Artificial Intelligence and the Forgotten Question: What Is Man?

Artificial intelligence is no longer a distant possibility. It is already here, already shaping the way we work, study, communicate, create, decide, and imagine the future. It writes, translates, summarises, generates images, imitates voices, answers questions, organises information, detects patterns, predicts behaviour, and performs in seconds tasks that once required long hours of human labour.

For many people, the first question is practical: How do I use it? For governments and businesses, the question is often economic: How can it increase productivity, efficiency, and growth? For schools and universities, the question is educational: How do we regulate it, detect it, or integrate it? For parents, the question is more anxious: What is this doing to my children?

These are all real questions. But they are not the deepest one.

The deepest question raised by artificial intelligence is not finally about machines. It is about man.

That is the great insight at the heart of Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas. The Holy Father does not treat artificial intelligence merely as another technological development requiring updated rules and ethical safeguards. He sees that AI presses upon the modern world an older and more serious question: what is the human person?

This question matters because artificial intelligence does something unusual. It does not merely extend the human hand, like a tool. It does not merely strengthen the human body, like a machine. It does not merely preserve the human word, like a book. It imitates certain outward signs of the human mind. It speaks. It generates. It predicts. It recommends. It simulates conversation. It can appear thoughtful, responsive, creative, and even personal.

Precisely there, the danger begins.

Not because the machine is evil in itself. Catholic theology has never taught that human creativity is bad simply because it is powerful. Man is placed in the garden “to till it and keep it” (Genesis 2:15). He is called to cultivate creation, to use intelligence wisely, to heal, build, organise, discover, protect, and serve. Technology can be a genuine good when ordered toward the dignity of the person and the common good.

The danger is subtler. When a machine imitates aspects of human intelligence, modern man may begin to interpret himself according to the machine. Intelligence becomes calculation. Speech becomes output. Creativity becomes generation. Freedom becomes choice architecture. Work becomes productivity. Relationship becomes responsiveness. The human person, slowly and almost invisibly, begins to be translated into the categories of the systems he has built.

Pope Leo’s encyclical is therefore not a fearful rejection of technology. It is a call to remember the truth of man before that truth is obscured.

Scripture gives the Church her answer from the beginning: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” (Genesis 1:26). Man is not first a worker, consumer, user, patient, student, voter, data subject, or profile. He is image. He receives his dignity from God before he performs anything, produces anything, chooses anything, succeeds at anything, or fails at anything.

This is the great line artificial intelligence can never cross. The machine may imitate speech, calculation, translation, prediction, pattern recognition, and even certain forms of counsel. But it does not bear the image of God. It is not called into covenant. It does not stand before God in conscience. It cannot repent, forgive, worship, receive grace, suffer redemptively, or become holy.

Man can.

This distinction is not meant to belittle technology. A tool is not insulted by being called a tool. The distinction exists to protect the human person, especially the weak. If dignity depends on intelligence, then those with diminished cognition become less secure. If dignity depends on productivity, then the unemployed, disabled, elderly, and sick become less secure. If dignity depends on autonomy, then the dependent become less secure. If dignity depends on efficiency, then every person who slows the system begins to appear as a burden.

Christianity refuses this. The unborn child, the elderly woman with dementia, the person with profound disability, the exhausted worker, the prisoner, the addict, the poor, the sick, the lonely, and the sinner all possess a dignity no algorithm can calculate and no society may revoke. Human dignity is not a performance category. It is a gift.

This is why Magnifica Humanitas matters for ordinary Catholics. It is not only for ethicists, computer scientists, bishops, politicians, or business leaders. It is for parents trying to raise children in a digital world. It is for teachers wondering how to form students when answers can be generated instantly. It is for workers facing automation and surveillance. It is for writers, artists, and publishers trying to defend truth and authorship. It is for pastors and catechists who will increasingly meet people receiving religious language from machines that cannot pray. It is for every Catholic who must learn how to use powerful tools without allowing those tools to define reality.

The encyclical’s contrast between Babel and Jerusalem is especially important. Babel is not condemned because man builds. Man was made to build. Babel is condemned because man builds without worship. The builders seek to make a name for themselves apart from God. Their unity becomes uniformity. Their power becomes self-assertion. Their construction becomes a monument to human pride.

Jerusalem offers another way. It is rebuilt through prayer, responsibility, participation, patience, and communion. Pope Leo’s point is clear: the question is not whether humanity will build with AI. It will. The question is whether it will build Babel or Jerusalem.

That question must be asked everywhere.

In schools: does AI help form students in truth, or merely produce answers?

In workplaces: does AI serve the worker, or make the worker more replaceable?

In hospitals: does AI assist care, or reduce the patient to data?

In families: does technology support communion, or replace presence?

In public life: does AI strengthen truth, or flood the world with persuasive unreality?

In the Church: do digital tools assist evangelisation, or do they tempt us to mistake content for communion?

The Catholic answer cannot be panic. Fear alone does not form wisdom. The answer also cannot be naïve optimism. Not every innovation is progress simply because it is new. The proper Catholic response is discernment: sober, serious, hopeful, and rooted in Christ.

Christ is the true measure of man. In him, humanity is not treated as a problem to be surpassed, but as a nature to be redeemed and glorified. The Son of God does not save us by escaping the human condition. He enters it. He takes flesh. He receives a mother’s care. He learns human speech. He works with human hands. He weeps, suffers, bleeds, dies, and rises bodily from the dead.

This is the final answer to every post-human dream. Salvation is not becoming less human. Salvation is becoming fully human in Christ.

That is why the Church must speak now. Artificial intelligence may become more powerful. It may become more fluent, more useful, more persuasive, more embedded in daily life. But it will never become the Word made flesh. It will never replace the Eucharist. It will never absolve sins. It will never form conscience. It will never love the poor. It will never sing the Magnificat. It will never become a saint.

The danger of the AI age is not simply that machines may become more impressive. The danger is that man may become more forgetful: forgetful of his dignity, forgetful of his body, forgetful of conscience, forgetful of truth, forgetful of worship, forgetful of the poor, forgetful of Christ.

That is why I wrote Made in the Image of God: A Catholic Reflection on Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas. The book is not a technical manual on artificial intelligence. It is a theological reflection on Pope Leo’s encyclical and its urgent call to safeguard the human person in the age of AI. It explores the encyclical through Scripture, Catholic tradition, social doctrine, moral theology, the Incarnation, the dignity of work, the crisis of truth, conscience, the Eucharist, and Mary’s Magnificat.

Above all, it asks the question that must come before every other question: what is man?

If we answer that question wrongly, no technical safeguard will be enough. If we answer it in Christ, then even the tools of this age may be placed at the service of wisdom, justice, and love.

Artificial intelligence may calculate, generate, predict, and imitate.

But man is made in the image of God.

That is the truth Pope Leo XIV calls the Church to remember.

That is the truth Catholics must now proclaim.