception of Pope Leo XIV’s pronouncement on artificial Intelligence has been curious. Some have fought over its account of just war theory; others have questioned its denial of machine sentience. Yet its diagnosis of the politics AI relies on, and the fixes needed to guard against it, has gone almost entirely unchallenged, especially among technologists.

In a recent article for the Financial Times, theologian and AI sceptic Carmody Grey insists that Leo’s Magnifica Humanitas is unique. It not only represents the voice of “17.8 per cent of the world’s population,” Grey writes, but focuses on AI’s users more than the technology itself: to the humans whose dignity AI risks undercutting. Rather than offering any proposal or suggestion, Grey suggests, it offers a “style or approach” that surpasses “the narrow menu of contemporary moral thought. . . .  and frames the ethics of AI as downstream of much deeper orientations regarding the purpose of human life.”

But is this true? Part of the problem is about process. The broad-based consultation inaugurated under Pope Francis was not carried over into the making of Magnifica Humanitas. And it shows. While the long-standing Catholic anxiety about social fragmentation remains, it has been pushed toward the margins of the argument. This leaves Leo with a critique of capitalism that is less institutionally specific than those offered by previous popes: structural injustices are clearly identified, but the organized social forces capable of confronting them are much harder to find.