alt Hacker NewsPope tells priests to use their brains, not AI, to write homilies
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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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
There's an interesting parallel here with code generation. The best code written with AI assistance still requires someone who deeply understands what they're building. The AI is a tool for expression, not a replacement for thought.
A homily written by someone who spent the week reflecting on their community's struggles will always be more meaningful than a polished AI-generated one, even if the grammar is worse. The value of a sermon isn't in the prose quality — it's in the authenticity of someone who actually cares about the people listening.
Francis is basically saying: the medium is the message. If you outsource the thinking, you're outsourcing the caring.
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.
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.
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.
Too bad Terry A. Davis is not around anymore. He would have been literally enraptured by LLMs.
> 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
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.
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.
Love the headline and curious what the pope actually believes that brains do.
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.
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.
This kind of headline is something we could have only imagined as a joke 5 years ago.
"AI" seems like a religion
It requires "belief"
"AI" believers claim to know the future
Relentless prognostication and effort to gain followers
Well, for 'The Nine Billion Names of God' the monks finally ended up renting a computer. ;-)
The results are probably too logical, and morally consistent.
Religion and Automation is not a new thing... cue...
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.
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™
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.
Corporations vs organised religion on artificial intelligence? This is way cooler than the cold war.
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.”
... but will they be able to compete with religions that have embraced AI, or will they be hopelessly left behind?
Our Electric Messiah has arrived: https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=pn3KD5YBhro&si=0sF3nL4DZBO...
Nothing new. I'm sure something similar was said about Google before...
https://encourageandteach.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2...
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.”
I wish the Catholic Church would use that approach more often.
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.
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?
One step closer to an Electric Monk
Related previously:
Message from Pope Leo XIV on the 60th World Day of Social Communications
The bible could have been written by a hallucinating AI.
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.
I meant tbh, if they get better ie less boring, I’m all for it!
Cyberpunk headline
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.
How long until the church publishes their official SOUL.md?
create-homily skill?
jesus mcp?
/request-transfer-to-Servants-of-the-Paraclete
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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?