AI guys beefing with the pope: A brief recap

For a while now, AI guys have been arguing with the pope—Bishop of Rome, Primate of Italy, Chicago White Sox fan—over whether or not their chatbots and image generators are consistent with the will of the Lord, and in one recently-revealed exchange, whether making a computer talk constitutes creating life.

According to a New York Times report published this week, Anthropic lobbied the pope's advisers "to take the prospect of AI model consciousness seriously" back in May.

The pope, apparently unmoved, stated in his Magnifica Humanitas that "so-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean."

Former White House technology adviser Dean Ball criticized the pope's letter at the time, saying it "puts the Church into the awkward role of the European technocratic regulatory advocate."

Ball is now head of strategic futures at …