Vatican cardinal warns of ‘painful consequences’ from AI ‘deepfakes’

VATICAN CITY (LifeSiteNews) — Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça, the Prefect of the Dicastery for Culture and Education, warned during a Thursday conference against the “painful consequences” AI (artificial intelligence)”deepfakes” may have for human interaction and relationships.

In his address to the May 21 International Conference on Artificial Intelligence at the Pontifical Urban University entitled “Preserving human faces and voices,” Cardinal Mendonça warned that AI “deepfakes,” or highly realistic AI-generated videos that alter someone’s voice, image, or likeness, threaten the “very grammar” of human interaction, per EWTN News. The prelate stressed that deepfakes not only can have “painful” consequences for individuals and their relationships with others but may also damage the very political, social, and cultural fabric of societies.

Mendonça’s remarks came just days before Pope Leo XIV is scheduled to release his first encyclical entitled Magnifica Humanitas (“Magnificent Humanity”), which will focus primarily on AI.

“When a deepfake lends a personʼs face to words they have never spoken … it is the very grammar of the human encounter that is altered,” Mendonça said. “Technology that exploits our need for relationship … can not only have painful consequences on the destiny of individuals, but it can also damage the social, cultural, and political fabric of societies.”

READ: Pope Leo XIV needs to write an encyclical about AI 

Mendonça also cited Pope Leo’s January message commemorating the 60th World Day of Social Communications, clarifying that the Vatican’s goal “lies not in stopping digital innovation but in guiding it.”

Paolo Ruffini, the lay prefect of the Dicastery for Communication, highlighted in his own conference remarks that the “greatest danger” for humanity is “passively accepting the idea that knowledge no longer belongs to us” but rather to AI.

Pope Leo’s highly anticipated encyclical Magnifica Humanitas was signed by the pontiff on May 15 to coincide with the 135th anniversary of the publication of his namesake Pope Leo XIII’s landmark encyclical Rerum novarum. Leo XIV’s encyclical will be released on May 25 and is expected to address the impact of artificial intelligence, posthumanist theories, and advanced technologies on human dignity, social justice, and labor.

READ: Pope Leo’s encyclical on AI will soon be reviewed by Cardinal Fernández

The morning of its release, Magnifica Humanitas will be presented at the Vatican’s Synod Hall by the pontiff himself, and he will be joined by other speakers, including Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, Prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF); Cardinal Michael Czerny, S.J., Prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development; and Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican Secretary of State.

Several laypeople are also scheduled to speak at the presentation, including Professor Anna Rowlands, a theologian and professor at Durham University (UK); Christopher Olah, co-founder and head of research on interpretability of artificial intelligence at Anthropic; and Professor Leocadie Lushombo, a professor of political theology and Catholic social thought at the Jesuit School of Theology at Santa Clara University in California.