New Vatican text explores challenges of Artificial Intelligence (AI)

January 28, 2025

The Vatican has issued a new “Note” exploring the promises, challenges, and dangers of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Entitled Antiqua et Nova, the lengthy (117-paragraph) statement was released on January 28 by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Dicastery for Culture and Education, and signed by Cardinals Victor Fernandez and José Tolentino de Mendonca, the prefects of those two dicasteries.

Antiqua et Nova states: “Like any product of human ingenuity, AI can also be directed toward positive or negative ends.” The document offers recommendations on choosing between the benefits and risks involved in new AI technology, while acknowledging that further discussions will surely be warranted as the technology advances.

The Vatican Note distinguishes carefully between AI and human intelligence. In the use of AI, it observes, “the ‘intelligence’ of a system system is evaluated methodologically, but also reductively, based on its ability to produce appropriate responses—in this case, those associated with the human intellect—regardless of how those responses are generated.” AI does not “think,” in the sense that humans think, but sorts information and produces responses—based on the way it is programmed. “Although these systems may use unsupervised autonomous learning mechanisms and sometimes follow paths that humans cannot reconstruct, they ultimately pursue goals that humans have assigned to them and are governed by processes established by their designers and programmers.”

Therefore, in developing AI, it is crucially important that programmers recognize the limitations of their systems, the Vatican warns. AI systems should be designed to protect and promote human dignity. The Note calls for accountability in the design and production of AI systems, noting with concern that to date the technology seems to have produced benefits primarily for “a few powerful companies.”

The second half of Antiqua et Nova is devoted to a series of cautions about the use of AI. The document says that the use of AI in education could actually interfere with the development of students’ ability to think independently, and the excessive reliance on the technology could foster “harmful isolation.” Reliance on “thinking” machines threatens to undermine the sense of human community. The Note observes in particular that in the field of health-care, the use of AI in place of a personal relationship between doctor and patient could have the unintended result of “worsening the loneliness that often accompanies illness.”

The Note is especially forceful in condemning the use of AI to simulate a personal relationship. This way of “anthropomorphizing AI,” so as to create the fraudulent impression that the machine is a human person, is a “grave ethical violation,” the Vatican says.

The Note is also forceful in calling for a ban on the use of AI in warfare, predicting that the use of autonomous machines could easily empower “the instruments of war well beyond the scope of human oversight and precipitating a destabilizing arms race, with catastrophic consequences for human rights.”

 

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Further information:

• New Vatican document examines potential and risks of AI (Vatican News)
• Antiqua et Nova (full text from Vatican press office)