AI and the Pope: AI Can Never Replicate Our True Divine Nature
AI will never have the divine spark that lives in every human being. The danger is that we will abandon our spiritual nature and become more like AI.
This past May, Pope Leo XIV, a man I greatly admire, published his encyclical “Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence,” in which he warned against embracing AI.
“In the era of artificial intelligence, when human dignity is threatened by new forms of dehumanization, ours is the pressing duty to remain profoundly human,” the pope wrote. “We must lovingly safeguard the grandeur of humanity bestowed upon us and revealed in its fullness in Christ, the splendor of which no machine can ever replace. True progress always stems from a heart open to others, an intelligence willing to listen and a will that seeks what unites rather than what separates.”
For me, Christ—like Krishna in Hinduism, Avalokiteshvara in Buddhism, and YHVH in Judaism—embodies the formless, nondual I AM, the source and substance of all reality, revealed to Moses as ehyeh asher ehyeh: “I am that which is I am” (Exodus 3:14).
When Pope Leo XIV speaks of “the grandeur of humanity … revealed … in Christ,” I hear the revelation of I AM as “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6), “in whom we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). This I AM calls us to realize our true divine nature, so that we might say with Christ and all mystics, “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30) or “Aham Brahmasmi” (Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 1.4.10)—“I am the Absolute.” We feel called to love neighbor and stranger (Leviticus 19:18, 34) as expressions of the Self that is the nondual I AM.
The One Thing That Makes Us Human
The reason “no machine can ever replace” the “grandeur of humanity … revealed … in Christ” is that no artificial intelligence can access the authentic intelligence of I AM. Awakening in, with, and as I AM is key not only to safeguarding “the grandeur of humanity” but also to resisting the dehumanization that will accompany AI’s dominance.
The real danger of AI isn’t AI imitating humanity, but humanity imitating AI and abandoning the one thing that makes humanity human: our capacity for introspection and the realization of I AM.
AI is created in the image and likeness of billionaire AI backers like Marc Andreessen, who insists he engages in “zero” introspection, and Elon Musk, who says he wishes to destroy what he calls “civilizational suicidal empathy.” The more we idolize AI’s creators, the more we imitate their AI creations, and the more we erase “the grandeur of humanity,” close our hearts to others, and forget our true nature as I AM.
There Is No “Me”
I am not anti-AI. I am pro-I AM. I am not anti-artificial intelligence. I am pro-authentic intelligence. To see what I mean, let’s look at how artificial intelligence works in both machines and people.
When I ask AI a question, it 1) breaks my question into individual words; 2) searches for words closely related to mine to better understand my question; 3) assigns a mathematical probability to each word it finds; 4) selects the words most likely to relate to my question; and 5) builds a coherent response to my question.
We call this “artificial” intelligence, yet I did the same thing when writing the previous paragraph. I asked myself, “How does AI work?” I filtered the four words of my question through all the words and ideas I know to form a paragraph that answers it, typing the ones that seemed most relevant into my computer. Aside from the speed at which we operate, the only difference between AI and me is my insistence that there is a “me” doing this, whereas AI has no sense of “me” at all.
Yes, AI can be engineered to use first-person pronouns to simulate personhood, but AI’s “me” is a fiction, whereas my “me” is real.
Or is it?
When I think of “me,” I search for words that best describe “me” and say, “I’m a 75-year-old married white Jewish American grandfather and author.” If I then set out to find this “me” who is these things, the “me” behind these labels, I find no one at all. There is no “me;” there are only the labels. Both my “me” and AI’s “me” are linguistic constructs.
When Labels Burn Away
Years ago, I would sometimes ask retreatants to wear paper name tags the size of sandwich boards, on which they would write all the labels, including their name, that they associated with their sense of “me.”
During the opening session, people introduced themselves by sharing what they had written on their sandwich boards, quickly realizing that “me” is a narrative constructed from other narratives about biology, race, gender, religion, class, nationality, and politics. At the end of the session, we burned our name tags in a fire pit.
What is left when “me” is burned away? Ehyeh. I AM. Pure awareness.
The difference between AI and you is that AI has no interior “me” and no access to I AM. The danger of AI isn’t that it will develop an interior life and ultimately realize I AM, but that we will imitate AI and lose our interior life and our capacity to realize I AM.
Looking for the Seer
To resist this loss, we must practice interiority.
Throughout the day, repeat a simple mantra as a reminder of your true nature. For example: “My innermost Self is pure Divinity” (in Hebrew: Elohai n’shemah shenatatabi t’horah he); “I AM absolute Divine Consciousness” (in Sanskrit, Aham Brahmasmi); and “I AM Truth” (in Arabic, Ana al-Haqq).
In addition, practice some version of Ramana Maharshi’s self-inquiry:
When physical sensations arise in your body, ask yourself who is aware of this body. Notice that the one who is aware of your body has no body.
When thoughts and feelings arise in your mind, ask yourself who is aware of them. Notice that the one who is aware of your thoughts or feelings isn’t thinking or feeling them.
When you are aware of body and mind, ask yourself who is aware of them. Notice that “behind” the one who is aware lies another subtle awareness, and “behind” this witness lies an even subtler awareness, and so on. The more you look for the Seer, the more you discover it cannot be seen. Eventually, the entire system of seer, seeing, and seen collapses into the I AM—the nondual Divine that is us all.
This is what the 13th-century Zen Master Dōgen Zenji (1200–1253) taught when he wrote, “To study the Buddha Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things.”
The search for humanity’s grandeur, which Pope Leo XIV sees manifest in Christ and I see manifest throughout reality, requires the emptying of “me.” The Psalmist calls this emptying kalta nafshi (Psalm 84:3), which Jewish mystics understand as the temporary annihilation of the separate self. When this annihilation passes and “me” returns, it is permeated by what Pope Leo XIV calls “a heart open to others, an intelligence willing to listen and a will that seeks what unites rather than what separates.”
This is the authentic intelligence of I AM, manifesting in you and resisting the nihilistic world of AI.
by Rabbi Rami Shapiro
