Few technologies have generated as much excitement — or anxiety — as generative artificial intelligence. For good reason. Pope Leo’s new encyclical, “Magnifica humanitas,” identifies the crux of the matter: “In the era of artificial intelligence, when human dignity is threatened by new forms of dehumanization, ours is the pressing duty to remain profoundly human” (15). Our species, the text reassures us, is a cause worth defending. Hear, hear!
On a recent episode of AMDG: A Jesuit Podcast, host Mike Laskey spoke with Catholic social ethicist Anna Rowlands, who participated in the Vatican conversations surrounding the development of “Magnifica humanitas.” Rowlands suggests that AI technologies, while potentially dangerous, can nevertheless be used responsibly by Christians and others of good will, provided users remain clear-eyed about their formative effects and attentive to the economic, political and technological power structures that shape the systems and the institutions that produce them.
Other voices, however, are less optimistic. There’s an increasingly large contingent of folks who argue that genuinely faithful use of AI is (nearly) impossible. In the AMDG discussion, for example, Laskey cites a passage from an article by Antón Barba-Kay in The Hedgehog Review, in which the author commends “Magnifica humanitas”in its recognition that technology is never morally or culturally neutral, but is critical of the text’s failure to follow that insight to its logical conclusion:
Magnifica humanitas recurs several times to the point that “technology is never neutral.” This is exactly right. … Unfortunately, this is not the point the encyclical is making. We read, rather, that “Technological innovations, including artificial intelligence, are not neutral, for they can either foster participation and justice or exacerbate inequality, control and exclusion. For this reason, they must be evaluated by asking a crucial question: Do they truly help individuals and peoples to become more humane and fraternal, while respecting our common home and future generations?” Yet this is precisely what people mean when they say that technologies are neutral, namely, that they can be used for good or ill and that it is up to us to decide well. These descriptions of technology’s neutrality proceed from the technocratic terms and premises themselves, the upshot of which is that AI is “a valuable tool that requires vigilance.” Which, to some of us, is interchangeable with the statement that cocaine can be a valuable drug that should be snorted with a pinch of salt.
Barba-Kay, distinguished fellow at the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law, thinks that the discourse surrounding AI is too “instrumentalist.” That is, we’re so caught up in articulating how to use this new “tool,” that we’ve forgotten, or ignored, or never knew in the first place, that digital media technologies are never mere tools. Rather, they constitute lived environments — spaces in which a person’s habits, and thus desires, are formed and reformed. Culture and technology writer L.M. Sacasas, in “Your AI is Not a Tool,” makes this case well.
I confess that I am astounded by how blithely some insist that it is all as simple as learning to use AI well, as if we had not just undergone a nearly 20-year, society-wide experiment showing that a so-called “tool,” say a smartphone or a social media platform, will (mal)form even the most vigilant and virtuous user into its own image and shape. This is the blindness at the heart of modern technological hubris. It is the firm but misguided conviction that our “tools” exist entirely outside of us and thus, if taken up with requisite skill, can be “safely” deployed.
Still others are even more strident in their criticism of artificial intelligence. Many artists, especially those whose creative work is uniquely threatened by generative AI, have outright refused it. The novelist Paul Kingsnorth, for example, recently launched Writers Against AI, a campaign that calls on authors to pledge never to use AI in their writing, never to knowingly publish AI-generated work, and to actively support human-created literature. The movement has led to other initiatives such as Readers Against AI.
Between cautious optimism and outright refusal lies an important question: If Christians are to engage AI at all, what does faithful engagement actually look like? How do we envision and enact an ethic of inhabitation, rather than total abstinence or unchecked enthusiasm?
With “Magnifica humanitas,” Leo provides a robust Augustinian account of technology, reminding us that human beings are builders whose making is always directed toward some ultimate end. We are teleological creatures who envision and participate in shared stories. The question, then, is not simply whether we’ll build, but what we’ll build — and for whom. Will AI become another Tower of Babel, or, like Nehemiah’s labor on Jerusalem’s walls, serve the patient work of restoring God’s kingdom? As Barba-Kay, Sacasas and others have pointed out, discerning between those two possibilities is far more difficult than merely stating them, even for those who recognize that AI is not a mere tool.
In a previous article for the Jesuit Media Lab, I suggested that Ignatian spirituality — in its emphases on discernment and encounter — affords us helpful means for faithfully abiding digital culture. I think it offers a way forward here as well. One of the most illuminating guides is the 20th-century French Jesuit Michel de Certeau (1925-1986). Best known today for his influence on media and cultural studies, de Certeau was fundamentally interested in how ordinary Christians navigate worlds that they themselves did not create. His landmark work, “The Practice of Everyday Life”(which I read years ago, in graduate school, not realizing he was Catholic), offers some ideas that, considered now, are especially helpful for thinking about AI.
De Certeau distinguishes between strategiesand tactics. Strategies are the purview of institutions: the means by which governments, educational institutions, corporations and other dominant actors organize social space, establish norms and distribute power. Technology companies, AI developers and digital platforms all operate strategically. Tactics, by contrast, belong to those who don’t control the system but nevertheless must live within it. Tactics are the creative, often quiet practices by which ordinary people borrow, redirect and occasionally subvert systems designed by others. Social media and generative AI users frequently operate tactically. They abide platforms whose rules they didn’t create — and whose underlying logic they cannot control — yet appropriate those platforms’ affordances in pursuit of their own ends.
Though de Certeau did not, as far as I’m aware, conceive of strategies and tactics in direct conversation with media ecologists like Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong or Jacques Ellul, his ideas invite media ecological application. Applied to AI discourse — and digital culture more broadly — the strategies/tactics distinction both illuminates AI’s formative capacities and provides a heuristic for resisting its more deformative tendencies. The point isn’t that tactics free us from technological formation. They don’t. Rather, tactics acknowledge that formation is unavoidable — that we’re always already immersed in a plethora of strategic environments not of our making. Tactics are the practices by which we learn to inhabit those environments without wholly surrendering to their formative influence.
AI isn’t “just a tool.” I’m with Barba-Kay and Sacasas there. Our intention in using it, while important, isn’t the only thing that matters. Precisely because generative AI is an ecology that forms our habits, attention and imagination, it cannot simply be “escaped.” But I’m also in agreement with Pope Leo and Dr. Rowlands that we, as Christians, can carefully and faithfully deploy new media technologies, including AI, for God’s good purposes.
This, it seems to me, is a profoundly Ignatian task: neither rejecting the world nor baptizing it uncritically, but discerning the spirits at work and learning to live faithfully — tactically — in a world that is not our own.
Jesus’ prayer in Chapter 17 of John’s Gospel is the root of the theological aphorism that Christians are to “be in the world but not of it.” Though some believers mistakenly interpret that passage to mean that the church should separate herself from the world, the correct reading forwards a different reality. The tension between “the world” and the church is not presence versus absence, but participation versus conformity. Christians are indeed called to inhabit the world, to be in it, as the saying goes, but to be here differently.
We must discern how to embed ourselves in the cultures, institutions and communities that surround us — not ignoring their potential dangers, but attentively, prayerfully, discovering ways to abide and redeem them. Fidelity is neither fearful withdrawal nor naïve embrace, but faithful presence. We may be on the internet, but not of it.
