Coca-Cola's Christmas advert this year, criticised as "soulless", has been created through generative AI. This may still feel novel but the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has found 90 per cent of advertisers plan to use AI tools to create their marketing videos by 2026.
This isn't limited to one industry. In a recent programme "Will AI take my job?", Channel 4 revealed that three-quarters of UK bosses have replaced human workers with AI across medicine, law and journalism. The programme highlighted the impact also on creative industries where support teams (light, make up, set design) all became unnecessary. The show itself was the first to be entirely presented by an AI host.
As the Conservative MP Tom Tugendhat raised in September, AI has been re-shaping parliamentary discourse too; and likely in time could shape legislation itself. Tugendhat referenced research that showed the use of certain phrases such as "I rise to speak" (650+ times now this year) and "delighted to announce" has spiked to record highs.
Also words like "streamline" and "unlock" have been reaching statistically unlikely heights since the advent of ChatGPT in 2022. This represents a subtle but profound narrowing of the choices of language and grammar used by those whose words and arguments shape our political life. To what extent it also generates the rationale and decision making of our times is not yet fully understood.
AI will be quietly entering the life of the Church too, from bidding prayers to homilies. In 2024, a survey of 660 US churches across more than 20 denominations found 87 per cent of church leaders were in favour of AI, with 66 per cent using it regularly and 13 per cent using it daily.
In the UK, teachers in schools deploy it for lesson planning and homework tasks (60 per cent reported doing so in a survey at the start of 2025, up from 31 per cent in 2023), whilst at universities 86 per cent are using multiple AI tools regularly.
Others are turning to AI for spiritual and psychological reassurance and support too. The challenges here for how it can simply reflect the rationale of the “prompter” were well illustrated in the US Senate hearings this year that heard of suicides where AI chatbots had confirmed the despair-based decision making of those writing into it for advice from a perceived superior mind.
If AI is becoming a defining feature of our age, then what are its material and spiritual ramifications? In this context, Pope Leo XIV’s own reflections seem to be ever-growing on this issue. Last week, he addressed US teenagers via video-link on 21 November, urging them to be "intentional" with AI use.
His message to US youth emphasised the importance of critical thought, to "do your own homework" and to use AI carefully. Earlier this month in his address to filmmakers he praised the beauty of human expression against the reductionistic "logic of algorithms".
What many don't grasp about AI is that it operates through probabilistic reasoning: it predicts likely words but does not understand any underlying meaning. Its output is based on the inputs it has received, regression analysis and learning reinforcement – and it can hallucinate facts entirely. The way many people increasingly trust it for medical advice, emotional support and in the answers it gives places a trust in its accuracy which its own creators repeatedly encourage the public not to do.
The Stanford professor Fei-Fei Li – often called the "Godmother of AI" – shared in a Bloomberg interview on 20 November this exact concern. For Li, schools are the "backbone" of tomorrow's society, and it is imperative they understand AI's strengths and limitations to best guide students on its use.
She reflected that some teachers will reject AI outright and for others it is trusted implicitly and not critically. Li imagined AI as the latest tool – a civilisation changing tool like fire or the wheel – but a tool nonetheless. And she said that it was in the use of the tool that it will gain its potential for positive or negative effects: some people will use it for good, and others will use it for evil (from fraud and misinformation to ends we cannot yet fully imagine).
The concern the present Holy Father has for AI’s impact were underscored in his first days as Bishop of Rome, when he highlighted that AI is, and will increasingly emerge as, a key theme of his Pontificate.
In his first post-Conclave address to the cardinals, Pope Leo XIV linked the choice of his name and the inspiration for his papacy to how to respond to this very issue: “I chose to take the name Leo XIV … mainly because in his historic encyclical Rerum Novarum he [Pope Leo XIII] 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 field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice and labour."
In 1891, Pope Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum (Of New Things) also grappled with a revolution that transformed society, and the perspectives within that society. His encyclical created a unique Catholic voice that emphasised the eternal values of the Faith: of human dignity, justice and love of neighbour.
The encyclical attacked the level of inequalities – the “fortunes of some … and utter poverty of the masses” – and the work conditions which “grind men down with excessive labour … to stupefy their minds and wear out their bodies”.
However, he went beyond the material and also critiqued the competing utopian philosophies of the era, challenging “socialism … [which] only injures those it seeks to benefit” and which he warned would lead to class conflict; whilst also challenging unrestrained and callous capitalism, while questioning how far it benefited all people.
It is clear that for Pope Leo XIV, this issue is a profound and personal element of his papacy and of how he sees the challenges of both our time and that of the world in the coming years. In this capacity he builds on what became a key focus for Pope Francis in his final years.
Pope Francis in 2020 commissioned the Pontifical Academy for Life to work with IBM and Microsoft on AI ethics, with the Vatican responding early, before the large language models (LLM’s) had become so pre-eminent. In his G7 address in June 2024, Pope Francis then emphasised it as “an exciting and fearsome tool”, but noted that it is “not really generative” but merely “repeats those [patterns] it finds, giving them an appealing form”.
His final doctrinal note on AI, Antiqua et Nova (Ancient and New) emphasised that AI needs to “complement human intelligence rather than replace it” and that replacement would amount to a “substitute for God”.
Pope Leo has continued with the themes first raised in the Pontifical Academy’s commission. Earlier this month he convened a rare summit of secular and religious academics, tech leaders, politicians, economists, NGOs and journalists for a conference on “The Dignity of Children and Adolescents in the Age of Artificial Intelligence”.
By engaging in such events, the Vatican is playing a unique role in considering the moral, social and economical impacts of AI, while attempting to develop the Church’s unique voice on this technology.
The AI-related conference convened by Pope Leo produced an initial "Declaration of Intent" emphasising a shared commitment to developing global governance, education, research and transparency to support the protection and safety of the young in particular.
As AI reshapes language, work and what is considered truth, the Church's voice on these issues is important not only to the faithful but in shaping the narrative around this technology for all peoples.
Photo: Xpeng's next-gen Iron humanoid robot speaks to media during a showroom tour at its headquarter in Guangzhou, China, 5 November 2025 (Photo by JADE GAO/AFP via Getty Images)
.jpg)
.jpg)
