Pope Leo XIV Reveals How AI Influenced His Name Choice

Newly elected Pope Leo XIV has already referenced artificial intelligence as a key issue facing ... More humanity.
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Artificial intelligence played a role in Pope Leo XIV’s name selection, the newly elected leader of the Catholic church said on Saturday. And no, ChatGPT didn’t pick it for him.
In his first formal address to the College of Cardinals following his election on Thursday, the Chicago-born Robert Francis Prevost spoke of how his namesake Pope Leo XIII led the church from 1878 until 1903 during a pivotal period that saw the development of the automobile and airplane and the growth of steel production. In his remarks to the cardinals who elected him, the pope likened the transformational change of his predecessor’s era to today’s technological advancements dominated by AI.
“Pope Leo XIII, with the historic Encyclical Rerum novarum, addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution,” Pope Leo said. “Today, the Church offers to all her treasure of social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and the developments of artificial intelligence.”
Pope XIII issued his famous 1891 Rerum novarum, or Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor, as an open letter to Catholic leadership addressing the need for just and humane conditions for the working class amid rapid industrial expansion.
”In our own day, the church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice and labor,” the new pope told the cardinals who elected him on day two of the papal conclave. A few days earlier, President Donald Trump shared an AI-generated image of himself in papal attire after joking that he would like to be pontiff.