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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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!
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.
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.
>>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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].
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.”
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.”
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.
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.
I'll accept your perspective and try to learn from it.
However I think that the comment is relevant, and you can see from the replies gathered before it was flagged that it did spark a relevant discussion.
Reminding that the speaker is a spiritual leader and not an authority on the use of technology is not a sneer and and not an ideological statement. In any context other than religion, which I understand is sensitive, a statement of that sort would be considered a contribution to the discussion, not an ideological battle. And that's precisely the problem - censoring a discussion about the relevance of religion to the matter is the ideological act.
I agree. I personally listen to Sam Altman on these types of matters. He's someone with much more extensive qualifications than the pope!
Edit: it looks like I was wrong about this and Sam Altman has no formal qualifications. I still think he has probably picked up a lot of life experience over the years.
I do believe (believe, not know) that consciousness is something bigger than we know, I can even believe in panpsychism sometimes but I don't think any religion have any real clue about the nature of consciousness.
They could even finally be a source for good if they’d actually use some of the billions they collect.
Has anyone actually directly encountered a single vatican sponsored charity or program in the wild? It seems quite a morally bankrupt organisation to me, and i’m not sure what if anything it really has to do with Christianity or Christians anyore.
From the Wikipedia page on the Catholic Church: "By means of Catholic charities and beyond, the Catholic Church is the largest non-government provider of education and health care in the world."
Just yesterday I went to see a presentation of a priest appointed to a massive parish in the rural area of South Sudan, setting up schools and bringing in aid.
I don't know enough about the current Vatican affairs. But as an anecdotal experience, I was born at a catholic hospital at a small town in Southeast Asia. And they're the best managed hospitals in the area. I'm not even religious or catholic but I respect what they did here
I'm not religious in the least bit, but this is a case where I'll take of the words of a guy with significant influence saying we shouldn't let a machine make our minds irrelevant as a win.
The AI bros believe in and promote superficial woowoo. They are cult leaders and con men, not an authority on anything else. I wouldn't take advice from them on anything.
I genuinely don’t understand AI people anymore. Like the cognitive gap is so huge that I feel like I’m from another planet now. Im not religious, but automating religion is so absolutely meaningless that it boggles my mind. You could have a machine emit million of prayers up to heaven per second, but why would you?
And despite what you think, most of us can tell apart AI generated content from the genuine thing. I am, however, starting to believe AI bros are being sincere when they tell us that they can’t. Every time someone gives me that tired “well how do you know we’re not just stochastic parrots too!” crap, I’m getting a little closer to taking their word for it. Maybe they are just that.
I used to worry that the problem was that LLMs allowed you to be stupid, but I recently realized the actual problem is that they reward you for being stupid.
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 ;)
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.
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.
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.
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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.
> 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.
You have a lot of faith in the qualities of average priests.
To be fair, faith is the crux of Catholicism.
we have vibe coding priests before GTA VI
> 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.
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
We have been further away from OMM 0000 than we are today, that's for sure.
There are resources that publish homilies for priests to give. Here is an example for English speakers.
https://associationofcatholicpriests.ie/liturgy/sunday-resou...
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.
Not to write homilies though. The real danger of risking exposing private information would be pastoral work.
Well maybe they just need to start recording confessionals. Just imagine what Gemini 3.1 could do with 1M tokens of that stuff.
Gemini 3.1 – I don't remember that verse. Is that from the old testament?
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!
Nit: you're confusing the vow of silence with the confessional seal.
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.
"We value your privacy! Do you consent to sharing the contents of your confession with our 2137 partners? [ACCEPT ALL] [MAYBE LATER]"
Was the number of partners you picked random or you chose 2137 on purpose? As it's actually somewhat related to the topic...
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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.
>>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.
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I'm glad that priests are well known for always obeying rules and never abusing their position. /s
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
[dead]
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".
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.
Yokels! lol
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.
>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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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The Pope will change his mind with Claude Opus 5.2
lol
If the Pope doesn't start spending every waking minute in a CC terminal he will be left behind and lose his job. /s
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
"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
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
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.
Too bad Terry A. Davis is not around anymore. He would have been literally enraptured by LLMs.
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.
Or he would have vibe coded the second coming of Unix.
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.
The flip side of that is, if you care about your community you want to deliver engaging homilies. And that may not be your personal strength.
Also I believe we're talking about Leo not Francis.
I meant tbh, if they get better ie less boring, I’m all for it!
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.
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.
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.
And that's exactly the plan I guess.
Religious claptrap is the OPPOSITE of critical thinking.
Well ... isn't organized religion a subscription service for everyday life?
You do not have to pay anything.
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Btw pope is a math phd.
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".
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.
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.
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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.
He did earn a BS degree in mathematics, but his dissertation was a religious one.
(BS here meaning bachelor's — I misread this at first!)
"On iconoclasm and the Birch-Tate conjecture".
Imagine the pope being a man of science a couple of hundred years back... How much better the world could be.
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.
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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...
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.
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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.
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A lot of very bad things were historically done by men of science
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Please be more specific. Church is 2000 years old.
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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.
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?
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Our Electric Messiah has arrived: https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=pn3KD5YBhro&si=0sF3nL4DZBO...
Corporations vs organised religion on artificial intelligence? This is way cooler than the cold war.
Religion and Automation is not a new thing... cue...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prayer_wheel
Well, for 'The Nine Billion Names of God' the monks finally ended up renting a computer. ;-)
Cyberpunk headline
Nothing new. I'm sure something similar was said about Google before...
https://encourageandteach.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2...
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.
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.
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.
AI Mary, bereft of grace, paid for by sinners.
I left the church a long time ago, but this still makes me sad.
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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
One step closer to an Electric Monk
Based
How long until the church publishes their official SOUL.md?
create-homily skill?
jesus mcp?
/request-transfer-to-Servants-of-the-Paraclete
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
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.
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This is exactly the type of comment we're trying to avoid on HN.
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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How to prepare homilies is clearly a religious topic
This is exactly the type of comment we're trying to avoid on HN.
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'll accept your perspective and try to learn from it.
However I think that the comment is relevant, and you can see from the replies gathered before it was flagged that it did spark a relevant discussion.
Reminding that the speaker is a spiritual leader and not an authority on the use of technology is not a sneer and and not an ideological statement. In any context other than religion, which I understand is sensitive, a statement of that sort would be considered a contribution to the discussion, not an ideological battle. And that's precisely the problem - censoring a discussion about the relevance of religion to the matter is the ideological act.
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I agree. I personally listen to Sam Altman on these types of matters. He's someone with much more extensive qualifications than the pope!
Edit: it looks like I was wrong about this and Sam Altman has no formal qualifications. I still think he has probably picked up a lot of life experience over the years.
It has to be ironic, right? Not sure what Sam Altman is qualified in apart from money making (which, of course, he's extraordinary excellent in).
Have you considered that our very consciousness is supernatural?
Considered at length, and ultimately rejected due to lack of evidence.
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I do believe (believe, not know) that consciousness is something bigger than we know, I can even believe in panpsychism sometimes but I don't think any religion have any real clue about the nature of consciousness.
I don’t necessarily disagree but how do you get to the conclusion?
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Why then does it change if we take drugs?
What does “supernatural” in the context of your comment means to you?
Ah, a man (or women) after my own heart in HN.
Do you limit it to human‘s consciousness?
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How could it be?
They could even finally be a source for good if they’d actually use some of the billions they collect.
Has anyone actually directly encountered a single vatican sponsored charity or program in the wild? It seems quite a morally bankrupt organisation to me, and i’m not sure what if anything it really has to do with Christianity or Christians anyore.
From the Wikipedia page on the Catholic Church: "By means of Catholic charities and beyond, the Catholic Church is the largest non-government provider of education and health care in the world."
Just yesterday I went to see a presentation of a priest appointed to a massive parish in the rural area of South Sudan, setting up schools and bringing in aid.
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I don't know enough about the current Vatican affairs. But as an anecdotal experience, I was born at a catholic hospital at a small town in Southeast Asia. And they're the best managed hospitals in the area. I'm not even religious or catholic but I respect what they did here
Ah yes, these priests killed and tortured around the world just to burn charity money.
I'm not religious in the least bit, but this is a case where I'll take of the words of a guy with significant influence saying we shouldn't let a machine make our minds irrelevant as a win.
> The pope believes in and promotes supernatural woowoo.
Hey, so does Peter Thiel!
The AI bros believe in and promote superficial woowoo. They are cult leaders and con men, not an authority on anything else. I wouldn't take advice from them on anything.
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Your comment has a very strong AI stench.
I guess that's the point of it. It's kinda hard to doubt what they're saying anw.
A comment about how nobody can tell facades from the real thing — and the first response is someone trying to tell. I appreciate the live demo.
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This post is a prime example of why the Pope said what he did.
Bring on the Electric Monks ...
I genuinely don’t understand AI people anymore. Like the cognitive gap is so huge that I feel like I’m from another planet now. Im not religious, but automating religion is so absolutely meaningless that it boggles my mind. You could have a machine emit million of prayers up to heaven per second, but why would you?
And despite what you think, most of us can tell apart AI generated content from the genuine thing. I am, however, starting to believe AI bros are being sincere when they tell us that they can’t. Every time someone gives me that tired “well how do you know we’re not just stochastic parrots too!” crap, I’m getting a little closer to taking their word for it. Maybe they are just that.
I used to worry that the problem was that LLMs allowed you to be stupid, but I recently realized the actual problem is that they reward you for being stupid.
AI people are a cult as well.
They simply follow (an)other god(s)... One of them clearly being Mammon.
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I think you are grossly missing the point.
That AI can do it better - by what dimension? - than the priests is arguable, but the reason for a priest to write one is reflection, connection..
Have you ever considered that possibly performing something is not only a mean to some output but that the process is the thing?
That may or may not translate to your coding analogy, but for the article comment you pose, I think you are way off.
I have been present for a sermon that smelled like chatgpt. It does make you wish you had sent your agent instead.
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Yeah, because the AI might educate them :)
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 ;)