It's Not the Machine, It's the Method

The most-shared critique of Pope Leo's encyclical on artificial intelligence was written by artificial intelligence. The lesson almost everyone drew from that is the wrong one.

Within days of Magnifica Humanitas, a critique of it went viral in Catholic circles. Thirty points, sharp and confident, taking the Holy Father to task on just war, on Babel, on human rights, on the Church and slavery. It was also, by its own author's open account, written by a chatbot — disclosed openly, never disguised. Hand the machine the encyclical, ask it to find the weaknesses, publish what comes back.

Then someone sat down and actually read it. Point by point, a careful reader showed that the critique was riddled with the particular mistakes these systems make. It misread which paragraph came first. It dropped the context around a quotation. It put words in the Pope's mouth that the text never used. It attributed a phrase to the wrong document.

The lesson most people took from this was simple. See what happens when you use AI on something serious.