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2000 years ago, a newscaster that we know of as Jesus Christ warned us about false Christianity. The warning was not against the devil but against false Christianity…about people who come in His name and deceive many.
About three weeks ago, the Pope had a speech about artificial intelligence, AI. I’m going to play a little bit of that news story and then talk about it myself, about AI, what it could mean for the future. Hi, this is Bob Barney for The Plain Truth Today, brought to you by theplaintruth.com. And like I was saying, there’s a report I’m going to play here about Pope Leo’s take on AI.
And basically, I agree with some of his stuff. And also, what I have to say about it as well. That was Pope Leo on just day three of his pontificate speaking to the College of Cardinals.
In his first official address as Pope, he identified artificial intelligence as a main challenge for humanity today, saying AI can threaten human dignity, justice, and labor. Already, Pope Leo XIV is framing the response to AI as a defining mission for his papacy and for our church today. And in the days following his election, the internet has been inundated with AI-generated deepfake videos, images, and messages attributed to him.
It’s all a stark reminder of the challenge that is the artificial age. Joining us from Rome now to discuss Pope Leo, AI, and the church’s response is Father Michael Baggett. Father Baggett is an assistant professor of bioethics at the Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum in Rome.
He’s also an invited professor at the Catholic Institute of Technology and at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas, the Angelicum, where Pope Leo XIV is an alum. Father, welcome back. In his first official papal address, Pope Leo XIV said he chose the name Leo because he feels called to follow the same path as Leo XIII.
He said, quote, Pope Leo XIII and his historic encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution. In our own day, the church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the fields of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice, and labor. Father, can you expand on this parallel that Pope Leo is drawing here? What is the AI revolution we are facing right now that compares to the industrial revolution? And before we get into the answer from this priest, I want to say that AI has good points, I’ve mentioned in the past, but AI has a lot of problems that could be down the road.
Between all of this new technology, the drone technology, which we’re seeing in the wars from Ukraine especially and now in Iran, and with artificial intelligence, with self-driving cars, self-driving airplanes, the dehumanization of civilization. The reason that so many people seem to be able to be slaughtered and sacrificed on battlefields is because human life has become less and less precious. Because the plain fact is, the real God of this world, who made us after our own image, is less and less precious to the people of this world.
They just don’t simply obey God, they don’t obey the Ten Commandments, they don’t obey anything they’re supposed to do, and they have been dehumanized. And AI is a further issuance of that secular dehumanization. And it’s going to be a problem for our children, not necessarily if you’re over 40 or 50 because you’ve already, you know, molded into what you are and what you believe, but the people that are 8, 9, 10, 15 years old, these people are bombarded with AI.
And one of the big problems with AI is what you just heard this woman say before we get to this priest. The biggest problem is they can fake everything. They can fake interviews, they can have people say things they never said, and things like that.
YouTube is full of AI-generated news stories. I put a few up with the disclaimer that it’s AI talking for somebody that’s dead, you know, sometimes. But at the same time, you got to be careful what’s going to happen.
There are, there was a movie a few years back about an actress that became so famous that everybody fell in love with her. Turned out she wasn’t real in the movie. It was an AI-generated actress only on screen.
This stuff is real. It’s coming. It’s like the Twilight Zone of the 21st century.
I’m going to get into this, what this guy has to say here, this priest, but, and what the Pope is thinking, and I’m going to go on my tangent. Well, if the first industrial revolution profoundly affected labor, especially physical labor, through new mechanized systems and factories, and disrupted family life by sending people from the fields into these factories, we see today a profound change, especially in intellectual labor. So before we saw manual labor shifted and transformed, now intellectual labor above all is being disrupted.
Journalists, professors, doctors, lawyers are all wondering how much of their work and effort will be automated and perhaps even considered no longer necessary. And replaced, and that’s the problem. Many workers are going to be replaced by AI.
Sometimes that might make more opportunities for other people or being retrained. But mostoften, what it means is going to be, like with the industrial revolution, a lot of people are going to lose their jobs. There’s going to be a lot more poverty.
There’s going to be a lot more call for socialism, communism, the Mamdani-type mayor elections all over the United States and throughout the Western world. It’s not a good place we’re at. It’s something we should be all concerned about.
And it’s not going to be stopped until Jesus Christ returns to this earth. And we are going to have to find out how to control AI. That’s the simple, plain truth of the fact.
We got to decide, is AI going to be something that becomes like fire and burns the house down?Or is it going to be like fire and we can control it and cooks our steak? And that’s the big questionthat everybody’s got to start thinking about. It’s probably one of the most important subjects of your future. I don’t care what age you are, because so much of what is going to be done about you and to you is going to be artificially intelligent, authorized, or invented.
Anyway, that’s what I wanted to say. It’s a real brief 7-Eleven short show for the day about artificial intelligence and you and what our future is going to be with it. It could, like I said, there’s some things that I use it for.
It’s pretty good. But like I said, it’s like a fire and it could come back to really burn all of us in the future. Anyway, that’s it for today.
Bob Barney for The Plain Truth today saying thank you for listening. Bye-bye.