Ask an AI tool to write a prayer for a sick friend, and a polished response appears within seconds. That speed can make the process seem immaterial, but every answer depends on much more, as we may have heard by now: data centers consuming electricity and water, computer chips made from rare materials, and, most importantly, workers around the world who train and maintain the systems.
AI’s attraction is its ostensible weightlessness. The interface tells one story; the facts behind its production tell another. That gap should trouble Catholics. AI’s immateriality is a spiritually dangerous fantasy that teaches us to forget the limits by which we must live.
This is one of Pope Leo XIV’s central arguments in Magnifica Humanitas (On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence). He calls on us to “disarm” AI, which may inspire us to smash the machines and head for the monastery garden. But doesn’t the monastery garden have tools, too? Leo knows this: Technology, he writes, has the power to “heal” and “protect our common home.”
Leo frames AI’s danger through the Tower of Babel. Its builders used a common technology to secure power and “make a name” for themselves; people and the earth became means to that ambition. Babel warns that technical achievement may serve domination when detached from God and the common good. “The earth is the LORD’s and all that is in it” (Psalm 24:1).
In Laudato Si’ (On Care for Our Common Home), Pope Francis presented Catholics with a blueprint for contemporary ecological harm. What Francis calls the world’s “technocratic paradigm”—the habit of treating the world as material for command—assumes that whatever can be done deserves doing. Within this paradigm, speed and scale count as evidence of progress all on their own. That same logic governs digital platforms designed to maximize their hold on our attention.
Francis insisted that our work not end with describing symptoms. As with the ecological emergency, we can trace back the emergency of generative AI to an easily malformed “human root”: the desire for mastery. We solved the horrors of heat with the air conditioner; perhaps we have solved the embarrassing, turbulent horrors of thinking—the interruptions, the jagged edges, the typos, the 14th drafts, the patience necessary to find the mot juste—with AI.
Catholic social teaching asks a rude and necessary question about who pays for this convenience and who profits from our distraction.
AI’s material life runs through a supply chain chock-full of wafers, copper wiring, rare-earth magnets, lithium batteries, diesel generators, and cooling towers. In 2023, U.S. data centers used about 4.4 percent of the nation’s electricity; the Department of Energy projects that share could reach 6.7 to 12 percent by 2028. Prompts depend on the “cloud,” one of our more pious misnamings. Real clouds are a mercy, drifting above us in the water cycle that makes the world habitable. The digital cloud is heavier. It sits on land, drawing power and shedding heat. To speak about AI without speaking about creation is to admire the magic trick while refusing to look at the trapdoor.
Beyond the material costs, AI also shapes attention. Pope Francis warned that the digital world can keep us from learning “how to live wisely,” that wisdom is not a “mere accumulation of data.” He offered his namesake saint as “the example par excellence” of what he deemed an “integral ecology,” which, as Leo’s encyclical affirms, is now an “indispensable dimension” of Catholic social doctrine. Integral ecology involves a responsible attitude toward forests and oceans, but it is also about the condition of our speech and the desires our tools train in us.
Francis wrote that an integral ecology must hear “both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.” We can hear both in AI’s hidden—often underpaid—workforce. Data annotators and content moderators label images and screen disturbing material so that systems appear automated. An International Labour Organization study of platform work in Kenya, for instance, describes the people performing annotation and content moderation as “largely invisible” and working under “precarious conditions.”
To practice an integral ecology, we must continue to interrogate whether such workers receive fair wages—and also psychological protection. What kind of habitat are we building for human dignity? What kind of guardrails do we need to preserve the sanctity of spiritual life?
So what should Catholics do? Begin with the ecology of use. The best question is: What kind of habitat does AI create for the soul? Does it make me more truthful, more attentive, more available to God and neighbor? Does it honor the people and places hidden inside the system that make the quick answer appear? If not, then the tool is catechizing us in the wrong faith.
Prompt yourself: Am I using this tool to avoid a hard conversation or the labor of prayer? Am I asking software to manufacture words of consolation that should pass through my own heart first? Substituting a generated prayer for attention to a grieving friend damages the ecology of love.
A student who uses AI to bypass the strain of a first draft may save two hours and lose an apprenticeship. Teachers can mark some work as un-outsourceable, especially reading until a sentence makes sense, and revising after failure. A classroom is also an ecosystem; it can train patience and attention, or it can teach students to treat thought as waste.
Families and Catholic institutions should demand the same responsibility from the companies building AI. Leo reminds us that technology takes on the character of those who devise and regulate it. Integral ecology must therefore play a role in the whole production process. We ought to insist that developers disclose the energy and materials their systems consume, and independent reviewers should assess those costs before data centers are built or new models are released.
Companies must also provide fair wages, mental health protections, and the right to organize for the workers who build these technologies. Communities asked to supply land, water, or electricity need a meaningful voice in decisions that may reshape their homes. Governments should make these duties enforceable and prevent companies from shifting environmental damage onto poorer places. This is the institutional conversion envisioned in Laudato Si’, which asks us to change our “models of production and consumption” and the structures of power governing them. AI can serve the common good only when its builders accept limits designed to protect creation, especially human beings.
To disarm AI is to reject the fantasy of a world without limits, both in our habits and in the systems companies build. Technology should be judged by whether it protects creation and honors the same slow human labor through which we learn to love. Creatures of dust and breath, made in God’s image, we can query no machine to lift us from that beautiful dependence.
Image: Unsplash/kazuend
