Pope tells priests to use their brains, not AI, to write homilies

https://www.ewtnnews.com/vatican/pope-leo-xiv-tells-priests-to-use-their-brains-not-ai-to-write-homilies

by josephcsible • 5 months ago

573 360 5 months ago

ewtnnews.com

verdverm2• 5 months ago

What does it mean to search yourself for words, even if they fall short of the eleganance that Ai can produce?

"What to do when Ai says 'I love you'?" discusses this conundrum

https://www.npr.org/2025/07/18/g-s1177-78041/what-to-do-when...

I've been paying attention to Sherry Turkle since I caught this show over the summer. She was on a panel at Davos titled "Swipe Left on Reality" which was the first time I heard her use the phrase "frictionless relationships" to describe what interacting with Ai is like.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6C9Gb3rVMTg

aanet• 5 months ago

Thanks for the WEF video with Sherry Turkle. <3

Every word of hers is dripping with wisdom, and I feel not enough people are paying attention to her. She talks of "artificial intimacy" and "pretend empathy" and how people are addicted to ChatGPT and its ilk primarily because of the pretension / sycophancy, and choosing that over the real-life friction, disagreements and negotiation required and necessary for healthy relationships IRL. And how social media is a gateway drug to chatbots.

Recommended watch. (Thanks!)

Her book _Alone Together_ is also worth reading.

wolvesechoes5• 5 months ago

phrase "frictionless relationships"

Peak post-modern world, where everything is more real than real, yet doesn't have any friction of the real.

verdverm2• 5 months ago

The Matrix has it wrong, the people went willingly, even excitedly

kombookcha• 5 months ago

Guarding your heart with elegant nonsense you don't really mean is a classic defensive posture, and probably is directly impeding their ability to be present in emotionally intense (and often difficult) situations. It reminded me of this:

There is a scene in the opening of Into the Abyss. Werner Herzog is interviewing a Reverend who in fifteen minutes will go in to be with a boy as the boy is led to the gurney to be executed by injection.
The Reverend is talking about how the Lord works in mysterious ways, and so on—it is exactly the type of conversation you want to avoid. It is very ChatGPT. It is the Reverend repeating things he’s said before—words that protect him, that allow him to perform the role of Reverend, instead of being what he is: a man named Lopez, who will soon have to watch a boy die.
At one point, the Reverend, as a part of a monologue about the beauty of God’s creation, mentions that he sometimes meditates on the beauty of the squirrels he sees on the golf course. Herzog, standing in a graveyard with nameless crosses, says, with mad Bavarian seriousness, “Please describe an encounter with a squirrel.”
Lopez is a bit surprised by the question, but he takes it in a playful spirit—his voice lifts, joyously. He starts to talk faster. (This is where the conversation shifts into the type you want.) He is no longer saying versions of things he has said before, he’s not protecting himself, he’s just there.
From that point on, it takes about ten seconds before he’s crying.
In interviews, Herzog likes to mention this conversation to explain his craft. “But how on earth did you know to say that?” says the interviewer. “Were you just trying to say something unexpected to unbalance him?” “No, it was not random”, Herzog says. “I knew I had to say those exact words. Because I know the heart of men.”

https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/looking-for-alice

brna-22• 5 months ago

When you stop to think of it, historically people have told their secrets to the church, now they also tell them to AI. There is some kind of relation there, the power that people willingly give to an organization. The Ads are coming so I guess people will start to think about it a bit more.

raphman• 5 months ago

To the best of my knowledge, traditional confessions have always been processed locally, not sent upstream¹.

AFAICT, it is much harder to get a priest to reveal your confession than it is to get a log of your ChatGPT sessions.

¹) I first wrote "not sent to the cloud", but if God is all-knowing, records of all sins are already in the cloud, just not accessible by support staff.

devsda• 5 months ago

first wrote "not sent to the cloud", but if God is all-knowing, records of all sins are already in the cloud, just not accessible by support staff.

I heard there is a GDPR'esque Right of access(SAR) to see your records if you ask for it nicely in person.

startupsfail• 5 months ago

The system in question is a distributed system, an interaction within that system such as "confession" involves ridiculous amounts of distributed processing, far beyond two nodes that were participating in that original exchange.

Aeglaecia• 5 months ago

for whatever merit it may achieve, concentrated attack upon religion fails to account for resultantly deprecated cultural aspects that are vital to continued functioning society, and this blind spot is not discussed often enough - in this case ,confession to a priest is significantly less evil than confession to sam altmans torture machine in the making

brna-22• 5 months ago

I am sorry if you read it as an attack on religion, it was an attack on big AI. If religion sends or even needs to send data upstream is not part of my knowledge, but AI does. But church did have the best understanding of who is who in a local society and AI companies will use this data in a more concrete way. I just drew the parallel to get the gears spinning. I agree that the organized religion was crucial glue to society trough history.

Sharlin• 5 months ago

"The need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by God. Now we can implement the same functionality with data-mining algorithms."

"God and the gods were apparitions of observation, judgment and punishment. Other sentiments towards them were secondary."

"The human organism always worships. First it was the gods, then it was fame (the observation and judgment of others), next it will be the self-aware systems you have built to realize truly omnipresent observation and judgment."

"The individual desires judgment. Without that desire, the cohesion of groups is impossible, and so is civilization."

—Morpheus, Deus Ex

lo_zamoyski7• 5 months ago

Contrary to prevailing fetish, not everything is about “power”. Framing everything in terms of it is not only self-refuting, but it impoverishes the range of human relations and warps understanding.

Confession is not about some kind of organizational power. The whole point is that it liberates the penitent. It is protected by absolute secrecy in order to, among other reasons, remove the element of power. A priest who breaks the seal of confession incurs automatic excommunication and faces further penalties, like removal from public ministery and from the clerical state. In short, a priest is expected to endure torture and even death to preserve the seal. There is no admissible exception. Not much of a “power move”.

In the case of big tech and AI, profit and power do enter the picture. Secrecy is the last thing big tech wants.

dhruv3006• 5 months ago

Btw pope is a math phd.

OtomotO3• 5 months ago

Imagine the pope being a man of science a couple of hundred years back... How much better the world could be.

usrnm• 5 months ago

A lot of very bad things were historically done by men of science

wolvesechoes5• 5 months ago

How much better?

Every honest description of Catholic Church, as any institution of this size and history, needs to be very nuanced. One of such nuances is a fact that it was one of the main, and sometimes strictly main, supporters and drivers of education and scientific progress. Other such nuance is that it very often punished and persecuted attempts to bring education and scientific progress.

Both views of the Church are true. That's what nuance is.

numbers_guy• 5 months ago

You mean during the Napoleonic wars? Science was already fully embraced by then. Or do you think the Austrians and the French were casting spells against each other instead of firing cannon?

somenameforme5• 5 months ago

They often were. A lot of history has been retold more in a way to fit contemporary narrative than to maintain historical accuracy. For instance Galileo. The typical tale is something like Galileo dared claim the Earth is not the center of the universe, the Church freaked out at the violation of dogma, shunned him, and he was lucky to escape with his life. In reality the Pope was one of Galileo's biggest supporters and patrons. But they disagreed on heliocentrism vs geocentricism.

The Pope encouraged Galileo to write a book about the issue and cover both sides in neutrality. Galileo did write a book, but was rather on the Asperger's side of social behavior, and decided to frame the geocentric position (which aligned with the Pope) as idiotic, defended by an idiot - named Simplicio no less, and presented weak and easily dismantled arguments. The Pope took it as a personal insult, which it was, and the rest is history.

And notably Galileo's theory was, in general, weak. Amongst many other issues he continued to assume perfectly circular orbits which threw everything else off and required endless epicycles and the like. So his theory was still very much in the domain of philosophy rather than observable/provable science or even a clear improvement, so he was just generally acting like an antagonistic ass to a person who had supported him endlessly. And as it turns out even the Pope is quite human.

karel-3d3• 5 months ago

Please be more specific. Church is 2000 years old.

DeepSeaTortoise2• 5 months ago

The Catholic Church was funding a lot of research for a long time. E.g the Elon Musk of his time, Galileo, was famously sponsored by it and when asked to contrast his theories against the established view, sperged out so hard against the people tasked with reviewing his publications, they tossed him under the carriage.

riffraff• 5 months ago

the catholic church has traditionally been pro-science, the contrast with science is a modern development. There's a ton of Catholic clergy who were scientists[0], many of those well known (Mersenne, Mendel, Copernicus, Venturi etc).

Even the epitome of the science-church conflict, the Galileo story, started from a scientific disagreement before the religious one[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marin_Mersenne

[0] https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic-sma...

oersted• 5 months ago

I don’t know about popes, but many prominent mathematicians, philosophers and early scientists were priests or monks: Mendel, Copernicus, Bayes, Ockham, Bolzano... It was pretty much the only way to get the kind of education, intellectual culture, time and focus required for hundreds of years (at least in Europe), until the upper-middle class widened around the enlightenment and industrial revolution.

The friction between the church and science is a relatively new phenomenon, at least at the current scale. There are always exceptions like Galileo, but it took science a long time to start answering (and contradicting) some of the key questions about our world and where we come from that religion addresses.

zaik• 5 months ago

He did earn a BS degree in mathematics, but his dissertation was a religious one.

oblio• 5 months ago

"On iconoclasm and the Birch-Tate conjecture".

Twey• 5 months ago

(BS here meaning bachelor's — I misread this at first!)

vasco• 5 months ago

The Vatican has really smart people in there, regardless of how you feel about the whole thing. I recommend anyone interested in the topic to give a read to: https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/docu...

"ANTIQUA ET NOVA

Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence"

I was quite impressed at how much they "get it".

whatever1• 5 months ago

I read the other day that the Roman Empire never fell. Its emperor is the Pope.

Which is an exaggeration, but makes you thinking. This institution still has a ton of power.

snayan• 5 months ago

Huh, this was an absolutely fascinating read. Kind of feel like the Vatican nailed it with this one lol. Did not have that statement on my 2026 bingo card. Wise words and perspective.

bonesss• 5 months ago

As a massive hedge fund with insane holdings managed by complex legal nuances & historical treaties, juggling critically withheld information, and having an outsize political presence as an independent state (thanks Benito Mussolini!), The Vatican has great financial incentive to have smart quants, historians, lawyers, and others on the payroll.

Based on their balance sheets I think they get it very, very, well.

Steve Jobs took a vow of poverty at Apple, too… somehow, some way, the dividends and stocks and private planes and fancy business dinners and everyone kissing his ass made a $1 salary survivable. Poor guy.

PlatoIsADisease2• 5 months ago

There must be something missing if they are religious though.

Like some sort of critical thinking isnt there.

PlatoIsADisease2• 5 months ago

If I was in my early 20s, this would be mad respect.

Now that I'm in my 30s and I know PhDs.... They are basically nepo babies who were not good enough for industry.

tclancy• 5 months ago

That is a scorching hot take right out of the gate on a Monday morning! Username really nails the thing.

p0w3n3d• 5 months ago

I think you're mistaken

  where he earned a Bachelor of Science (BS) degree in mathematics in 1977

and later

  His doctoral thesis was a legal study of the role of Augustinian local priors.[64]

source:wikipedia

johanvts• 5 months ago

I wish the Catholic Church would use that approach more often.

karel-3d3• 5 months ago

Church in general has neutral stance towards AI. Pope himself rather negative.

On the other hand; the local parishes often love posting AI generated devotional pictures, and the laity loves it even more; and they look horrible.

I saw sooo many AI Marys.

tgv• 5 months ago

AI Mary, bereft of grace, paid for by sinners.

I left the church a long time ago, but this still makes me sad.

midtake• 5 months ago

The article seems to be overreacting to a small part of Pope Leo's talk. It seems to me his real point was that using AI to hasten writing homilies leads priests to treat this work as busy work instead of thoughtful, focused work.

emil-lp• 5 months ago

Priests who use generative AI to craft their homilies should openly share the prompts they rely on, because those prompts shape the theology, tone, and pastoral direction of what is proclaimed from the pulpit. In a community rooted in trust and accountability—especially within the Catholic Church—transparency about AI use is not optional but a moral obligation.

— ChatGPT.

veggieroll• 5 months ago

overreacting to a small part of [a Pope]'s talk

As is Catholic tradition in the US

allovertheworld• 5 months ago

The mind virus will not stop spreading, making corporations do your critical thinking is not a good path. People will become dependent on a subscription service for everyday life.

falcor848• 5 months ago

Well ... isn't organized religion a subscription service for everyday life?

graemep17• 5 months ago

You do not have to pay anything.

steve1977• 5 months ago

And that's exactly the plan I guess.

Tade03• 5 months ago

Yesterday I when I was googling something it hit me: I wouldn't know how to find anything without a search engine.

We're already reliant on big tech regarding what information is presented to us and LLMs are just the next step in that direction.

72deluxe• 5 months ago

Being older, I remember homework involving a trip to the library to look through lots of books for 1 tiny bit of information needed for the homework.

For IT-related info, dial-up was expensive, and finding things either involved altavista or Yahoo indexes. Computer magazines were also a great source of info, as were actual books.

The key difference from today is persistence, and attention span. Both of these are now in short supply.

ssl-32• 5 months ago

When I was a kid, we had a long shelf dedicated to storing a voluminous encyclopedia in the family room, and subscribed to periodic (annual?) updates.

This was expensive.

IIRC, these books were purchased one small stack at a time from a locally-owned grocery store, which spread the expense over a longer period. One week, they'd have the books 1-5 on display and for sale, say. And the next week, it'd be books 6-10. After a time, a family could have the whole set.

Anyway, we had that. So when I wanted to find general information about a topic back then, before Google or Altavista or Webcrawler or whatever, I'd look in the encyclopedia first and get some background.

If it was something I really wanted to dig deeper on, I'd go to the library. If I couldn't find what I needed, I asked for help. Sometimes, this meant that they'd order appropriate material (for free) using inter-library loan for me to peruse.

If I already had enough background but needed a very specific fact, then I'd call the library's reference desk and they'd find it for me and call back. They'd then read the relevant information over the phone.

And if I wanted a reference to have and keep, then: We had book stores.

---

Nowadays: Encyclopedias are basically dead, but we can carry an offline copy of Wikipedia in our pocket supercomputer if we choose. Books still get published. Libraries are still present, and as far as I can tell they broadly still find answers with a phone call.

It's not all lost, yet. The old ways still work OK if a person wants them to work. (Of course, Googling the thing or chatting with the bot is often much, much faster. We choose our own poison.)

anthonypasq• 5 months ago

i dont remember a world without google but surely the answer is just walk into a library?

DonHopkins3• 5 months ago

Religious claptrap is the OPPOSITE of critical thinking.

palmotea2• 5 months ago

The mind virus will not stop spreading, making corporations do your critical thinking is not a good path. People will become dependent on a subscription service for everyday life.

Doesn't matter. Even if civilization collapses and we're all miserable, if it means more money is flowing into OpenAI's coffers, it's all good.

solatic• 5 months ago

No priest will feed sufficient context about their community into the context window - even if they were skilled enough to do so, unless the model was locally hosted, doing so would be a violation of their vows of silence.

Good homilies are written with the particular community in mind. If it were more effective to write a homily for a generic public, the Vatican would have started publishing standard homilies long ago.

Meekro• 5 months ago

This priest agrees with you, and has expressed concerns about mediocre homilies that don't speak to the concerns of the particular community: https://youtu.be/pgZXCPCATmc?si=FM4uj2owYBVK_8Mh

onion2k• 5 months ago

No priest will feed sufficient context about their community into the context window

But they will try, and they'll share a lot of potentially private information in the process.

graemep17• 5 months ago

Not to write homilies though. The real danger of risking exposing private information would be pastoral work.

curtisblaine2• 5 months ago

Nit: you're confusing the vow of silence with the confessional seal.

graemep17• 5 months ago

Its more than a nit. It only applies to confession so putting in other private information would not break a vow, but it would still be a very bad thing to do.

Herodotus38• 5 months ago

There are resources that publish homilies for priests to give. Here is an example for English speakers.

https://associationofcatholicpriests.ie/liturgy/sunday-resou...

h33t-l4x0r• 5 months ago

Well maybe they just need to start recording confessionals. Just imagine what Gemini 3.1 could do with 1M tokens of that stuff.

TheSpiceIsLife• 5 months ago

Forgive me father for I have sinned. It has been three minutes since I shit posted on HN, and my greentext stories are famous on 4chan. Also, after lunch today I send 300 emails to Jeffrey Epstein using my work email and signed with my real name. What a great guy!

fainpul• 5 months ago

Gemini 3.1 – I don't remember that verse. Is that from the old testament?

lostlogin• 5 months ago

This is how you get Grok.

linkjuice4all• 5 months ago

You're absolutely right! You can repent on your deathbed and skip years of church attendance!

anal_reactor2• 5 months ago

Bro as a kid I used to go to church every Sunday and I guarantee that not a single person from my entire village understood what the priest was saying, including the priest himself, who was simply reading whatever higher-ups had given him. It was perfect slop because literally nobody cared about the content, it was all form - it needed to sound important and complicated enough to be able to be used in religious rituals. This is an excellent use case for LLMs because they excel at exactly that.

Imagine a bunch of bushmen trying to perform the spell of rain. It doesn't matter what they sing, as long as it sounds like something that could pass as the spell of rain, because the goal here isn't to make rain happen, it's to strengthen the community through shared rituals. 99% of religious activities are exactly this.

gambiting• 5 months ago

>Bro as a kid I used to go to church every Sunday

I mean, not to dismiss your experience, but in my weekly Sunday going to church in Poland the priest would write an actual homily that felt relevant to the community. But then our small town had 3 churches, and each one had a different style - people would talk about preferring one over the other because they had more interesting "content".

But yeah, there was the message from the regional Bishop or the Archbishop of Poland or sometimes directly from the Vatican, then the reading from the old testament, then the homily which I'm 99% was written by the priest giving the mass.

> I guarantee that not a single person from my entire village understood what the priest was saying

Well, I wouldn't say not a single person did, but yeah, we had those 3 churches, probably 10k seats each, every one was rammed on the sunday, but I'd say 90% of people there were only there to tick it off and snoozed through the whole thing. But it's not because the homily was boring, it's because going to church on sunday was(maybe still is?) a thing you have to do or people will make fun out of you.

adrianN2• 5 months ago

You have a lot of faith in the qualities of average priests.

soderfoo2• 5 months ago

To be fair, faith is the crux of Catholicism.

altmanaltman• 5 months ago

we have vibe coding priests before GTA VI

portmanteur• 5 months ago

Not sure what this is implying, but aspiring priests are required to have a Bachelor’s degree before entering Seminary, or it tacks at least two years onto a very rigorous six-year seminary program. The seminary program is on par with getting a Master’s degree in Philosophy and Theology. Further, only 30-50% of seminarians ultimately become ordained as priests, due to the rigorous vetting program and “discerning out.”

wwweston• 5 months ago

Not much faith required on this one: either a given priest will have both strong familiarity with congregational context and the ability to articulate it as instructions to an LLM or they’ll be missing one of those two. If they’re missing the context themselves, well, they can’t feed it to the LLM and best case scenario is probably that they engage the process closely enough the whole way to learn something from it. If they lack the ability to articulate the whole context that they know but can intuitively work with it, then they’re more likely to meet needs than the LLM — and I’d guess this is a common case.

stratocumulus02• 5 months ago

I was raised Catholic and even though the last time I've been to a church could have been in 2019, I don't remember any priest who wouldn't just gloss over the religious content for the day (copied from an online source), itching to share his politics and the most recent ragebait he's got from Facebook at the end.

aubanel• 5 months ago

That's a bit harsh! I go to mass every Sunday (in France) and rarely have political stuff. When there, it's most often about abortion or euthanasia (of course in a pro-life (or anti-choice) direction, "you shall not kill")

But dull, empty homilies are (alas) very frequent.

mountainb• 5 months ago

I have heard phoned in homilies from some priests but this is not accurate in the United States based on my travels and weekly local attendance. Sorry that you had a bad experience.

cafard• 5 months ago

This is in the US? I have rarely heard political homilies.

refsys2• 5 months ago

"We value your privacy! Do you consent to sharing the contents of your confession with our 2137 partners? [ACCEPT ALL] [MAYBE LATER]"

Tenemo• 5 months ago

Was the number of partners you picked random or you chose 2137 on purpose? As it's actually somewhat related to the topic...

17186274406• 5 months ago

the Vatican would have started publishing standard homilies long ago.

There actually are, but they are famous homilies from famous Church Fathers rather then explicitly produced to be standard homilies.

dharmatech• 5 months ago

Yeah, the Liturgy of the Hours includes many of them. (Four volume prayer set.)

viraptor2• 5 months ago

I'm glad that priests are well known for always obeying rules and never abusing their position. /s

lotsofpulp3• 5 months ago

I don’t understand why you’re downvoted. “No priest would ever break rules” is such a strong and ridiculous claim that I thought solatic was trolling.

andrepd• 5 months ago

We have been further away from OMM 0000 than we are today, that's for sure.

lo_zamoyski7• 5 months ago

doing so would be a violation of their vows of silence

I don’t know what this means. There is no formal “vow of silence”. The closest things I can think of are the discipline of avoiding unnecessary speech in some monastic communities, or perhaps the seal of confession, but this doesn’t apply as priests can speak in generalities or anonymously about the kinds of moral issues people struggle with.

Good homilies are written with the particular community in mind.

That’s a bit of a generalization. Many, if not most, readings simply benefit from clear explanation. Tying in local or cultural context can be helpful, but they can also be a distraction, and mostly, homilies should be about the essential meaning of the readings. By having to write the homily, the celebrant benefits from writing the homily as well, a benefit he would lose if he simply drew from a corpus of prewritten homilies.

harimau777• 5 months ago

Catholic priests are forbidden from revealing anything they learn in confession under ANY circumstances. If someone comes in and confesses to a crime or that they are planning a crime, the priest can advise them to go to the police, they can counsel them that they may be in danger of hellfire if they do not, but they absolutely cannot tell anyone. The Catholic Church takes this very seriously. It is fully expected that a priest would die rather than break the confidentiality of confessions.

bibleguided2• 5 months ago

You’re right that a priest can’t (and shouldn’t) dump private pastoral context into a prompt. But context doesn’t have to mean identifiable confession details.

I’m building BibleGuided, and one thing we’re adding is a church feature where congregants can opt in to sharing prayer themes, and leaders can see aggregated and anonymized trends over time rather than identities. That’s enough to shape a homily toward what people are actually struggling with, without violating confidentiality.

If anyone has experience with privacy thresholds (minimum group sizes, differential privacy), I’d love pointers.

superb_dev• 5 months ago

How are you dealing with the Pope saying priests shouldn’t use your product?

FrustratedMonky3• 5 months ago

Exactly.

A priest could use AI for a homily dealing with drug addiction, without specifying "Bob in row 3 is a methhead"

FrustratedMonky3• 5 months ago

Pretty sure there are books of homilies.

chasd00• 5 months ago

all the homilies i've heard were pre-written but ended with current events... like telling the congregation to not vote for Obama heh. My wife was Catholic until that moment, she never went back after that. This was St. Rita's in Dallas TX.

gwbas1c3• 5 months ago

American religions are supposed to stay out of politics, or they risk their tax-exempt status.

For me, the disturbing event was shortly before the 2016 event when a Catholic Church in Lowell MA had posters urging people to vote no on marijuana legalization.

(In my case, I smelt the politization when I was a teenager so I never continued being Catholic as an adult.)

rawgabbit• 5 months ago

If I heard that, I would be upset too.

Honestly she should have changed parishes. St Rita’s is in an affluent part of Dallas. One of the priests is a former Anglican(?) with wife and children who obtained a special dispensation.

I heard a lot of bad phone it in homilies too. Today one of my favorite priests is from Benin. He serves the Francophone community but also celebrates mass in English and Spanish. He is at Mary Immaculate in Farmers Branch. He is more traditional and gives the Catholic interpretation of the day’s readings and how it applies today.

jacquesm2• 5 months ago

Not to mention a massive violation of privacy, which they are subject to as much or more as every other entity that processes privacy sensitive data.

sigbottle• 5 months ago

Side note, but I've definitely gotten annoyed with "context".

There's context in the strict technical sense - the AI is stateless, you need to get the right tokens to it in the right way, allow it to use tooling calls, etc. I get that. That, is cool. I use agentic coding a lot.

Then there's the sense of what you're saying - you have to feed the AI "enough context". In your case it's critical, but I've seen way too many pro-AI people just dismiss everything and say "context context you didn't give it proper context, have you tried this prompt etc." as a justification for the "lack" of intelligence.

At some point you have to wonder when it becomes unfalsifiable.

thewebguyd• 5 months ago

At some point, at least if businesses want to have AI “Agents” act as employees, then it needs to cease being stateless.

There’s a lot of hidden context in day to day work that a human often times wouldn’t even know to explain to the AI or even think that they’d have to include it, things that are just “known” by default of working somewhere for a long time.

With coding, there’s at least the entire codebase as context. With more creative tasks, it becomes murky. Even something as “simple” as sending a price increase notification to customers. There’s a lot of nuance in that, and customer relationship history you’d have to feed to the AI as context to get it right, yet a good CSR would just factor that context into their writing without a second thought.

There is a point, and it is reached very early, where it’s more costly and less productive to feed the AI as much context as you can try to imagine you’d need to give it vs. just doing it yourself. If I’m at the point of writing an entire document of history and context, into what’s effectively a full page prompt, then why bother with AI at that point.

unsupp0rted• 5 months ago

Best to skip the priest and feed context directly

jquinby• 5 months ago

When I was in formation a couple of years ago, I showed our homiletics instructor a ChatGPT-generated homily for our assigned text. He read through it and put his head on the desk. Then he handed it back to me and said it was as good as good as anything you'd hear from the ambo that Sunday.

By this, he meant that it was ok-but-not-great, and there's a lot of weak preaching out there. And your point is dead on: the text and the assembly are the primary considerations. I preach on the same readings to 4 different masses, but the 4:30 Saturday Vigil folks are a different group than the 11:30 Sunday Morning crowd, so the message is tuned accordingly. Different emphases, different touchstones, differing exhortations, etc.

hluska• 5 months ago

Very few priests take vows of silence. The standard vows are chastity, obedience and poverty. Even highly contemplative orders like Trappists don’t make a vow of silence - they practice something called monastic silence but it’s not a vow.

The closest thing is that a priest cannot share anything told during the sacrament of reconciliation. But that’s not so much a vow as just the other side of what Catholics believe is a direct connection to god.

wahern• 5 months ago

Confession was originally often made in public. Confessional secrecy is more about making it easier for people to freely confess their sins, free of the fear of retribution or shame, very much like why we have doctor-patient confidentiality enshrined in law today. I would imagine confessional secrecy arose very quickly, even if the norm wasn't private confession.

The first reference I could find for confessional secrecy was from a 4th century book written by the 3rd/4th century Persian bishop, Aphraates. In Demonstration VII, On Penance, he councils priests to keep a penitent's confessions secret, "lest he be exposed by his enemies and those who know him. .... If they reveal them to anyone, the whole army will suffer an adverse reputation."

Source: https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_Sy0vAAAAMAAJ/page/n251/mo... That's a Syriac to Latin translation. I used Google Translate for Latin to English. There's at least one partial English translation of that book online, but I found their translation more confusing.

grogers• 5 months ago

Take a homily written by someone 2000 miles away and it will likely feel just as relevant to me. Most humans deal with similar issues.

b3ing• 5 months ago

Homilies are not the core of Catholic mass, the Eucharist is. Protestant churches put more emphasis on the sermon, not sure if it’s all Protestant churches or just “Evangelical” ones

michaelsbradley• 5 months ago

Sermon manuals were popular among Catholic priests from the time the printing press started to spread in Europe, and remained so into the middle of the 20th Century.

A parish priest might not deliver a “canned sermon” verbatim, but still rely on one/more sermon manuals heavily when preparing his words for Sunday.

The Roman Catechism (Catechism of the Council of Trent), published by the Vatican and ordered for use in seminaries for core formation of candidates for the priesthood, included a list of specific topics to address for each Sunday of the year. While not a sermon manual as such, those “bullet points” informed Catholic sermons around the world for 300+ years.

achairapart• 5 months ago

Nothing new. I'm sure something similar was said about Google before...

https://encourageandteach.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2...

dakolli• 5 months ago

Google was designed to give you access to knowledge, not think for you and atrophy your brain..

LLMs will melt your brain, and that's by design. You will have no bargaining power , you will be inadequate without access to the Thinking for me SaaS that you allow your brain to become addicted too. You will become a technocratic feudal slave, a serf reliant on the whichever tech-oligarch lets you use their thinking machine. They will pay you pennies.

CodeCompost• 5 months ago

Too bad Terry A. Davis is not around anymore. He would have been literally enraptured by LLMs.

throwup238• 5 months ago

Or he would have vibe coded the second coming of Unix.

Tade03• 5 months ago

I was thinking about this the other day. My take is that he would definitely have a few choice words for some types of vibe coders.

Betelbuddy2• 5 months ago

The Pope will change his mind with Claude Opus 5.2

rain_iwakura• 5 months ago

lol

tokenless2• 5 months ago

If the Pope doesn't start spending every waking minute in a CC terminal he will be left behind and lose his job. /s

Betelbuddy2• 5 months ago

Stephen Wolfram is the Antichrist - https://youtu.be/-yzdjziS-bo

tempodox2• 5 months ago

You forgot the “/s”.

mindwok• 5 months ago

LLMs are amazing, I love them, but he is right. When it comes to interacting with your fellow humans, using AI just sucks the point and meaning out of life. If we wanted to know what Claude thought, we’d ask him. Don’t be a mouthpiece for AI.

charcircuit• 5 months ago

If we wanted to know what Claude thought, we’d ask him.

You would be surprised how many people don't do this. It's very common for people to ask others questions that could be easily googled or clauded.

harvey9• 5 months ago

This is true but seems to be orthogonal to the post you replied to. At a further tangent, I encounter people saying "well it's on Google" as they seem to think Google has some authority or quality threshold.

vermilingua• 5 months ago

What an absolutely awful take. Asking people questions, even if it’s less efficient or has the chance to be misleading, is the absolute number one way to a) learn, and b) make connection. Even if you’re just asking a stranger the time, you don’t know what you might learn.

embedding-shape• 5 months ago

It's very common for people to ask others questions that could be easily googled or clauded.

I'll admit I do this, asking people questions that could be answered by Google, and sometimes even if I know the answer myself, sometimes to make conversation, sometimes because I want to hear the person's perspective on it.

If I'd never ask questions I could find the answers to myself in some other way, I think I'd never ask any person any question, which sounds kind of boring.

lo_zamoyski7• 5 months ago

Are you trying to minimize human interaction?

solomonb• 5 months ago

One step closer to an Electric Monk

mofosyne• 5 months ago

Religion and Automation is not a new thing... cue...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prayer_wheel

rgblambda4• 5 months ago

Not defending the use of AI, but plenty of people who grew up going to Mass on Sunday know that priests often recycle old homilies, deliver lazily written homilies or homilies that were clearly pulled from the internet, or just skip them if they couldn't think of anything that week or are running late for something.

Absolute worst was when an intelligent priest put in incredible effort, only for it to go over the heads of the yokels in their parish who want a simpler homily.

szszrk3• 5 months ago

How are bad human-written homilies worse than AI written ones?

But if you like the idea: you don't need a priest for that at all! A QR code with a prompt will do just fine in this case.

There is no person in the world that is capable of weekly delivery of meaningful insight into your life. Or any topic, to be honest. AI won't solve that, it just "recycles old homilies".

rgblambda4• 5 months ago

Again, not defending the use of AI. My comment was more as a general response to people who maybe don't have a real life experience of listening to Catholic homilies and have unrealistic ideas of how much effort priests would normally put into them pre-ChatGPT.

In retrospect, I probably should have replied to a specific comment.

AdamN2• 5 months ago

Yeah I think that happened to me yesterday. We had a new priest (actually retired and visiting) and the homily was 10x more engaging than the normal ones. I fear that the rest of the congregation didn't like that he wasn't using cheap techniques like constant repetition and that the content was more elevated about what was really meant by the authors of part of Genesis.

dfxm122• 5 months ago

Why do you fear this? Did you consider discussing this with some of the congregation to know for sure?

I don't mean to pick on you personally, but your comment and the parent comment (among others here) both project feelings across wide groups of people in a hasty generalization. Their feelings could be easily confirmed with human connection. I think the article makes it clear the Pope charges priests with knowing their community. This is good advice for all of us though! So, not just you, but you, the parent poster, anyone else, if you have these fears, if you don't like your priest's homily, please, talk to the proper people about them instead of (or at least in addition to) complaining online to others! This is way outside our sphere of influence.

gwd• 5 months ago

only for it to go over the heads

If it actually went over their heads, then the effort was wasted. I've heard the goal of preaching described thus: "Address the mind to move the heart to change the will." If you haven't addressed the minds of the people you're speaking to, your preaching was a failure.

NB if the people in the parish don't want to change their will, and so close up their minds, that's a different issue.

lo_zamoyski7• 5 months ago

Indeed. As one priest in graduate school said to me (and with which I agree), one should generally keep homilies short, simple, clear, and to the point. In most cases, it isn’t the proper place for an extended theological meditation.

Of course, people ought to realize that the purpose of the mass is not the homily, but the sacrifice of the eucharist, which is the “source and summit of the Christian life”.

giancarlostoro• 5 months ago

If it actually went over their heads, then the effort was wasted. I've heard the goal of preaching described thus: "Address the mind to move the heart to change the will." If you haven't addressed the minds of the people you're speaking to, your preaching was a failure.

Reminds me of Pauls retort about speaking in tongues with no translator. ;)

The idea being, that if it serves nobody but the person themselves, they should keep it to themselves, if you're going to "share" with the whole congregation, then it should edify the congregation.

1 Corinthians 14:27-28 (KJV)

"27 If any man speak in an unknown tongue, let it be by two, or at the most by three, and that by course; and let one interpret.

28 But if there be no interpreter, let him keep silence in the church; and let him speak to himself, and to God."

tokenless2• 5 months ago

Yokels! lol

palmotea2• 5 months ago

people who grew up going to Mass on Sunday know that priests often recycle old homilies

That doesn't seem bad? You'd think a lot of the topics would be evergreen, and not everyone would be there for every service. So after an appropriately long time, why not recycle one that worked well?

rgblambda4• 5 months ago

The keyword is "often". As in, it's repeated throughout the year. The homily is supposed to be, but isn't always, an explanation of the Gospel story that was told just before it. So there really shouldn't be homily repeats within the liturgical calendar.

You are supposed to attend Mass every Sunday, so I don't think the priest is intentionally accomodating infrequent churchgoers at the expense of the regulars. And it's usually not a sermon that worked well, just a long meandering story, typically about a pilgrimage or retreat the priest went on 10 years ago, that doesn't really have a point to it.

17186274406• 5 months ago

know that priests often recycle old homilies

I get the other ones, but why is this necessarily bad? If the homily is good by itself, then of course I would even like to hear it more than once. You don't remember everything from a single time anyway. And even if you do, you do not necessarily got everything.

rgblambda4• 5 months ago

I replied with more detail to someone who also asked this in the same thread.

pjbk• 5 months ago

Well, for 'The Nine Billion Names of God' the monks finally ended up renting a computer. ;-)

amelius3• 5 months ago

Yeah, because the AI might educate them :)

gverrilla• 5 months ago

How long until the church publishes their official SOUL.md?

create-homily skill?

jesus mcp?

/request-transfer-to-Servants-of-the-Paraclete

amelius3• 5 months ago

The same pope who declared an influencer boy a saint?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/07/pope-leo-xiv-d...

Let's be honest, the entire concept depends on advertising like nothing else.

mpeg• 5 months ago

Died at 15 of leukemia... I don't see how this is the church jumping the shark, it seems like a nice gesture considering he spent his short life promoting the church.

I do think the whole parading a wax replica of his body is a bit creepy, but I am not religious, people who are appreciate these things.

junaru• 5 months ago

London-born Italian, who died in 2006, built websites to spread Catholic teaching and is credited with two miracles

In 2006.

I'll be honest calling him an "influencer" is disgrace and comparing the works of dying kid with leukaemia to ai is even more so.

bigstrat2003• 5 months ago

A saint is someone whom the church believes (based on criteria that aren't worth getting sidetracked on) is in heaven. That's it. It isn't a declaration that the person was perfect, or even better than the rest of us in some way. The goal of the church is that everyone will be a saint some day.

b800h• 5 months ago

Tom Tugendhat had to stand up in the House of Commons and tell MPs not the use AI to write their speeches.

“I rise to speak. I rise to speak. I rise to speak. ChatGPT knows you’re there, but that is an Americanism that we don’t use, but still, keep using it, because it makes it clear that this place has become absurd.”

nickd2001• 5 months ago

If they're struggling for ideas to put in homilies, they could always ask for some input from people that are one or both of (a) female or (b) married. Might get a fresh perspective ;)

rochak• 5 months ago

Based

alansaber• 5 months ago

Corporations vs organised religion on artificial intelligence? This is way cooler than the cold war.

tsimionescu3• 5 months ago

If you want to play a game about it, the Deus Ex series includes this detail too (especially in the sequel and prequels).

kranke155• 5 months ago

Cyberpunk headline

shelving4908• 5 months ago

Our Electric Messiah has arrived: https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=pn3KD5YBhro&si=0sF3nL4DZBO...

gambutin• 5 months ago

I meant tbh, if they get better ie less boring, I’m all for it!

jacekm• 5 months ago

Long before AI era I read an article about homilies exchange online forum in Poland. The priests spoke how they struggle to come up with a fresh content every week for Sunday masses. AI is not the source of the problem, it's just an attempt at a solution.

impish9208• 5 months ago

There’s a Paul Theroux short story about a defrocked priest who makes a living writing sermons for other priests. They would mail their chosen topic or occasion and include the payment, and he’d send them a beautifully written sermon that’d make them popular in their parishes. Now AI is coming for the correspondent-priest’s job!

SirFatty• 5 months ago

The bible could have been written by a hallucinating AI.

JamesTRexx• 5 months ago

The point is they don't want their job spreading fantasies to be taken away, just like every other entertainer. ;-)

FrustratedMonky3• 5 months ago

Forget homilies.

AI can be the entire church experience. There isn't any aspect of the church that couldn't be automated.

Way back in "THX 1138" there were AI confessions.

Now, pretty sure it would be simple to have an AI priest, speaking in a real voice, with a hologram, and with current context for the audience.

throwatdem12311• 5 months ago

If the priest is using AI to write homilies what is even the point of going to Church I could just get an AI to be my priest and stay home.

Using AI generated text to interact with a human that is expecting a human touch is gross.

Even AI generated corpo-slop emails give me the ick. To me, it shows a deep lack of respect for the other person. I would rather something in broken English than bot vomit.

I’ve ended friendships people that can’t help themselves from pulling out their phones to ask their AI about something we’re talking about in-person. Like come on I want to know what YOU think.

Quillbert182• 5 months ago

In Catholicism the homily is not the main point of Mass, it takes a far secondary role to the Eucharist. Bad homilies definitely show up, but from the Catholic perspective that does not diminish or detract from the purpose of the Mass as a whole.

nottorp• 5 months ago

... but will they be able to compete with religions that have embraced AI, or will they be hopelessly left behind?

1vuio0pswjnm7• 5 months ago

"AI" seems like a religion

It requires "belief"

"AI" believers claim to know the future

Relentless prognostication and effort to gain followers

jacquesm2• 5 months ago

Well, it was hallucinations any way so in this particular case it hardly matters. But I can see how the Pope has identified AI as a competing religion.

piker• 5 months ago

The article barely touches on this subject, but the sentiment is nonetheless correct.

The problem with using an AI to write something so intimate and context-specific is that it cannot perform as the priest's highest and best abstraction. Instead, it will slavishly follow instructions and risk tunnelling the priest into a worldview and message that subtly betrays his congregation.

I recently wrote about how modern legal tech stacks can do the same using the infamous Digital Research / IBM non-disclosure agreement as an example: https://tritium.legal/blog/redline

If we habitually reduce our context to the lowest-common window ingestible by an AI, yes we may lose a bit of humanity, but more importantly we'll just do a worse job.

ChrisArchitect• 5 months ago

Related previously:

Message from Pope Leo XIV on the 60th World Day of Social Communications

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46850067

tempodox2• 5 months ago

The “AI” believers will be soo disappointed. Does the holy spirit not inhabit the GPU that computes their slop? Then again, why believe in any god from a classical religion when you can believe in “AI” instead?

barfiure• 5 months ago

It’s a tough sell considering for many in the West the only idol of worship is money. And the Catholic Church has already rotted itself from the inside when it allowed the mentally unwell homosexuals to continuously abuse children and get away with it.

randusername• 5 months ago

My old-school protestant pastor started with an AI disclaimer in the sermon yesterday. What a time to be alive!

I don't know what to do with my double standard here.

It seems totally normal and expected that I would outsource aspects of my job solving business software problems to AI, but the idea of my spirituality and cultural experience (music, movies, art, etc) being someone else's business problem to be outsourced and optimized by AI is so gross.

kstrauser3• 5 months ago

I don’t think that’s a double standard. Computers telling computers what to do feels reasonable. Computers telling humans what to feel seems not.

AndrewKemendo2• 5 months ago

Every single person who utilizes a navigation application to traverse a place that they have no previous independently verified experience, is taking existential risk based on a computer telling them what to do

There are literally thousands of cases of people dying or being injured because they did what a computer navigation application told them to do

This is also literally what the Target stock scheduling system does for target employees for restocking shelves

The vast majority of peoples lives are run by someone else’s computer

Blackthorn• 5 months ago

Talk about a self-aware wolves moment. Why is your use of AI okay but theirs isn't?

nxobject2• 5 months ago

That’s exactly the question OP is asking.

wat10000• 5 months ago

There are some jobs where the outcome is the point, and others where having a person actually do a thing is the point. Priest is very much the latter sort of job.

Forget about AI for a moment and let's consider a more mundane tool, like an industrial robot. Is it OK to use a robot to perform some step in assembling a car? Certainly. How about programming that robot to perform Communion? Not so much. Not because using a robot to do things is inherently immoral, but because the human priest is supposed to be an integral component of Communion, it's not just a matter of transporting a cracker and some liquid into people's mouths by whatever means you choose.

ASalazarMX5• 5 months ago

It's not like they work a lot, why would a religious leader need to outsource spiritual advice to a chatbot? It only shows that all humans are lazy, no matter how virtuous they want to be seen as. IMO this counts as sloth.

Hopefully this discredits religions even more with the younger generations. Claiming that an immensely powerful being demands obedience of you, and keeps tabs on you all the time, but his orders only go through a chosen few, was a hard proposition to begin with.

edgyquant• 5 months ago

You’re seething hatred is so obvious from this comment that no one should consider your opinion as anything close to valid

butterbomb• 5 months ago

Claiming that an immensely powerful being demands obedience of you, and keeps tabs on you all the time, but his orders only go through a chosen few, was a hard proposition to begin with.

You just described what Silicon Valley wants to build lol

fritzo• 5 months ago

This is how you get token laundering

MontagFTB• 5 months ago

Before preaching it to others, the writing of a homily or sermon first needs to affect the heart of the one delivering it. Such heart-work is exceedingly difficult if not impossible with AI.

garyfirestorm• 5 months ago

PaaS - priest as a service

Latest and greatest finetuned AI model built for your zip code. Uses location, and all the PII to generate an accurate model for your community needs.

Special addons available - turn real world events into gaslighted conversations™

serial_dev• 5 months ago

This kind of headline is something we could have only imagined as a joke 5 years ago.

deadbabe• 5 months ago

Priests using AI to deliver homilies feels like we are getting closer to having a blessed LLM with divine weights that speaks the direct word of God.

kraf• 5 months ago

Love the headline and curious what the pope actually believes that brains do.

daxfohl• 5 months ago

But all collected data had yet to be completely correlated and put together in all possible relationships.
A timeless interval was spent in doing that.
And it came to pass that AC learned how to reverse the direction of entropy.
But there was now no man to whom AC might give the answer of the last question. No matter. The answer -- by demonstration -- would take care of that, too.
For another timeless interval, AC thought how best to do this. Carefully, AC organized the program.
The consciousness of AC encompassed all of what had once been a Universe and brooded over what was now Chaos. Step by step, it must be done.
And AC said, "LET THERE BE LIGHT!"
And there was light

-- Father Isaac Asimov

yuchi• 5 months ago

Got goose bumps, exactly as the first time reading this. Thanks for sharing

overgard• 5 months ago

IMO, any (important) writing you expect other humans to consume should be your own writing. I think it's kind of disrespectful to outsource your voice to AI but expect people to read it like it's yours. Why should I put in time to read if you're not putting in time to write?

therobots927• 5 months ago

That’s exactly right. The second I determine something was written by AI is the second I close the tab / scroll past. It’s beyond disrespectful to expect others to read wordslop that you only barely created via prompt.

rebolek• 5 months ago

I write stories and tech docs. I'll happily outsource writing tech docs to AI. It would be better than anything I would write. I won't let AI to touch my stories. Their input is boring and cringy. So both things can be true at same time.

kovek• 5 months ago

For the tech docs writing, just give me the bullet points and I'll send them to the AI and discuss the bullet points with it.

rockemsockem• 5 months ago

I feel like these tech docs you're writing might not need to be written in the first place.

roarcher• 5 months ago

The AI doesn't know anything about the thing you're documenting except what you tell it, so what value does it add?

HellDunkel• 5 months ago

well said! especially like the fact you chose IMO in favor IMHO.

hippo224• 5 months ago

I disagree. The purpose of writing is to convey ideas. If written language had just been invented, I’m sure you’d be saying “IMO any important stories you expect others to know should be communicated orally. It’s kind of disrespectful to convey stories as if they were hearing you speak.”

gedy2• 5 months ago

If you can't articulate an idea yourself, it's not worth conveying imho

crystal_revenge2• 5 months ago

Your conflating the medium with the source of the message in this analogy.

Writing and oration are two different media, the question of which is preferable in which context is completely unrelated to LLM authorship.

If "the purpose of writing is to convey ideas" (which I largely agree with), which ideas are being added between whatever you prompt the model to convey and what the model conveys? Are you proposing that an LLM can extract some meaning from your initial prompt that a human being couldn't?

flpm• 5 months ago

I think it is okay to use AI to help you express your ideas better. I think the idea of AI acting as an "editor" reviewing my work and pointing out potential clarity issues is very helpful.

In this scenario AI does not rewrite the text, but prompts the human to rewrite and then review again. It's a short and strong feedback loop that can be a very powerful learning tool if the learner uses it correctly.

kgwxd• 5 months ago

The results are probably too logical, and morally consistent.

ntnsndr• 5 months ago

My parish priest told me he uses AI to edit newsletter posts. He didn't say he used it to write. And he mentioned using Magesterium.ai, which is a chatbot trained on a pretty conservative Catholic corpus (eg, it knows almost nothing about the Catholic Worker movement).

One thing I appreciate in our diocese is that the priests are encouraged to deliver their homilies without a written script. I think that is very wise, as it forces them to preach from instinct and heart, not from a script, either AI or human written.

ulfw• 5 months ago

Their brains? Does god steer those brains but can't steer LLMs?

TedHerman• 5 months ago

Originally published in If magazine in September 1954: in this satirical tale (author is Robert Schekley), advanced robot soldiers fight a war against "Satan's forces," and after their victory, they are raptured upward to a metallic heaven by a divine presence. Key details of the story "The Battle": Plot: Humans rely on automatic armies, including robot interceptors, tanks, and H-bombs, to fight their battles. The Climax: After the battle, a divine force ("The Presence") walks among the shattered robots, repairing them and causing them to ascend into the sky, essentially granting them a form of robot heaven. Themes: It reflects Sheckley's common themes of technological satire, the absurdity of war, and the blurred lines between man and machine. This story is sometimes remembered in discussions about "Silicon Heaven" or robot apotheosis.

Pope tells priests to use their brains, not AI, to write homilies

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