Pope Leo XIV, in his January 26, 2026, message on the World Day of Social Communications, had much to say about the dangers of Artificial Intelligence. One statement in particular caught my attention and provoked a stream of thoughts: โAI models are shaped by the worldview of those who build them and can impose these ways of thinking by reproducing stereotypes and prejudices in the data they draw on.โ
This is a most important point, to be sure. The reigning pontiff is properly concerned about how the technology of AI can produce images that do not represent human beings in their truth. He is concerned about how AI, in essence, can displace the heart. At the same time, we might say, AI does not refer to something that is entirely new. The imposition of the dangerous views of others by the use of technology has been going on for some time.
We elaborate briefly on three areas in which dangerous world views have been imposed on human beings: Morality, Music, and Metaphysics. The attempt to submerge the heart in these three areas is evident.
Morality
Hugh Hefner, publisher of Playboy magazine, used the technology of photography to send an unrealistic image of women that excised the heart and its capacity to love. His philosophy was twofold: “sex without issue” and “sex without tears.” The female sex existed to arouse the lust of men, not to marry and have children. Whatever visible flaws a female model might have were effectively airbrushed into oblivion. These nubile ladies were depicted as never being disappointed either in love or in life. A phrase comes to mind from the pen of C.S. Lewis that captured the unreality of Hefnerโs view of women: โA harem of imaginary brides.โ
Hefner exported a fantasy that had its own built-in dangers. When Malcolm Muggeridge visited the Playboy headquarters, Hefnerโs Chicago mansion, he said: โI canโt tell you what a strange atmosphere that house has. Itโs something at the absolute heart of twentieth-century lunacy.โ Hefnerโs corrupting influence on men (as well as women), is unmeasurable. Of course, Hefner was not alone, but his example is salient and well known to most people.
Music
The attempt to reduce music to mathematics, thereby eliminating the heart, has been going on ever since computers were available.
Joseph Schillinger, who was a prominent music theorist in the mid-twentieth century, confidently predicted that the day will come when music becomes โa branch of mathematics.โ In his magnus opus, The Mathematical Basis of the Arts, he claims that music is nothing other than mathematical formulae which are to be exorcised from nature by the scientific mind. Harry Olson, another math-musician, produced โsongsโ by means of a digital computer, though unsuccessfully.
An attempt has been made to produce another pleasant Stephen Foster song by feeding a computer with the songs that Foster wrote and blending them together to produce another Beautiful Dreamer or I dream of Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair. The experiment, predictably, was a failure. The human heart cannot be fed into a computer.
For Beethoven, on the other hand, who knew something about the genesis of music, โOnly the flint of manโs mind can strike the fire in music.โ Johannes Brahms stated that music came to him from heaven. There may be an element of envy on the part of mathematicians who believe that artists do not possess anything that they do not have as mathematicians. Nonetheless, mathematics cannot duplicate what the great artist accomplishes.
Metaphysics
Blaise Pascal, like Pope Leo XIV, was concerned that the rise of science would displace the heart. โThe heart has reasons that the mind knows nothing of,โ he famously declared (Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaรฎt point). Pascal wanted to save the heart from being submerged by science. The heart, however, cannot be reduced to mathematics, although the attempt to do so has attracted the minds of many illustrious thinkers. If the heart is displaced, then man is displaced, reduced to mathematical formulae that can be controlled. Hence the loss of the dignity of life.
Perhaps the British philosopher, Bertrand Russell, proposed this inhuman ideology most clearly and emphatically. In his book Logic and Mysticism, he makes the following statement: โRemote from human passions, remote even from the pitiful facts of nature, the generations have gradually created an ordered cosmos, where pure thought can dwell as in its natural home, and where one, at least, of our nobler impulses can escape from the dreary exile of the actual world.โ Lord Russell proposes a heartless world in which there would neither be love nor spiritual nourishment. His sweeping view is truly metaphysical.
Human beings are not machines. They cannot be reduced to mere quantity. Nor can AI produce great works of art. AI copies, but it does not create. It has the capacity to create images of human beings that are convincing, but deceptive. Technology, needless to say, can be an asset in communicating โheart to heart,โ to borrow the famous phrase from St. John Henry Newman. We should spend more time with each other in face-to-face relationships. Television, radio, iPads, and computers are not alive. They are not problems in themselves. The problems arise when those who use them disseminate their own worldly messages and images that are untrue and therefore, potentially dangerous. We must be ever vigilant.
Photo by Philipp Katzenberger on Unsplash
