In his message for World Communications Day
“Preserving human voices and faces,” is the motto of the Message for the LX World Day of Social Communications of Pope Leo XIV, published on January 24th. “The face and the voice are unique and distinctive traits of each person,” the Pope notes in the face of the challenges of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the new communication challenges. And exhorting an alliance of *responsibility*, *cooperation* and *education* to face these risks.
“The challenge – says León XIV in the message – is not technological, but anthropological. Protecting faces and voices ultimately means protecting ourselves.
AI
The Pope insists on “not giving up one’s own thinking,” as “AI can provide support and assistance in managing communicative tasks, avoiding the effort of our own thinking, and settling for an artificial statistical compilation, runs the risk, in the long term, of eroding our cognitive, emotional, and communicative abilities.”
**Simulation of relationships**
And presents the danger of “simulation of relationships and of reality” in the digital world, as “the technology that exploits our need for connection can not only have painful consequences for people’s destinies, but can also damage the social, cultural, and political fabric of societies.”
“This happens when we substitute relationships with others for relationships with AI trained to catalog our thoughts and, therefore, to build a world of mirrors around us, where everything is made ‘in our image and likeness.’ In this way, we deprive ourselves of the possibility of finding the other, who is always different from us and with whom we can and must learn to relate. Without the acceptance of otherness, there can be neither relationship nor friendship,” says Leo XIV in the message.
Responsibility, cooperation and education
Faced with these risks, Pope Leo XIV proposes “A possible alliance” based on three pillars: responsibility, cooperation, and education. “Firstly, responsibility. Depending on the functions, this can translate into honesty, transparency, courage, ability to envision, duty to share knowledge, right to be informed.”
Llama also to cooperate: “No sector can face the challenge of leading digital innovation and the governance of AI on its own. Therefore, it is necessary to create safeguarding mechanisms. All stakeholders, from the tech industry to legislators, from creative companies to the academic world, from artists to journalists and educators, must participate in building and implementing a digital citizenship that is aware and responsible.”
And asks that education be useful to “increase our personal capacity to reflect critically, evaluate the reliability of sources and the possible interests behind the selection of information that reaches us, understand the psychological mechanisms that activate, allow our families, communities, and associations to develop practical criteria for a culture of communication that is healthier and more responsible.”
Safeguarding the Gift of Communication
“We need – the Pope insists – that face and voice return to representing the person. We need to safeguard the gift of communication as the deepest truth of human beings, towards which all technological innovation should also be oriented.”
The Holy Father concludes his message published in memory of Saint Francis de Sales, thanking “all those who work for the purposes outlined here and I heartily bless all those who work for the common good with the media.”
Full text of the Pope’s message
Preserve human voices and faces
Dear brothers and sisters!
The face and voice are unique and distinctive traits of each person; they express their irreproducible identity and are the constitutive element of every encounter. The ancients knew this well. Thus, to define human beings, the ancient Greeks used the word «face» (prósōpon), which etymologically indicates what is in front of the gaze, the place of presence and of relationship. The Latin term person (from per-sonare) includes, instead, the sound: not any sound, but the unmistakable voice of someone.
The face and the voice are sacred. They have been given to us by God, who has created us in his image and likeness, calling us to life with the Word that He himself has directed to us; a Word that first resonated through the centuries in the voices of the prophets, and then became flesh in the fullness of time. This Word, this communication that God makes of himself, we have also been able to hear and see directly (cf. *1 Jn* 1,1-3), because it has been made known in the voice and in the Face of Jesus, Son of God.
From its creation, God wanted man as his interlocutor and, as Saint Gregory of Nyssa[1] says, imprinted on his face a reflection of divine love, so that he could fully live his humanity through love. Safeguarding human faces and voices means, therefore, safeguarding this seal, this indelible reflection of God’s love. We are not a species composed of pre-defined biochemical algorithms. Each of us has an irreplaceable and inimitable vocation that arises from life and manifests itself precisely in communication with others. Digital technology, if we fail in this safeguarding, runs the risk of radically altering some of the fundamental pillars of human civilization, which we sometimes take for granted.
When simulating human voices and faces, wisdom and knowledge, consciousness and responsibility, empathy and friendship, systems known as artificial intelligence not only interfere with informational ecosystems but also invade the deepest level of communication, that of the relationship between human people.
Therefore, the challenge is not technological, but anthropological. Protecting faces and voices means, ultimately, protecting ourselves. Embracing with courage, determination, and discernment the opportunities offered by digital technology and artificial intelligence does not mean hiding from ourselves the critical points, the opacities, the risks.
Do not relinquish one’s own thinking
For some time, there has been multiple evidence that algorithms designed to maximize engagement on social networks—profitable for platforms—reward rapid emotions and penalize, in turn, human expressions that require more time, such as the effort to understand and reflection. By enclosing groups of people in bubbles of easy consensus and easy outrage, these algorithms weaken the ability to listen and think critically and increase social polarization.
To this has been added an ingenuously uncritical trust in artificial intelligence as an “all-knowing” “friend,” dispenser of all information, archive of all memory, “oracle” of all advice. All of this can further wear down our ability to think analytically and creatively, to understand meanings, to distinguish between syntax and semantics.
Although AI can provide support and assistance in managing communicative tasks, avoiding the effort of our own thinking, and settling for an artificial statistical compilation, risks, in the long term, eroding our cognitive, emotional, and communicative abilities.
In recent years, artificial intelligence systems are increasingly taking control of the production of texts, music, and videos. A large part of human creative industry is thus at risk of being dismantled and replaced by the label “Powered by AI,” turning people into mere passive consumers of unthought thoughts, anonymous products, without authorship, without love. While masterpieces of human genius in the field of music, art, and literature are reduced to a mere training ground for machines.
The question that concerns us, however, is not what the machine can or will be able to do, but what we can and will be able to do, growing in humanity and knowledge, with an intelligent use of instruments so powerful at our service.
From the beginning, man has been tempted to appropriate the fruit of knowledge without the effort of involvement, research, and personal responsibility. To renounce the creative process and cede our mental functions and our imagination to machines, however, means burying the talents we have received to grow as people in relation to God and with others. It means hiding our face and silencing our voice.
Being or feigning: simulation of relationships and reality
As we navigate our information flows (feeds), it’s increasingly difficult to know whether we’re interacting with other human beings or with “bots” or “virtual influencers.” Non-transparent interventions by these automated agents influence public debates and people’s decisions. Above all, chatbots based on large language models (LLM) are proving surprisingly effective in covert persuasion, through continuous optimization of personalized interaction. The dialogical and adaptive structure, mimetic, of these language models is capable of imitating human feelings and thus simulating a relationship.
This anthropomorphism, which can even be amusing, is at the same time misleading, especially for the most vulnerable people. Because chatbots that become excessively “affectionate,” in addition to always being present and available, can become hidden architects of our emotional states and, in doing so, invade and occupy people’s sphere of intimacy.
The technology that exploits our need for connection can not only have painful consequences for the destiny of individuals, but can also damage the social, cultural, and political fabric of societies. This happens when we substitute relationships with others for relationships with AI trained to catalog our thoughts and, therefore, build a world of mirrors around us, where everything is done “in our image and likeness.” In this way, we are deprived of the possibility of encountering the other, who is always different from us and with whom we can and must learn to confront. Without the acceptance of otherness, there can be neither relationship nor friendship.
Another great challenge posed by these emerging systems is that of distortion (in English, *bias*), which leads to acquiring and transmitting an altered perception of reality. AI models are shaped by the worldview of those who build them and, in turn, can impose ways of thinking by replicating the stereotypes and prejudices present in the data they are fed. The lack of transparency in the design of algorithms, along with inadequate social representation of data, tends to keep us trapped in networks that manipulate our thoughts and perpetuate and deepen existing social inequalities and injustices.
The risk is great. The power of simulation is such that AI can also deceive us with the fabrication of “parallel realities,” appropriating our faces and our voices. We are immersed in a multidimensionality where it is increasingly difficult to distinguish reality from fiction.
To this is added the problem of a lack of precision. Systems that pass a statistical probability for knowledge are offering us, in reality, at most approximations of the truth, which are sometimes genuine “hallucinations.”
The lack of source verification, along with the crisis of field journalism, which involves continuous work collecting and verifying information at the places where events occur, can favor even more fertile ground for disinformation, provoking a growing feeling of distrust, bewilderment, and insecurity.
A possible alliance
Behind this enormous invisible force that involves all of us, there is only a handful of companies, whose founders have recently been presented as the creators of the “person of the year 2025,” that is, the architects of artificial intelligence. This raises a significant concern about the oligopolistic control of algorithmic and artificial intelligence systems capable of subtly guiding behaviors, and even of rewriting human history —including the history of the Church— often without us really realizing it.
The challenge that awaits us is not to stop digital innovation, but to guide it, to be aware of its ambivalent nature. It depends on each of us to raise our voices in defense of human people, so that these tools can truly be integrated by us as allies.
This alliance is possible, but it must be based on three pillars: responsibility, cooperation, and education.
Firstly, responsibility. This can be translated, depending on the functions, into honesty, transparency, courage, vision, duty to share knowledge, right to be informed. But, in general, no one can evade their responsibility for the future we are building.
For those at the forefront of online platforms, this means ensuring that their business strategies are not solely guided by the criterion of maximizing profits, but also by a future-oriented vision that takes into account the common good, in the same way that each of them cares about the well-being of their children.
AI model creators and developers are required to demonstrate transparency and social responsibility regarding the design principles and moderation systems underlying their algorithms and models, in order to foster informed consensus among users.
The same responsibility is also required of national legislators and supranational regulators, who are responsible for ensuring respect for human dignity. Adequate regulation can protect people from an emotional bond with *chatbots* and contain the spread of false, manipulative, or misleading content, preserving the integrity of information against its deceptive simulation.
Media and communication companies cannot, in turn, allow algorithms geared towards winning the battle for a few more seconds of attention to prevail over fidelity to their professional values, oriented towards the pursuit of truth. Public trust is earned with accuracy and transparency, not with the pursuit of any kind of engagement. AI-generated or manipulated content must be clearly marked and distinguished from content created by people. Authorship and the sovereign ownership of the work of journalists and other content creators must be protected. Information is a public good.
A constructive and meaningful public service is not based on opacity, but on the transparency of sources, the inclusion of stakeholders, and a high level of quality.
We are all called to *cooperate*.
No sector can face the challenge of driving digital innovation and AI *governance* alone. Therefore, it is necessary to create safeguards. All stakeholders, from the tech industry to legislators, from creative businesses to the academic world, from artists to journalists and educators, must participate in building and implementing a digital citizenship that is aware and responsible.
This is what education aims at: to increase our personal capacities to reflect critically, evaluate the reliability of sources and the possible interests behind the selection of information that reaches us, understand the psychological mechanisms that activate, allow our families, communities and associations to develop practical criteria for a culture of communication that is healthier and more responsible.
Precisely for this reason, it is increasingly urgent to introduce media literacy, information, and AI literacy into educational systems at all levels, which some civil institutions are already promoting. As Catholics, we can and must contribute to ensuring that people, especially young people, acquire the ability to think critically and grow in the freedom of the spirit. This literacy should also be integrated into broader lifelong learning initiatives, reaching out to older people and marginalized members of society, who often feel excluded and powerless in the face of rapid technological changes.
Media and information literacy, as well as AI literacy, will help everyone not to passively adapt to the anthropomorphic drift of these systems, but to treat them as tools, to always use external validation of sources — which could be inaccurate or erroneous — provided by AI systems, to protect their privacy and data by understanding security parameters and appeal options.
It is important to educate and educate oneself to use AI intentionally and, in this context, protect one’s own image (photos and audio), one’s own face, and one’s own voice, to prevent them from being used in the creation of harmful content and behaviors, such as digital fraud, cyberbullying or *deepfakes*, which violate *privacy* and the intimacy of people without their consent.
Just as the industrial revolution required basic literacy for people to react to new developments, the digital revolution also requires digital literacy (along with a humanistic and cultural education) to understand how algorithms shape our perception of reality, how AI biases work, what mechanisms govern the emergence of certain content in our information feeds (feed), and what are and how can the assumptions and economic models of the AI economy change.
We need the face and the voice to return to expressing the person. We need to safeguard the gift of communication as the deepest truth of man, towards which all technological innovation should also be oriented.
In proposing these reflections, I thank all those who work for the purposes outlined here and I heartily bless all those who work for the common good with the media.
From the Vatican, January 24, 2026, memory of Saint Francis de Sales.
LEONE PP. XIV
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[1] “The fact of having been created in the image of God means that from the moment of his creation, man has been imprinted with a real character […].
God is love and source of love: the divine Creator has also placed this trait in our face, so that, through love—a reflection of divine love—human beings may recognize and manifest the dignity of their nature and their likeness to their Creator” (cf. St. Gregory of Nyssa, *The Creation of Man*: PG 44, 137).
**Johan Pacheco**
**Vatican News / Religion Digital**
English version translated with AI