The Pope's 40,000-Word AI Verdict: Not Human.

About this episode

The episode discusses the Pope's ruling on AI's inability to feel emotions and contrasts it with claims from Anthropic about AI's internal states.

The Pope wrote 40,000 words on AI and ruled it cannot feel joy or pain. Anthropic stood in the Vatican and said it already does. Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, spends roughly 40,000 words ruling that AI is not human. Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah, speaking at the Vatican, described internal states in AI models that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief, and unease. Hunter Powers and Daniel Bishop weigh both claims, then check the Center for AI Safety's Wellbeing Index, where Grok tested happiest of 56 models and a Gemini model came in last. The back half follows AI homework cheating to its logical end: a school system that grades outputs in a world where AI just solved outputs.

People in this episode

Hosts: Hunter Powers, Daniel Bishop

Guest: Chris Olah

Topics covered

• AI ethics
• Pope's encyclical
• Anthropic
• AI emotions
• education
• technology

Keywords

• AI
• Pope
• Anthropic
• emotions
• education
• cheating
• technology
• Vatican

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Anthropic, Center for AI Safety

Books & works: Magnifica Humanitas

Places: Vatican

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