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Beware the Benedict Bot

Nikolas Prassas

June 9, 2026

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The words of a dead man / Are modified in the guts of the living.” Neither W. H. Auden, who wrote these lines in 1939, nor W. B. Yeats, whom they concern, knew that their words would one day end up in the matrices and vector fields that constitute the “guts” of modern AI models. To use Yeats’s preferred language, everything he ever wrote is now being turned around in a virtual “gyre” along with everything else that has ever been written. How his works will be modified in the process is impossible to say.

While this may not be an urgent problem for Yeats scholars, it does present a difficulty for an institution with teaching authority like the Church. The integrity of doctrine depends on the precision with which it is stated. Hallucinations—the standard euphemism for erroneous outputs by AI models—can, where the word of God is concerned, jeopardize the salvation of souls.

Last month, the Benedict XVI Society proposed a way of solving this problem. It announced the creation of Benedict AI, a proprietary language model trained on the writings of Benedict XVI along with a scaffolding of canon law to ensure fidelity to doctrinal teaching. The project is also touted as an exciting opportunity to render accessible the writings of one of the greatest theologians of his generation.

The team behind the project has sought to head off any misconceptions, a prudent decision given the febrile state of public debate over AI. Details are scarce, but we can state emphatically that this is not what the industry calls an “AI resurrection.” Something like this is being attempted by the Cluny Institute, a research center affiliated with the Catholic University of America. At their 2026 annual conference, Zoë: Life Abundant in an Artificial Age, one of the featured speakers will be “AI René Girard,” an algorithm trained to impersonate the dead French philosopher. One can only imagine the outrage were Girard replaced with the late pontiff.

In the same poem quoted above, Auden wrote that at the moment of his death, Yeats “became his admirers,” surely one of the most terrifying lines of poetry in the English language. What was intended metaphorically can now be achieved through technical means by these so-called “resurrections.” It is for theologians and canon lawyers to determine whether this amounts to necromancy or the consultation of oracles, practices that are viewed as grave sins by the Church.

Benedict AI was announced shortly before the publication of Magnifica Humanitas, Leo XIV’s first encyclical and the most authoritative statement to date by Rome on AI and related technologies. It opens with a startling rhetorical gambit. Humanity, we are told, is faced with a choice of two paths corresponding to two biblical episodes. Either we give into blind technological determinism and “construct a new Tower of Babel,” or, following Nehemiah, we judiciously use what we have made to “build the city in which God and humanity dwell together.”

One of the great qualities of Magnifica Humanitas is how it demonstrates the supernatural fruitfulness of Scripture. Its use of the stories of Babel and the Babylonian exile is so persuasive that, were you outside of the Christian tradition, you might begin asking yourself whether you needed to be inside it to understand the trajectory of the modern world. And yet, despite some 40,000 words of carefully argued text, we are still left with the practical problem of discerning whether, in our business life or our research activities, we are truly building up the walls of Jerusalem or succumbing to “Babel syndrome.”

Thankfully, a reliable acid test for the Christian technologist was provided by St. Maximilian Kolbe almost a decade before the discovery of the first point-contact transistor set off the computer revolution. Kolbe had a great interest in the sciences and became what we would now call an “early adopter” of modern communication technologies. At his friary in Niepokalanów, friars would spend the intervals in the liturgical day manning a vast printing press that could reliably produce hundreds of thousands of copies of their popular monthly magazine. Shortly before Hitler’s invasion threw the Polish Franciscan community into disarray, Kolbe was busy testing a new radio tower for transmitting broadcasts on an experimental shortwave...