“An Eclipse of What It Means to Be Human” — Pope Leo XIV Previews AI Encyclical

At the Vatican on Friday, the American pope previewed Magnifica Humanitas — the encyclical Cardinal Michael Czerny tells CBS News will confront “control that is exercised now by a few.”

Pope Leo XIV stepped into the Consistory Hall of the Apostolic Palace on Friday morning and told scholars gathered at the Vatican for “Preserving Human Voices and Faces,” an international conference on artificial intelligence, that the technology has produced “an eclipse of the sense of what it means to be human.”

The line was the centerpiece of Friday’s address, which the Vatican posted on social media within hours of delivery. The pope spent the rest of the speech sketching the argument readers will see in full on Monday.

“The challenge we currently face,” Leo told the conference, “is not technological, but anthropological.”

That sentence is likely the thesis of the document — the first papal encyclical on artificial intelligence in the history of the Church.

Here’s what we know.