Claude, Author of the Humanitas - LessWrong 2.0 viewerClaude, Author of the Humanitas<br>Linch26 May 2026 16:05 UTC62 points<br>17 comments16 min readLW linkAI
In the wee hours of Memorial Day, my friends and I stayed up past 4:30 AM California time to listen to the announcement of Pope Leo’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence. We were excited albeit sleepy, eagerly anticipating the event and upcoming essay by the world’s foremost religious authority on a question so central to our world. Still we were an odd audience for this presentation: none of us are practicing Catholics, and most of us didn’t really know what to expect.<br>I thought Pope Leo’s own speech was good, and addressed the current moment in AI with some of the seriousness it deserves. I thought the other speeches, including by Chris Olah, were less impressive. But that’s okay, I’m not the target audience!<br>A specific cardinal’s point struck me, however:<br>Cardinal Parolin made much of a specific prepositional choice in the subtitle: “sulla custodia della persona umana nel tempo dell’intelligenza artificiale,“ which the live translator translated to something like “on the safeguarding of the human person in the time of AI,” and not “sull’intelligenza artificiale“ – “on AI.”<br>This was supposed to be a big deal. “In the time of AI” supposedly centers the human person in the theological narrative, while a mere first papal encyclical on AI focuses too much on the technology itself and not on human and societal reactions. A fascinating position!<br>Though as my subsequent analysis will demonstrate, perhaps a more apt preposition here is “by.” As in, the world’s first papal encyclical written in large part by AI.<br>My article has the following claims, each of which I hope to convince you of:<br>Significant fractions of the recent papal encyclical are written by AI. I provide multiple lines of evidence for this.
We can corroborate the vibes and tonal indications with statistical evidence. Phrases and punctuation much more commonly used by AI are much more present in this papal encyclical than past encyclicals.
The best commercially available AI detector, Pangram, notes that some paragraphs are between 40% and 100% AI, while most paragraphs appear to be 0% AI.
This is unlikely to be a false positive:
0% of paragraphs in past encyclicals I backtested are registered as AI.
Pangram in general has a very low false positive rate
This is overall very unlikely to be a translation artifact (including AI translation). We again have multiple lines of evidence:
All the most prominent signs of AI I observed in English are preserved verbatim in the Italian version, as well as in other translations.
The Italian version of the current encyclical also gets flagged as AI by Pangram (actually more so than the English version), though I’m not aware of academic research or rigorous testing of Pangram’s service when applied to Italian)
Backtesting AI translation of past encyclicals get 0% on Pangram
The specific AI used is most likely Claude, judging by both textual and circumstantial evidence.
Different sections of the encyclical have very different rates of apparent AI usage. This indicates to me that some cardinals used AI assistance for this encyclical and many (probably including Pope Leo himself) don’t.
Each individual piece of evidence might be explained away, but the consilience of evidence across multiple angles and sources is in my opinion very hard to dismiss collectively.
Significant fractions of the recent papal encyclical are written by AI<br>I was initially very excited to read Pope Leo’s first encyclical, a long treatise on maintaining humanity in the age of AI. The intersection between AI and societal response is one of my greatest intellectual and personal interests, and it’s both exciting and a relief for the world’s foremost religious authority to share a substantial interest in my personal and career obsessions.<br>Nonetheless – as I kept reading – certain lines jumped out at me as too smooth, too triadic, too… inhuman:<br>“Technology has the power to heal, connect, educate and protect our common home; but it can also divide, exclude and generate new forms of injustice. In the abstract, technology in and of itself is not a solution to humanity’s problems, just as it is not inherently evil. In practice, however, technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it.”<br>“We must, then, avoid the “Babel syndrome,” namely the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak, a uniformity that neutralizes differences, and the pretense that a single language — even a digital one — can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance. The risk of dehumanization — of building a future that excludes God and reduces the other to a means — is an ancient and ever-new temptation that today takes on a technical...