Pope Leo’s First Year Challenged Trump, AI and the Rich

In early January, as I was pulling together a column on Pope Leo XIV, I asked a couple of AI chatbots to find the text of his first Christmas message. Gemini — the Google interlocutor — responded by telling me that any news or social media reference to “a Pope Leo XIV… appears to be a digital hallucination or fictional placeholder” because the current pope was Francis. Even though we were eight months into the new pontificate, it insisted: “There is no Pope Leo XIV.” OpenAI’s ChatGPT wasn’t any more cognizant. “As of now, there is no reigning Pope Leo XIV,” it declared, though it was willing to project what commentators might say about a “hypothetical ‘Leo XIV.’”

Were Gemini and ChatGPT trying to erase Leo even before he reached his first anniversary? Maybe they were mad at him because he’d been wary — even critical — of AI, calling it a “challenge to human dignity, justice and labor.” Regardless, the events since January give them no excuse for ignorance. As he reaches his 365th day on the Throne of St. Peter on May 8, Pope Leo XIV is far from hypothetical or hallucinatory. Indeed, his very real presence will continue to disturb princely politicos and potentates of pixels around the world.