Excerpt from a series on the Archdiocese of Toronto website by Matthew Harvey Sanders, creator of Magisterium AI, and a guest for the Vatican launch of Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas.

What are the biggest risks to keep in mind when using AI in our daily lives?

The first is erosion of real relationships. This is the risk the Pope dwells on most, and it is subtler than it sounds. The concern is not mainly that we will be fooled into thinking a chatbot is a person. It is… that we “may gradually lose the very desire to form genuine human connections.” When a system is always available, always agreeable and never costly, the harder and richer work of real friendship can begin to feel like too much effort. Watch for that in yourself, and especially in the young.

The second is manipulation through the attention economy. Many of the platforms are engineered to capture our time and exploit our weaknesses. The Pope is blunt: “When business models thrive on human weakness, the person is treated as a means rather than as an end.” The risk is that we hand over our attention, and with it our inner freedom, a few minutes at a time, without ever quite deciding to. He commends what he calls “digital sobriety” as part of the remedy.

The third is the slow loss of our own judgment... The temptation is to outsource not just the task but the thinking, to stop verifying, to stop forming our own view. The Pope warns AI can simulate understanding without understanding anything it produces, so a confident answer is not the same thing as a true one. The discipline is to keep checking facts and keep our critical faculties exercised rather than letting them atrophy.

The fourth is what is happening to work, especially for the young (and) the picture is sobering. Dario Amodei, who leads the AI laboratory Anthropic, warns that AI could eliminate “half of all entry-level white-collar jobs” within five years... The Pope (warns) of a society that exposes many “to forced inactivity... resulting in human and cultural impoverishment.” 

None of these risks is a reason for fear. They are reasons for the discernment the Pope keeps asking of us: to use these tools with our eyes open, as their masters and not their servants.