Did the Pope use artificial intelligence to warn us about the dangers of artificial intelligence?

AI was likely used to write parts of Pope Leo XIV’s recent encyclical on the impact of AI on humanity. that analysis By Linch Zhang Posted in LessWrong Forum I found certain paragraphs from Wonderful humanity To be written between 40 percent and 100 percent by AI, according to popular AI detector Pangram.

The document includes well-known features that appear in AI-generated writing, such as higher use of the word “really” — which appears in Claude Anthropic’s writings — than in previous public publications, Chang says. Someone else ran the text of the document section by section Via pangramwhich found that 62 percent of the first chapter was marked as AI generated. when Edge After running roughly 2,000 words of the document through Pangram, she estimated that 46 percent of them were written by the AI.

However, other parts are recorded as being written by humans. Zhang notes that Pangram has labeled some sections as “essentially 0% AI.” The first 20 paragraphs of the last four posts, when viewed in Pangram, were 100 percent confident that they were human written. The text of Pope Leo’s speech, published via Pangram, was also classified as 100 percent human.

AI detection is not foolproof. Different AI detectors can return different results, and even when there is consensus, there is no guarantee that it is correct. But Pangram is well-respected among AI researchers. in March 2025Pangram said it estimates its false positive rate for reporting AI-written works as AI-generated at “about 1 in 10,000.”

Encyclicals are lengthy letters published by a pope, intended to convey teachings that address important moral and social challenges of the time, according to the New York Times. This encyclical is the first for the pope, and the most recent was written by Pope Francis in October 2024. It is also the first to focus on artificial intelligence and its wide-ranging implications, with Pope Leo introducing it in particular alongside Christopher Olah, one of the founders of Anthropic.

The Vatican did not immediately respond to a request for comment.