Pope Leo has issued a warning about AI and called for regulation, quoting Gandalf from The Lord of the Rings in the process.
As part of a manifesto on the future safety of mankind called Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity), the pontiff called on governments to slow down the development of generative AI technologies and develop regulation that would help to prevent the spread of misinformation. He also condemned the use of AI in warfare, saying that reducing human control of weaponry makes it even harder to consider a war “just” and warned against launching an AI arms race. Leo, who has called AI the biggest challenge facing humanity today, said in the document that it was “not permissible” to entrust irreversible, lethal decisions to AI systems.
In the Magnifica Humanitas, under a section titled ‘We can all do our part,’ Pope Leo channels Gandalf to hammer home his point:
The twentieth-century Catholic author J.R.R. Tolkien, in the words of a protagonist in one of his novels, described our responsibility in this way: “It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.”
That quote is from The Lord of the Rings. The Return of the King, where the famous wizard addresses a gathering of the lords of the allies at the gates of Minas Tirith. At this point Denethor and Théoden are dead and Faramir is recovering from his wounds in the Houses of Healing. Among those listening is Aragorn. Here’s the quote in full:
“Other evils there are that may come; for Sauron is himself but a servant or emissary. Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.”
The question is, will the tech leaders of the world, so obsessed with AI that it has come to dominate western economics, listen to Pope Leo? Among the attendees at a Vatican event presenting the text on Monday was Chris Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, which produces the Claude AI tools. So we know at least one of the major players listened to what the Pope had to say.
“We cannot be satisfied with merely calling for the moralization of machines — the so-called ‘alignment’ of AI with human values — without also having the courage to insist on a further condition: the possibility of openly discussing the ethical frameworks involved and subjecting them to shared standards of social justice,” Leo continues in the text.
“Otherwise, those who control AI will impose their own moral vision, which will become the invisible infrastructure of these systems. A more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few. What is needed is a more active political involvement that is capable of slowing things down when everything is accelerating, and of protecting the opportunities for communities still to be able to participate and ask questions.”
This month, Peter Jackson, legendary director of The much-loved The Lord of the Rings movies as well as the Hobbit trilogy of films, dismissed concern about the impact of AI on filmmaking, saying: “I don’t dislike it at all. I mean, to me, it’s just a special effect.” His work on The Lord of the Rings continues with next year’s movie, The Hunt for Gollum.
Photo by Alberto PIZZOLI / AFP.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].
