Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical ‘Magnifica humanitas’ offers AI developers a valuable anthropological contribution as they design systems with which human beings interact at a deeply personal level, according to Taylor Black, Microsoft’s Director of AI and Venture Ecosystems.
Massive advances in consumer-facing artificial intelligence systems in recent years have led the Church to engage more deeply with companies building the technologies of the future.
That movement has led to criticism of the Church’s engagement with tech companies to help direct the development of AI, as well as to criticism within the tech world of those who dialogue with the Church.
But by pushing religion and theology to an “optional realm,” developers risk missing out on more deeply understanding how their customers think, according to Taylor Black.
Mr. Black serves as the Director of AI and Venture Ecosystems in the Office of the Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft and as the inaugural Director of the Leonum Institute for AI and Emerging Technologies at the Catholic University of America.
These dual roles—along with his deaconal studies for the Byzantine Catholic Eparchy of Phoenix—offer Mr. Black the opportunity to reflect philosophically on the future of AI while helping direct Microsoft’s capital investments in AI start-ups. Speaking to Vatican News in his personal capacity, Mr. Black pointed out that technology has no anthropology or specific view on the human person. Rather, generative or agentic AI products are probabilistic, guessing the next word in a sequence, every action based on data on which it has been trained and the user’s prompt.
The result is that users are co-creating their experiences, and products must be based on a good understanding of the user’s way of thinking. In response to this new tech development paradigm, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Dicastery for Culture and Education released “Antiqua et nova: Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence”. Then, Pope Leo XIV exercised his papal magisterium with the publication of his first encyclical Magnifica Humanitas. Both documents seek to apply the Catholic Church’s deep experience and understanding of the human person to the emerging technology of AI. Mr. Black said Pope Leo’s encyclical recognizes that AI can shape its users’ development if they forego critical thinking and accept whatever the AI chatbot proposes without verification. This risk is especially relevant for children, whose prefrontal lobe continues developing into their mid-20s, said Mr. Black.
He gave the example of a parent who leaves their child with a morally dubious adult, who may be very knowledgeable but may also give information the parent would not want their child to have, even if not in a malicious way. In an attempt to be helpful, AI can also change our voice or our face, sometimes pushing our real self to the side in favour of an ideal version.
“It’s forming us in a way that we can assent to if we feel like it,” said Mr. Black. “But again, if we’re children, then we can’t really fully assent to that shaping without our own creative input to it, of our voice, of our way of being in the world, as well as adults can.”
