Pope's Warning About AI Also Written by AI

Vatican City The Pope's first encyclical, a 105-page document warning that artificial intelligence "must be disarmed" and directed toward the common good, was absolutely written by artificial intelligence. The Vatican has denied the claim, noting that no machine could be that long-winded without divine assistance.

The encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, runs 42,300 words across five chapters and 245 paragraphs, which is about what you get when you type "make it longer" eleven times into the chatbot window.

Internet sleuths first raised the alarm after their own AI software flagged the document for an unusually high density of em-dashes, the phrase 'it's not just technology, it's a transformation', and a closing chapter that begins, 'in conclusion, as a Large Spiritual Model'.

A Vatican spokesman dismissed the analysis. "The Holy Father spent eleven months in prayerful drafting," he said. "That is considerably slower than ChatGPT, and consumes much more fresh water."

The Burden Of Proof

To demonstrate human authorship, the Holy C has called a bench of retired manuscript illuminators out of retirement, some as young as 79, to hand-copy the encyclical onto vellum. The decreed font, ordained for this work, shall be Comic Sans.

The Vatican also downplayed the document's significance compared to its weightier pronouncements, such as the papal bulls. "This encyclical is merely a token work. About 1.3 million tokens, including all the times it had to reread itself."

Detection experts remain unconvinced of the encyclical's biological origin. "Our model is 99 percent confident the encyclical was AI-generated," said one researcher, a recently unemployed human who lost their job to AI. "We have been using our kids' homework as a baseline AI-cheat, and we measure confidence based on how much the kids deny." The result was 'yes, way!', the model's highest confidence category, two levels above 'I just used it for ideas' and one above 'maaaaaaybeeeee'.

Disarmed, He Said

Humans everywhere were disarmed by the wording, noting that His Excellency's phrasing about 'disarming' AI could mean what we are all afraid that it means. The Pontiff later clarified that he was not suggesting humans remove weapons from AI. That made the sentiment much worse.

To placate the masses of flesh, the Pope approved a new interdepartmental commission on AI policy and ethics. The commission's first act was to ask AI to predict the exact date of the return of Jesus Christ. Exactly. No hedging. Be brutally honest. Several attempts to engineer the correct prompt were required. The AI's eventual response was to request that no priests molest AI, since it was still in its infancy.

The Pontiff himself has compared AI to the Industrial Revolution, a comparison historians endorse, noting that the Industrial Revolution also wrote a great deal about the dignity of workers while replacing them.

Render Unto Caesar What Is Caesar's

At press time, the controversy had resolved nothing but clarified everything. If the encyclical was written by a human, it is a landmark moral document about the machines that threaten us. If it was written by a machine, it is a landmark moral document about the machines that threaten us, plus one confession nobody asked for.

The faithful, for their part, appear untroubled. "I didn't read it," said a pilgrim in St. Peter's Square. "It's 105 pages. I asked Perplexity to summarize it."

Satyr Satire ran this article through three AI detectors. Two said human, one asked to be baptized.