To defend an anti-AI Pope from claims a machine helped write his words, his camp reached for an unlikely tool: AI. An Australian firm has certified Pope Leo XIV’s writings as human-made, using a suite of the very detectors the technology has spawned.
Pope Leo XIV has made AI one of his defining themes. His first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, published in May, warned that the technology could come to dominate humanity. Now a collection of his reflections on education and AI, Maps of Hope, has been certified as human-authored.
The awkward backdrop
The certification follows an uncomfortable episode. Soon after the encyclical appeared, AI researcher Linch Zhang argued in a widely shared analysis that parts of it carried the fingerprints of AI. He pointed to the heavy use of em dashes, the word “genuinely,” and rhetorical triads, and suggested the likely culprit was Anthropic’s Claude.
The detector Pangram flagged some passages. The Verge asked the obvious question: did the Pope use AI to write about the dangers of AI? Zhang stressed it was probably Vatican officials, not Leo himself. The Vatican never confirmed the claim, and it was never proven.
