Pope Leo XIV recently tweeted:
In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce. There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity. For this reason, the Church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity.
Many on Twitter… I mean “X”… including many respectable Catholic thinkers, seem to have interpreted this as meaning: “AI art is inherently bad, or at least inherently worse than human-created art, by virtue of being generated by an algorithm, and therefore you shouldn’t make it, or even like it. (Except maybe for memes.)”
Just some examples:
To be fair, maybe the pope indeed does think this, and agrees with all these people, but that’s not quite what the text says, nor necessarily implies. Rather, I think the above supporters are experiencing confirmation bias: they were already wary of AI generated content for whatever reason, and interpreted the pope’s tweet as supportive confirmation of their views. For the purposes of this post, let’s call these folks “AI Haters” (though they might not necessarily hate AI in all its forms and uses).
The Unknowable Magical Human Thing
The error I think many of the above AI Haters make is that they think the ontological difference the pope mentions always matters, and must affect perception and experience of a work of art, even if it cannot itself be perceived, measured, or at all known based only on a work of art itself. So they look at a piece of art, and cannot know if it has any meaning or value unless they know if it was created by a human or not. If it was created by a human, then all the little curves and colors and details have some ineffable meaning and value by virtue of a human having chosen them (apparently regardless of exactly how they were chosen). But if they then discover that the art was actually created by an algorithm, that ineffable “meaning” is actually something like an illusory phantom, a human-shaped ghost wearing human-shaped skin to “trick” you into having an emotional reaction, a feeling of connection, but it was all a lie!
This is akin to the silly idea behind art as “self-expression”. If I share a piece of my art, I’m somehow expressing something of myself, there’s a bit of me in the work, like an invisible layer of love in a sandwich. What exactly that is, I don’t know, you don’t know, nobody really knows, but it must be there because I created it. (But if I accidentally showed you someone else’s work, then oh no! I accidentally expressed someone else! And if I show you a computer-generated work, then oh no! I’m actually expressing nothing at all!)
Suffice it to say, this is all nonsense, and not actually what the pope is talking about, as far as I can tell.
So what does the pope mean?
Honestly, it’s almost 4 AM now, so I’m going to bed. I leave a more sensical interpretation as an exercise for the reader, and will share my thoughts later! In the meantime, one can at least read the full context of the quote here: Pope’s address to artists.