Pope Leo Statement on Artificial Intelligence: Slop-Ridden LinkIn Confirms Warnings

‘The first contribution we can make toward a more humane civilization,” Pope Leo XIV writes in his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, “is to be mindful of our words.” The power of words and language is one of the unifying threads of the papal document, which explores the growth of artificial intelligence and its implications for life, work, war, and what it means to be human. It’s a theme very much connected to the Tower of Babel, one of the biblical images Leo chooses to frame the volume.

Babel, he warns, “was a project conceived without reference to God, supported by a uniformity that eliminated diversity and that chose homogenization over communion” [emphasis mine]. Reading these words, I couldn’t help but think about the homogenizing effect AI has had on words themselves for a large sector of the working world. Corporate jargon has long been with us, but if there’s one example of the kind of language that millions of Americans who work in tech associate with the age of AI, it’s the LinkedIn Slop Post.

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Nat Brown

Nat Brown is a former deputy web editor of Foreign Affairs and a former deputy managing editor of National Review Online.

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Pope Leo XIV

‘The first contribution we can make toward a more humane civilization,” Pope Leo XIV writes in his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, “is to be mindful of our words.” The power of words and language is one of the unifying threads of the papal document, which explores the growth of artificial intelligence and its implications for life, work, war, and what it means to be human. It’s a theme very much connected to the Tower of Babel, one of the biblical images Leo chooses to frame the volume.

Babel, he warns, “was a project conceived without reference to God, supported by a uniformity that eliminated diversity and that chose homogenization over communion” [emphasis mine]. Reading these words, I couldn’t help but think about the homogenizing effect AI has had on words themselves for a large sector of the working world. Corporate jargon has long been with us, but if there’s one example of the kind of language that millions of Americans who work in tech associate with the age of AI, it’s the LinkedIn Slop Post.