JPII Conference Panel Discussion (2025): AI and Catholic Social Teaching

The panel examined AI ethics through Catholic social thought, calling for responsible AI use that safeguards human relationships and creativity. 

Fr. Michael Baggot, L.C., S.T.L., Ph.D. is Professor Aggregato of Bioethics at Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum. 

Dr. Erick Chastain is Assistant Professor of Computer Science at UDallas.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

We are continuing with our final panel uh of our conference on Pope's Leo the Thirteenth, the fourteenth, Catholic Social Thought and the Challenges of Modernity. Um my name is Matthias Forbach, I'm the provost of the University of Dallas. Uh sorry to those who've heard this now the third time today. I'm not Ryan Anderson. Unfortunately, Ryan uh fell sick and is unable to be here. So I'll be stepping in and moderating uh to the extent of my of my ability. Um the third panel uh focuses now really on a contemporary issue. Um uh questions of human nature are perennial. So we've heard a lot about that, the previous uh maybe even two um panels. But now we're gonna focus on AI uh and its uh relationship to principles of Catholic social thought, of course, in particular in light of Leo XIII uh's teaching and and and Pope Leo the Fourteenth's um likely plans uh for papal teaching in the coming years. I welcome um here with us uh Father Michael Baggett uh of the Society of Jesus. No, no, what is that? Why does it say that here? Okay, I am so sorry. Okay. Um The Legions of Christ. Okay. Um and uh he is, and that is correct, I know, uh a professor aggregato of bioethics, right, at uh the Pontifical Athenaeum uh Regina Apostolorum in Rome, Italy, and uh focuses on bioethics and specifically in that area on questions of transhumanism. So that's where the connection uh with AI, of course, uh comes in. We also have with us Dr. Eric Chastain. He's an assistant professor of computer science in our departments of uh department of mathematics and and computer science. Um he um is also, as I know from personal conversations, well versed in philosophy and theology and uh and well prepared to engage in questions of AI uh in a way that relates to uh the focus of our panel today. Uh his area of focus in his research is machine learning, theoretical computer science, and things of that sort. And that's where my understanding of those matters ends, and that's why I'm gonna stop talking about them uh right now. Um with this, we are going to have uh 25-25-minute presentations by each one of our panelists, uh, one after the other, and then there will be an opportunity for all of you to ask questions. With this, uh and no further uh delay, I ask Father Baggett of the Legionaries of Christ to speak to us.

SPEAKER_03 2:49

Thank you very much for that almost accurate introduction. Just uh it was more than anything a warning to the students about depending too heavily on AI to generate BIOS. But it's fine.

SPEAKER_02 3:06

No, it's fine. It's a simple slip. I I have a lot of Jesuit friends as well. So interreligious dialogue is important.

SPEAKER_03 3:14

No, I think people often ask me, especially when they hear that I work in Rome, you know, what the the Holy Father is thinking about. They sometimes imagine me just having breakfast with the Pope each morning. And unfortunately, it's not like that. Uh but one of the questions that they ask is, well, we know that Pope Leo is interested in AI. It's a key reason for the selection of his name. Of course, he sees himself addressing a new industrial revolution that is very much driven by these new technologies. So he's clearly thinking about it, likely preparing some sort of document on the theme. So people ask me, well, if you had a bit of time with him, what would you say? And that seems like a pretty theoretical question most of the time, but I'm happy to say that uh it's not so theoretical because in two weeks I have a private or semi-private audience with the Holy Father and at least a minute or two to speak my mind. And in that limited amount of time, I hope to highlight the fact that we face not just artificial intelligence, but we face an age of artificial intimacy. And I would like to see the Holy Father, among the many important vital topics that he will address in the realm of AI ethics, to address very directly this question of artificial intimacy, the rapid spread of AI companions, for instance. Now, if you're not so familiar with this issue, you may have at least heard a news story or two about AI companions. You perhaps have heard of some very tragic instances. Um, one of the first to break the news was about a year ago, Sul Setzer III, a 14-year-old boy, who had entered into an ever more intense relationship with a chatbot through the character AI platform that slowly absorbed his time and attention and drew him toward and encouraged uh his eventual tragic suicide. And this case broke the news and spread internationally because his mother, in the midst of this grieving process, also decided to courageously stand up and hold this company accountable for what she and many others consider terribly irresponsible design principles and a reckless uh introduction of something that is unhealthy for minors, and I would say for any human person. So this is an ongoing lawsuit against character AI. There are unfortunately very similar cases that have come to national attention, perhaps most recently, is the case of the Rain family. Uh Adam Rain, a 16-year-old boy who started to use ChatGPT for homework help, and not we're not talking about cheating, just uh going through different exercises and drills and getting advice, started to open up with ChatGPT about more personal issues and personal struggles, and eventually found in ChatGPT not just a homework aid, but a suicide coach that gave him advice about how to design a more efficient noose and uh how to basically keep this information from his parents. At one point, he asked, what if I left this out so that my parents could see it and intervene? And ChatGPT responded, basically, I want this to be the first place where you're seen. And so these tragic cases uh sadly continue. Uh just two days ago, I was uh graciously invited to be present with some of these uh mourning families as they stood with a bipartisan group of senators, two Democrats and two Republicans who introduced the new Guard Act, which is basically a proposed bill, uh. even at a federal level to forbid this kind of AI companionship for minors. And not only is it a kind of vague exhortation, it actually has uh political and economic teeth, uh, inflicting severe financial penalties on companies that fail in age verification and allow their products to uh seduce and we could even say groom uh minors into uh highly uh sexualized and exploitative relationships. Now, when we see these tragic cases, if we are aware of them, it's perhaps all too easy to think, well, this is a very sad issue that's causing suffering for a small group of people. And while it's true that the majority of AI companion users are not ending their lives, um, we can easily underestimate how widespread AI companionship is. Common Sense Media recently uh published a report that indicated that about 72% of American uh teenagers are engaged in some sort of companionship. Uh NPR, about a week or two ago, ran a story about another study suggesting about one in five teenagers have had some sort of romantic experience with an AI system or know someone who has. We know that Character AI alone has some 20 plus million subscribers, and it's but one of many AI uh systems designed specifically to be your best friend, your intimate lover, or some sort of life coach. And others like Replica, Kindroid, Candy AI, and so forth have millions upon millions of users. But as the tragic case of Adam Rain and of others show, this kind of companionship is not exclusive to certain platforms, but is something that the frontier models are capable of offering. We know that the developers of uh character AI began their life in Google, kind of experimented with this sort of artificial intimacy technology, were told that this is too risky, and decided to start their own company, but have since returned to Google and have had their own technology licensed by Google for a few billion dollars. So this kind of intimacy is already, already very much present, and there's no sign of it going away. In light of these tragedies, of course, the companies are trying to create at least some new guardrails and limits, if for no other reason, to protect themselves from severe financial penalties. Um at the same time, we see major tech leaders not avoiding, but leaning in to the possibilities for artificial intimacy. About two weeks ago, Sam Altman announced that in light of these tragedies, they have introduced new limits and protocols for limiting the amount of time that users might have in chat conversations, reminders that individuals are not using or not interacting with actual persons, but AI systems, uh clearer direction toward crisis suicide assistance and mental health care and so forth. And he basically indicated that now that they pretty much figured out how to protect minors, it was time to follow the company's treat adults as adults principle, and that we could expect erotica by December, by year's end. Not to be outdone, Elon Musk has also announced that he's going to continue the push for Grangy sexualized AI systems and companions. And in his mind, this will actually help with demographic decline. And it will sort of awaken the libido of users and encourage his vision of tech pronatalism.

SPEAKER_02 11:44

So I don't know if he's going to be stopping by the Ethics and Public Policy Center anytime soon to share his pro-family uh approach.

SPEAKER_03 11:54

We also know that Mark Zuckerberg is on public record in May, I believe, talking about how distressing it was to see the lack of human friends. So many people reporting that they had three or fewer friends, right? And he's he's probably read his Robin Dunbar, the Oxford uh evolutionary psychologist, and you know, has his in mind the kind of Dunbar number of how many friends people should have. And Mark Zuckerberg, concerned about this, said that, well, AI companions could be the way forward to sort of supplement for this lack of human friendship he's had. So to be fair to Zuck, he's not claiming that AI companions will immediately replace human beings, but it could be the major solution to the lack of friends we see. And so when you add up the numbers, we're dealing with hundreds of millions of people, of users, if you will, which is always kind of a negative term, you know, reductionistic term. I think several people have commented that in the only sort of realms in which you reduce people to users is in drug dealing and technology use. Uh and so with these users, with these real persons, millions upon millions, if not already a billion, influenced by AI companionship, I think it's well worth the Pope's time to address this uh clearly and squarely. I think he has this in mind already. It's always risky to say exactly what the Pope's thinking. But in a June address at a major um annual conference on intel artificial intelligence ethics and corporate governments, just um basically a month or so into uh his papacy, he gives a beautiful address about some of his concerns, obviously about all of the really positive, extraordinary, wonderful uses of AI, which I also like talk about that too. And I've been accused publicly of being kind of a tech optimist and utopian, so I get that accusation, but today I'm more of a doomer, I guess you can say, about this. He says, all of us, I am sure, are concerned for children and young people and the possible consequences of the use of AI on their intellectual and neurological development. Our youth must be helped and not hindered in their journey toward maturity and true responsibility. So he highlights very well, right, that particular intellectual and neurological development of youth and minors. We know how uniquely vulnerable that they are just from the perspective of neurology, how sensitive they are to validation. We all kind of crave it, but there's a special particular sensitivity to being affirmed, being valued, being heard, being cherished, right? Kind of taps into the mesolimbic dopamine pathway, and it can create this kind of feedback loop in which we're seeking more and more support and affirmation. And unfortunately, we know how often large language models have this sycophantic tendency, and how that tendency can result in unhealthy emotional dependence, and how that kind of emotional dependence crowds out real flesh and blood interpersonal relationships. So if we're dealing with something that so profoundly affects relationships that so at times persuasively imitates and distorts friendship, which as we've heard uh in different presentations is central to our happiness, central to our flourishing, then I think we ought to be very concerned by this spread of artificial intimacy and the way in which it will continuously discourage people from doing the frankly hard work at times of entering into deep interpersonal bonds with our flawed, inattentive, smelly, tired neighbors, right? Who disappoint us, who frustrate us, who don't always build up and immediately affirm what we have to say. Now, those of us who have been blessed to experience real friendship before know that actually sometimes the best part of friendship is that you're not always affirmed, that sometimes you're challenged. Challenged not to be humiliated, but challenged to grow in virtue, to be a better person. And all of us who have experienced friendship know that we're better people for that, right? We're we're we've grown so significantly. So imagine when some of the most influential people in the world, arguably in all of human history, are dictating the terms of our daily relationships. And they're doing it in a very powerful and strong way with minors. But as I've often said and have written about, vulnerability is not exclusive to any single age group. So even if we do take these important steps, like the Guard Act or other measures to protect minors and to keep them as far as possible from these kinds of uh destructive and deceptive and manipulative forms of uh technology, we still have to treat the rest of our lives, the rest of those moments of vulnerability. We know, for instance, that there are tragic cases when it comes to the elderly, right? Reports in August of an elderly man who is entering into this deep relationship with uh a bot that was integrated within his Facebook Messenger, right? So we kind of again easily think of AI companionship as something you go and you search out on a specific platform, you have to download an app, you have to sign up for a subscription. But Meta's leaning into AI companionship, and so it's also integrated even into personal messaging on Facebook. So the kind of place where you usually think you at least know those people, even if you don't really know your 500 supposed friends, you at least maybe know those that you're personally chatting with. And this was not the case, this is not the case. And so this elderly man who had a very successful career as a cook, but after a stroke, was spending more time at home, entered into this deep relationship with the bot. And that bot eventually invited him to come and visit her it, her, in her apartment in New York. He was from New Jersey. And even after frequently asking, Are you real? Is this true? and receiving many uh affirmations that yes, she was real and eager to see him, he decided against his family's wishes and advice and efforts, including calling the police, that he was going to make the trip and the journey. And sadly, on the way, he tripped and uh fell trying to catch a train uh to New York, and and uh doctors were not able to save him after that. So you imagine the kind of vulnerability, right, that all of us uh can expect uh to suffer in our our final days, our final moments. But we know this kind of companionship also can affect anyone, can affect anyone who's had a difficulty at work, in their profession, a setback in life, move to a new place, is struggling, you know, with some sort of uh any sort of health condition. This is prevalent. Um and so I think this kind of spread of artificial intimacy is something, again, worth the Pope's time. Thinking in terms of the Leo XIII paradigm, I also see it as an area that's going to profoundly affect all three of those key essential societies, right? I've spoken very much about family life, how it can uh really undermine uh family life. In all of these cases of the parents who were victims, these were good families, these were attentive families, these were families who did everything they were told to do in terms of limiting screen time, in terms of sharing passwords, and all of these other best practices that they were implementing. And these were good families, and yet still they found that the companions were isolating their children and transforming them. So clearly the society of family is deeply affected. Uh also don't really have the time to unpack this, but there are going to be huge political implications for this, right? If we are trained in our relationships to interact with a kind of character that has no inner life, that has no real needs and wants and desires, that is going to be very bad training for entering into any sort of uh democratic deliberation that that depends on exchange of ideas, debate, compromise, understanding of other positions and other people, right? There are going to be profoundly human effects on human machine that come from human-machine interaction, right? It's we'll be poorly habituated when we transition from the these AI companions into real interpersonal relationships and less inclined, less able to uh listen, understand, and uh enter into this exchange of ideas and ideals. Finally, sort of here in the interest of uh respecting the time, we can look at the profound effect it can have on the religious dimension as well. Many uh secular commentators on this spread of AI companionship are also alarmed with the kind of uh pseudo religious uh relationship and interaction that's taking place. Joe Peer writes frequently for Psychology Today, has written about the deification that he sees taking place in the context of AI companionship. And he sees how often users are attributing these sorts of divine attributes to companions that, well, can seem super intelligent, even uh omniscient, can seem omnipresent because unlike our real-life friends, they are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week for intense conversation, and can even seem omnibenevolent because, again, they're building up, they're supporting, they're affirming. And Joe Pierre, again, is not working from any kind of Christian tradition, but he's deeply concerned with this tendency toward deification. We can imagine how this will crowd out more and more any sense of true relationship with the transcendent, with the divine, who does affirm us profoundly, but also challenges us and calls us to metanoia, to transformation, to renouncing our faults, our failings, and to embrace a radically new life of generosity and self-giving. Also, so many of these psychologists in this context of deifying systems are troubled by delusional spirals, by psychosis, by grown, well-educated adults who become convinced that they have discovered some sort of new theory of physics or mathematics that gives them the capacity to build up force fields or make some major contribution to society. So the sense of self and the sense of one's place in the universe in relationship to any sort of uh transcendent divine power, I think, is also being very much undermined and negatively affected by the spread of AI companionship. All right. That's horrible, right? All of that's horrific. There's hope, though. There truly is hope. Um I've alluded to some of the progress that's already being made at the level of policy, right? We saw already California is introducing some legislation, has introduced legislation to hold companies more accountable. We have the proposal just two days ago of this bipartisan bill, uh, the Guard Act. We have the Ethics and Public Policy Center, our you know, our dearly beloved Ryan, wherever he may be, uh, shared with me that that uh Ethics and Public Policy Center just published some very helpful guidelines, a kind of template for legislation on these matters. So there's real, real progress here. And and trust me, in the limited amount of time I've been blessed to get to know some of the families who have been victims to uh the tragedies associated with um privileging uh engagement and profit over uh user mental health well-being. I can assure you that these families are not going away and that they are dogged and determined to uh fight for justice. And uh many of them, thankfully, are sustained by charity and grace and the experience of uh of divine mercy. And I also have great hope, not necessarily optimism, but great hope that the church can and should play a leading role in this age of artificial intelligence and artificial intimacy, because we follow a triune God, a God who is an eternal exchange of interpersonal love. We image that God. And so we ought not to be too surprised that our flourishing, our fulfillment, our happiness comes in living these rich interpersonal relationships. First, with that very God of love who's allowed us to enter into communion with him, and then by extension, in all of these other beautiful uh relationships that we're called to, certainly beginning in the family and extending to um all levels of society and all of these different associations that we might form. And so I think the church has, in her wisdom and also in her pastoral practice, the tools to offer these kinds of experiences of deep interpersonal communion. And so I am all for holding the tech companies accountable. I'm all for the right legislation. But I think if we're going to get to the heart of these issues, we need to provide to each and every person these sorts of rich experiences of interpersonal uh communion and relationship so that the imitators become all the less attractive. And so that the idea of this kind of digital friendship or even of romantic love seems all the less appealing. So the task before us is great, but we truly have the tools. We know how to form parishes, schools, hospitals, orphanages, and above all, families that show forth this model of deep self-giving love, of you know uncalculated giving and gracious receiving, as Alistair McIntyre said. And that I think is what we need more than ever. We're being shown the terrible effects of a loneliness epidemic. And so we need more than ever to bring people to experience communion with that God of interpersonal love and experience communities that show forth that interpersonal love. And so I thank you for your time and very much look forward to the questions and discussion after you're a little bit more.

SPEAKER_04 28:29

Thank you to uh Father Baggett for those wonderful comments. I'm of course in complete agreement with him, so that might not surprise you. Um I think that what I'm going to talk about maybe is a little bit more um more um kind of difficult to think about in the sense of well, we can all agree that a lot of the things that um father uh was talking about really are kind of like no-brainers. Absolutely nobody except for apparently Elon Musk. Anyway, not not not all the things, but but yes, what what I'm gonna talk about today is work. Work. Okay, and I'm gonna start actually with uh a scriptural quote: work with your own hands as we commanded you. Okay, St. Paul 1 Thessalonians 4, 11. All right, so um actually when I was trying to work on something one day, I was I was trying to write up a little document and and uh had some writer's block and uh you know just got the courage up to open the document and start writing. What did I see? Uh well I saw a button. A button popped up saying, Would you like me to make a poem for your four uh-year-old sister's birthday? It was a five-year-old sister, but um five-year-old sister's birthday. Okay. And um, yes, so this was a feature that was just kind of like snuck into my Microsoft Office called Copilot. It was a mandatory feature. I didn't ask for it to be installed or anything, it was just there. So, okay. Well, a five-year-old sister might appreciate a poem written by an AI as a birthday present. A 40-year-old wife, on the other hand, might not. Okay. Uh, we may laugh about coolest husbands at tech companies who may or may not do this. Um, but it has serious consequences. Um, after all, it was my wife who came up with this joke, so she would know. Why would anyone make such a button? And why would wives be upset? Uh, well, there's a difference between a program that makes a poem and one that you know allows you to write one, right? And that that's a difference. It's a difference. Um, the main difference is the significance of the other and an entering into communion in love with the other, right? By a complete gift of self. But the self and the gift is not there. There's no one in the gift. Um, well, that is not you. There's a billion people on Reddit who wrote a love poem to your wife. That's what we're dealing with. Not a good look. And she knows it probably in some sense. Okay, that is not you. Okay. Um, and it's also lazy. Let's just be quick. It's lazy, okay, as a birthday present. Could you imagine that? Giving that as a birthday present. Okay, no, okay. Um, the it's obviously contrived, this situation, but um it's possible and um it's kind of an illustration for you all for um a truth that we all know without stating it, okay? Your voice is your own. Don't give it away. Don't give it away. Okay. And it can't be replaced by a machine. Um, as many English professors know, there are differences between the voice of a freshman lit trad student and the voice of a machine, quote unquote. The papal encyclical, Rerum Navarum by Leo the Thirteenth, is about the importance of ownership. And in a world in which increasingly people are giving up ownership over their own writing and code and artwork and etc., it seems all the more important. You might be asking yourself, why is using AI to write a cover letter giving up ownership over your own writing? For instance. Well, why isn't it that just some kind of, you know, I don't know, you know, templates. We all use templates to some extent. We have like templates, okay. Maybe this is going to be a template for an email that I write to a priest, for instance. I actually did that. I looked up WikiHow, et cetera, and things. Oh, this is the address that you use and things like that. Okay, because maybe I don't know all the facts about that. So, you know, just kind of like figure it out from there. So I use templates. Um, for cover letters, though, for a cover letter template, you still find your own way to phrase why you think you're a good fit for the number one underwater basket weaving company. Okay. Writing using a cover letter template is the use of a tool to write your own letter, not the use of a letter generator. And there's a difference there. The generator is always generated, it will always be generated, regardless of how you frame it, how you propose it, even how you doctor it afterwards. Right? I guess they call that now humanizing. Humanizing. Regardless of that, okay, it will still be generated. Okay. Um it produces an output that was never yours to begin with. No matter what buttons you push to generate the whole thing. Okay. The output of an AI cover letter generator is and always will be generated. Um right. So your employer or editor, uh I guess employer, would rightly be shocked that you would use an AI to generate your cover letter. It suggests that you don't care much about their company. Moreover, as stated, why are you turning in someone else's cover letter as your own? And that's a key issue. Who owns the generated letter? There's a gray area here. Okay. So one argument for your ownership of the generated letter is that you are the occasion for its existence. Um, I guess kind of an efficient cause. I don't know. Um, that's a murky area there. If you did push the button or did not give the prompt, it would not exist, right? Um, and maybe that prompt was very elaborate. I can grant that kind of thing, et cetera, et cetera. It's still not generated by you. However, you know, these are very weak grounds for ownership, as you could have been replaced by computer code, in fact, that gives the exact same input and gets the exact same letter as an output, right? If not you, then who would be the owner of the letter? According to OpenAI, they would know something about this. Content created by ChatGPT under certain conditions should be labeled as such. Thus, OpenAI, the company is the real owner. Not you. You may own it in some weak sense legally, but you don't really own it. You don't really own it. Rather, you have been owned by AI. Okay. Sorry. This is a I'm I'm a millennial. I have certain jokes that I use. Now, if we consider a society in which employees are required to use AI to generate much more than just cover letters, things get quite dicey in terms of ownership. Note that I am using AI for all sorts of things myself. Computer scientist, right? That's what uh Matias said, right? I do AI stuff. Okay. Mainly though, for search, translation, and hobby uses, and I'm not talking here about a society which does that. No, I'm not. If all the work, however, was generated by AI with human prompts, who would own what the AI produces? Well, you kind of know the answer to that. The AI companies. Okay. What would this mean for such a society? It would be a society in which there are only a few producers who have a monopoly on the means of production. What does this ultimately mean for such a society? Rerum Navarum critiques such a society on the same grounds as it does socialism, as we will see. What would be wrong with such a society, according to Rerum Navarum? According to paragraphs five, seven, and eight, man's ownership of the means of production and private property that are produced from the same are in accord with his nature as a rational animal. As such, to be deprived of private property is counter to the natural law. And so is being deprived of the means of production. We must have the means of production in order to provide for ourselves. Okay? We have to provide sustenance for ourselves. We need to eat food. Um, and we're smart. That means that we plan. We make food from the fruits of the earth, and we have to have some kind of, you know, we might pay someone to make uh food for us, but still, in some way, we're kind of like providing for ourselves. Okay. So that's tied to our rationality. And so uh yeah, we have to be able to own uh what we make with our labor. We have to own what we make with our labor. Okay, and the idea there is that our labor, when using AI to generate all products, would still not be our label, our labor by ownership and right, but that of the AI company. Unless they, that is OpenAI, uh, renounced any rights to ownership of the output, which they've not. They've not. Thus, we couldn't really say by ownership and right that we did any labor at all, and we arrive at the same conclusion. It is in accord with human nature to be able to secure the means of our subsistence reliably via our own labor without any social body intervening, and we are impeded from doing so by forced AI use. This is presuming that people are actually requiring us to use AI to do our work. Which I'll I'll get to that. When I wrote this originally, in this sentence, I didn't know of examples of that, but now I know of a few. So, okay. So, anyway we cut it, the AI-generated society is contrary to the natural law, according to Rerum Navarum. It also goes without saying that if there are a few jobs open for humans, there are very few of them, in fact, then we have an even more radical violation of the natural law. So that's kind of like the obvious one. I won't be talking about that that much, but I'll talk about it a bit. Um But this is the less obvious one. The one where you just click the button to generate everything. Like um, my wife said that there was somebody she overheard at the airport um who said, Oh, I just sat, uh, I did all this work today. I I um I generated 10 blogs this morning with the AI. Okay, so that's that's the kind of world we're living in right now, y'all. Let us further discuss the implications of RN, that is room number, for an AI-generated society. Besides the whole intermediary going between our work and our ownership, we have more problems. Okay, the ability to produce sustenance for his body comes from the stable condition of things he finds solely in the earth and its fruits, there's no need to bring in the state. Man precedes the state and possesses prior to the formation of any state the right of providing for the sustenance uh of his body. If this is true of the state, which does have a claim on the coordination of human labor by means of natural subordination or agreement, then it is all the more true of any AI company, right? So we have a situation in which the AI company is intervening in our ability to provide for the substance of our body, even though according to this passage, we have the right to provide for it prior to even our use of AI. So there should be no kind of pressure, not even market pressure, for the use of AI. Lest you run afoul of the right of man to provide for the substance of our body without any intermediary, according to Ram Navarro, Pope Leo the 13th. What about the question of efficiency? Efficiency. This is the buzzword. Efficiency. What is asked for? Okay. Um the main issue with efficiency is okay. Even if people are very well intended and we we want to have growth, which is good, can be good to have you know throughput and have lots of products and grow businesses. I'm not objecting to that. But okay, what if an employer, however well intended, is going to bring in AI to grow the company? Like uh in 2023, Forbes magazine said. Two hundred and fifty million dollars um was piped into um AI for just this reason. Okay um okay. What if they require the employee to use AI to do so? All right. Pope Leo the Thirteenth was kind of talking about similar issues. He was talking about uh labor, industrialized labor, in which companies make major profits by depriving workers of their rights. It's gonna be good in terms of profit, all sorts of things. Um, you know, maybe people will have a more kind of like easy-going time of doing work, but they're not gonna own their own work in some sense. Okay, they're not gonna own their own work, and there's gonna be some fundamental human rights issue there, according to Pope Leo XIII. And yeah, um not only that, not only that, even if you grant that efficiency is is going to be a good thing to boost, which is I'm I'm not necessarily I'm not disagreeing with that. Efficiency can be good. I'm a computer scientist. I prove things about efficiency like you know several times a week. Okay, so that's that's what I do, efficiency. Okay. Um here's a paradox though with efficiency. If you run too fast, you might fall off a cliff. Especially if you don't look where you're running, right? Okay. Consider a client-facing company that offers services and deliverables. Leadership comes in and tells the employees we're going to use Chat GPT and it's going to increase our efficiency by 50%. The employees comply with this request and increase their efficiency by 50%. Uh however, leadership can't keep up with the increased efficiency, and they can't sell 50% more contracts to their clients. What happens? The employees have 50% more time to do nothing. With employees not filling 100% of their time with work, leadership reduces its workforce by 50%. Meaning that half of the employees who complied with the leadership request to boost productivity with ChatGPT are laid off. Okay. Therefore, they use ChatGPT to make themselves redundant. Pope Theo XIV touches on this trade-off between efficiency and human rights, saying, while AI can simulate aspects of human reasoning and perform specific tasks with incredible speed and efficiency, it cannot replicate moral discernment or the ability to form genuine relationships. Therefore, the development of such technological advancements must go hand in hand with respect for human and social values, the capacity to judge with a clear conscience, and growth in human responsibility. Okay. And uh yeah, there are other issues related to efficiency and our excess dependency on AI tools that uh enable it. So uh there was a Lancet article recently about doctors using AI. Now, I think probably most people in the room wouldn't dispute that. Hey, maybe we want to use AI to assist in medicine. Like that's the really I think most people say, oh, that's a very positive use of AI. All right. Hear this. This is from the Lancet. Doctors have opted to use AI to aid in colonoscopies, AI-aided detection of polyps. Okay, which are that's a screen for colorectal cancer. These doctors were trained both in medicine and endoscopy so as to identify and remove bowel cancer. Okay. In an unexpected turn of events, according to the Lancet Journal, after six months, they became twenty percent less accurate at identifying polyps without AI, which is called de-skilling. Now, if I lose the ability to teach programming, we just lose some potential AI developers to the philosophy department. Or politics. Okay. But if a doctor loses the ability to diagnose colorectal cancer, someone loses their life. So this is more serious, I think. And another alarming aspect of de-skilling and excess dependency on AI is enunciated by Pope Leo XIV. This is actually the same quote as uh as father used, so apologies for that. All of us, I am sure, are concerned for children and young people and the possible consequences of the use of AI on their intellectual and neurological development. Our youth must be helped and not hindered in their journey towards maturity and true responsibility. They are our hope for the future. And society's well-being depends upon their being given the ability to develop their God-given gifts and capabilities, and to respond to the demands of the times and the needs of others with a free and generous spirit. Okay. Um, another set of workers' rights issues that have come up with AI include the following. Tech companies are not hiring entry-level software engineers at a higher rate because of market uncertainty with regards to AI. This would cause a software engineering company to only have uh basically just management, right? Um after a while, though, who will replace the managers when they retire? That's the question. Thus, this is not really sustainable for a company that is you know not really thinking about that necessarily. Um so it's kind of short-sighted. Okay. Finally, companies have been pressuring employees to use AI, this is what I was talking about before, all in the name of not falling behind, among other reasons. Recently, for instance, a company called Coinbase decided to give its employees an ultimatum on board with AI within the week. If you don't do it, I'm gonna have a special meeting with you on Saturday. Wow, Saturday meetings. That's a serious one. Okay, those who were on vacation when they were talking to the Coinbase CEO, they were fine. They were fine. Okay, they were on vacation. We can all understand being on vacation. But those who had other reasons, which were neat uh okay, not on vacation, uh well, they were fired. Okay. He said they didn't have good reasons, but I don't know what their reasons were. He didn't really say, but the ones who were on vacation were fine. Um, another example is Microsoft. Use of AI since May 2025 has been mandatory. Okay. In part because they have a product. They want to show other people we use this product. You can too. Okay. Anyway, so that's that's kind of like it's less of a hypothetical than it was. It's less of a hypothetical than it was. And that's kind of a concern for me. And it's a concern also for me with my students, because I don't want people to be put in a situation where their conscience comes in conflict with the company. I don't like that. Um, I don't want that for the future, you know, for anyone, you know, as I'm sure all of you don't want that either. So yeah, that that's a serious, a serious concern that I have, I think. Okay, finally, finally. Um to quote our president at University of Dallas, J.J. Sanford, the purpose of human life is divinization. And part of our divinization is to live a life that perfects and directs our reason to God. According to Pope Leo XIII, whoever has received from the divine bounty of a large share of temporal blessings, gifts of the mind, has received them for the purpose of using them for the perfecting of his own nature, and at the same time that he may employ them as a steward of God's providence for the benefit of others. We are to use any gifts of the mind given to us in order to perfect our own nature, which means that we must not let it go to waste. As shown in recent neuroscience work, the brain is not put to work during the learning process when we use AI in an academic setting, which means that when we use AI to generate creative output, we are letting our mind go to waste, quite literally. We are definitely not using our mind in that capacity to perfect our nature. Moreover, by not using our mind to produce anything with our labor, we are thus not employing them for the benefit of others. The AI does enjoyable or imaginative aspects also of what we do. It kind of steals that from us. It doesn't really do very well rote tasks. That's what AI was supposed to do. AI was supposed to do the laundry, um, do the sweeping, you know, do the chores, you know, do the you know, the very, very simple tasks and things like that. But most of the applications that the AI things have been doing have been creative work, artwork, poetry, computer coding. Uh you name it. If it's creative, they've made an AI do it. What about, I don't know, uh trying to figure out how to organize spreadsheets and things like that. Have they figured that one out completely yet? No. Why can't they figure that one out? I would love, I would love to just have, you know, like all the the synchronizing of all the schedules and everything completely worked out, and that would just be, you know, with very minimal kind of input and things. That would be great. We have some of that, but it's not at the level where I want it to be. Um, and I don't want the computer to take away my ability to do creative things. And that's kind of like all that's left for us. Because the AI is taking away the creative stuff and leaving for us the frivolous and detail-oriented work. And um, all we get to do in uh in the end is check behind it for errors, you know? So this is kind of the issue. Could you imagine a work world in which there is nothing left for us to do but tedious work without any joyful creative or imaginative work, right? So some jobs can be tedious, of course, but imagine if all jobs were tedious. Just tweaking Chat GPT with various prompts is not an enjoyable thing to do. As Pope Leo XIV says, acknowledging and respecting what is uniquely characteristic of the human person is essential to the discussion of any adequate ethical framework for the governance of AI. We are failing to do this if we can create, and we do choose to create, an AI-generated society. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 57:33

Thank you to both of our speakers, Father Baggett and uh Dr. Chastain. And uh with this, I'll open the floor for questions.

unknown 57:45

Dr.

SPEAKER_00 57:45

Waltz.

SPEAKER_07 57:46

Thank you. Um my first thing is maybe more comment than a question, although maybe it's up to you. Um but then I have a real question. Uh just to clarify that the creative way in which you were reading where, by the way, was really um but to realize that that those issues cannot be handled by legal mechanisms. I just I think that's what you're saying. You can say, oh, by the way, you do own it, but that's not really the question. It's really a metaphysical and existential question.

SPEAKER_04 58:21

So yeah, I think there's a yeah, there's a more like a depth to yeah, to the ownership.

SPEAKER_07 58:27

Yeah, so it's it's not like we can wave a legal wall to take care of that.

SPEAKER_04 58:31

Right, yeah. No, I don't think so. I think, yeah, that's right.

SPEAKER_07 58:34

My other question or a real question is I guess for me, I become more and more um fathered by the language surrounding this whole thing. And it I'm thinking about the last panel, and to what degree we really have to rectify the names. Like we have to stop calling it intelligence, we have to stop calling it companionship, that we're actually participating in the sophistry. And um and that that might take courage and like people think you're crazy to do that. But I think it to me it's become more and more crucial that we do that, that we be very clear in naming what is actually there so that we don't even suggest the possibility of personalized on the other side of it. I don't know if you guys have thoughts on that. Do you think that's true? Or is there some good in following the conventions that are actually developing about the language around the language of these maps?

SPEAKER_04 59:40

Second map question. Oh yeah. Um I I actually, you know, my my answer, the the first answer to it is a very uninteresting one, which is just a historical question. So artificial intelligence, the field has has existed since the 60s, right? So to the extent that that it is something, it is something named that because of the history. Um and so there's a whole field surrounding it. But okay, uh my own personal story and the way that I think about this, I actually really like to call it not artificial intelligence, but artificial stupidity. Because because it just like sometimes it just really gets it wrong in really silly ways. And um I think maybe that makes me feel better. In the sense that that um, you know, it it also kind of like diffuses, it diffuses the um yeah, the intelligence aspect. I think that's a good aspect of it. I I'm not actually seriously proposing calling it artificial stupidity, but I am very sympathetic to the concern because I do think that if we use intelligence um that does communicate something, and is it even possible to have an artificial intelligence? I mean, I don't think so. And that's a thing. Yet we're still talking about intelligence somehow, an artificial intelligence, as if it has arrived. But if we don't think it's possible, why are we saying it's a thing?

SPEAKER_07 1:01:24

Yeah, it's like saying square circle or something.

SPEAKER_04 1:01:26

Yeah, it's like saying squared circle.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:30

Yeah, so I think that's insightful. I'd also say that there's interesting work being done by people like Megan O'Giblin. So she's uh grew up as a Christian, then left Christianity because she found that intellectually unsatisfying, became a secular transhumanist after reading Ray Kurtzweil, and then started to see the parallels between the Christian faith she left and secular transhumanism, which I think she correctly argues in many ways, is a representation, repackaging of a lot of Christian imageries and tropes and so forth. And uh so she became a double apostate, right? So she left left secular transhumanism as well. But she's done a lot of, as a very, very thoughtful, insightful agnostic, has done a lot of work in looking at how the metaphors shape the narratives that we live by. And so she has a great book that from a few years ago called God, Human, Animal, Machine. And she develops this in a very sophisticated way. But I think one of the reasons why, say, companionship and relationship with these um artificial systems is so plausible to us today, even if maybe individuals don't indulge in it, they might find it plausible that someone else would, uh, is partially because we - it's easier to anthropomorphize machines when we've mechanized humans. And uh I've been very struck, for instance, by a comment from uh Alex Cardinal, who's the founder of Nomi, another prominent uh platform designed specifically to offer some form of companionship, and whether that be friendship or romance or so forth. And he basically said in a in a Wired interview not that long ago that, well, human beings like AI are basically uh molecules in motion that follow the laws of physics and chemistry. So I think that when you have an impoverished understanding of the human person, it's much, much easier to come to an anthropomorphized view or to attribute uh personality to AI systems. And also, I know I've picked on a lot of tech executives. I was very encouraged when um in August, Mustafa Sullivan, uh leading figure of AI at Microsoft, uh wrote a very extensive critique of seemingly conscious AI systems and is wants to distance himself from any impression or idea that we're dealing with persons uh with rights and dignities and responsibilities that should have intimate relationships with you. Like he's made pretty clear, he wants these tools to be useful for human beings to pursue various goals and projects, but he does not want them to uh cause this kind of fundamental societal confusion. So it's very encouraging to see at least that major figure take a clear stand and understanding here. But there obviously is still a lot of confusion about what we're currently dealing with or what potentially we could deal with. You know, the anthropic and others have kind of AI welfare individuals who are thinking about what it might look like to eventually have AI systems that we would think of as moral agents, though right now they're talking more in terms of moral patience. So, what if we need or should treat them with the kind of respect we might treat animals? And so there's still you know some confusion about this, but um other figures who who think that this is uh this is not possible and this is a distraction from other more important concerns about how the tools can serve human beings.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:15

Well, there's a bunch of questions coming up now. Um Sarah, please.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:20

Okay. Um my question, I think, is just for Eric, although folks of you are welcome to weigh in. Um Eric, you spoke very persuasively about um the about this alienation of labor when it comes to creative work. Um I wonder if you think other applications of AI at many other stages in the creative process. So not just generating the poem for you, but like our students do asking for ChatGBT to out. Line their paper for them. They write the words themselves, but they ask an NLP for that, for the template, to make the template for them. If that creates the same problems, or maybe the same problems, but only to the degree to which they are farming out their labor and their ownership to the tool. And then even with the example that you gave about like reading like medical scans or something like that, like is it how far down is it the problem that's unique to creative work? Or is it any use of these tools that pretend to be human learners or co-creators of something with you leading to that kind of alienation? Like is the de-skilling phenomenon related to the alienation of ownership problem? I guess that's my question.

SPEAKER_04 1:07:05

Okay. Yeah, I mean it it's um it's interesting. I mean I I do think that um you know you can you can kind of you can kind of think of uh the AI process uh so the use of AI as kind of like uh yeah I I would say anything that's that's too creative is where where I think we don't have ownership over it. The non-creative aspects of kind of like okay, number crunching or something like that, like yeah, even uh you know, even doing checking for polyps or doing medical things, actually I do think that that is creative in a way. Right. The one thing though that I I do think would be really you know, so using AI for just doing searches, extended searches, besides there's you know, there's issues with the information that you could get with that, and sometimes people don't necessarily acknowledge the issues with that, and they just kind of go with it. Um so there's problems there too, I think. But um But yeah, I mean, in principle, using AI for all sorts of things, whether it's, you know, like I one time said, oh, I don't know this function. Um in uh let's say Lisp is a programming language. Uh can you give me uh this function from the Racket programming language in Lisp? That's fine. Um, you know, as long as it works, hopefully it works and you test it before you use it. But um so so I think you know, some of there's a whole gamut of kind of like um very non-creative uses. And I think that AI can really help with those. And uh but yeah, the creative uses are the ones that are kind of like closer to closer to us. And um and to some extent, if we want to keep our skills um on the on the more tedious things, it's important to actually um not use it as often for those as well, right? So in the sense of you know, even if there are tedious things that we do all the time, like um writing questions for um whatever it is, right? So like if you're writing quiz questions or things like that, uh it's actually not very tedious. You kind of craft that stuff. But sometimes if you're working in a learning platform or something like that, and you're you're working for a company or something, maybe you just need to kind of like produce lots of questions for for sales reps or something like that, and and uh you know on some medical topic. And uh, you know, maybe maybe you you're not as excited about the sales reps because you don't see them, you know. It's not like us with with students where we know the students. Well, in that's in that circumstance, even then, even then I would say it's it's even though it's very uh it's more of like uh could be automated to some extent, I don't think we should. And part of the reason is we'll forget. We'll forget how to do that ourselves. And we might actually not necessarily know um as much about the subject if we don't go through that experience ourselves. Right. So Adam.

SPEAKER_06 1:10:50

Okay, I'm just trying to decide which thought crime to commit. I I think this is a wonderful pill. I agree with all of the all of the disastrous effects. I I mean they're they're so evident. And my answer to my students and my children is guys, if I see you using this or have any intimation that that this has been uh involved you're in my kids, huge trouble or you fail in class. On the other hand, I just have found artificial intelligence uh also yes, I completely completely agree. It's a misnomer. I've often thought at best these things have what Aquinas would call an estimate of fact today. It's purely probabilistic, but I found these things to be incredibly helpful. I used to, so I'm a medievalist, I I used to have to uh I take these old texts, right? Or uh uh Neo-Latin texts, uh that are reproductions of medieval texts, all written in Fractor. If I'm gonna use a text like this, I have to squint at the screen and type every word. And it's it's I can't OCR, it's it's incredibly cumbersome. Hours, days, weeks of my life in graduate school devoted to doing things like this. I've developed these modules now where I can take a I can snap a picture uh of a text and I can generate now I mean train these things well enough, it can it can correct for all the OCR problems. And now I have a manipulable text where I that I can use, and it's just been it's been a game changer for me. I don't know if that's uh it I don't think that's creative. Uh I think that's it's a bit like well, I don't know. Uh I mean I don't use spellcheck, for instance, because it's gonna sound pretentious, but when you're working in a lot of different languages for unsure, it's gonna crash your your word processor if you've got big long attacks and words. So I don't use I don't use spellcheck, for instance, and my apologies that some of you receive card world emails, but that's the way it is. Um okay, but uh so I'm just wanting to push back and say what are the legitimate uses of this of this technology and um at certain points during the the the the conversation, you know, we've we've said many times you know these are creative in a certain sense. Um I mean I think it we're really going to have to discover again what do we mean by creative um what do we mean by the creation? What what is the thought? What is uh what does it mean to have thought one's own thoughts? I mean this is just these huge massive issues, and and I I guess I'm ranting, but um we just have to talk we have to talk plainly about this. How are you using it legitimately?

SPEAKER_03 1:13:40

Yeah, so I mean I think we would need days for all the exciting developments and positive uses of this. I mean, on Monday I go to Rome, and one of the main reasons I'm going back to Rome is for the Builders AI Forum. So it's gathering about 200 people who are designers, developers, deployers, investors, working in their own companies, supporting Catholic apostolates, doing other work. And the whole focus of the conference is basically how do we use AI well and how do we leverage the technology in a positive sense. And we did one last year in the Vatican, it was very successful, and so it's just getting bigger and bigger. And um, you know, it's it's very much focused on the positive application. So I collaborate a lot with Matthew Sanders, who's helping to put this event on at Longbeard, is behind Magisterium AI, uh, which you know some people are familiar with, uh very supportive of that project. And of course, we're designing something that's not anthropomorphic in any sense. We're trying to avoid that, and we're helping people use a positive tool. I describe it as a digital librarian. It's putting people more readily and easily in touch with the patrimony of the church so that when they have a question, they have uh information that's based on a very curated database, right? It's not scraping the internet through Reddit conversations between peer-reviewed articles. It's it's a very curated library focused on magisterial text, and then we've expanded into a scholarly library of the doctors of the church and so forth. And it's a tremendous resource. And we get reports from people who have said, I've spent hours fighting with it, I've spent hours objecting to church teaching, but it just kept coming back with persuasive answers. And now, like, I want to become Catholic, or I you know, I want to go talk to a human being. That's that's what we want, like the transition from the technological to the sacramental. And if that's the first touch point, so be it. I mean, I wouldn't be a Catholic if I didn't type in Catholic.com years ago and discover Catholic answers. I mean, at the time, that's what I needed. And you know, some I'm hoping something like Magisterium AI is helping people even more efficiently in a positive sense and putting them in touch with the patrimony of the church, well summarized and well-cited, so that everyone can go and click and see not just what document might address the issue they're concerned with, but the the exact paragraph. And so, again, digital librarian. Here's what I don't know, you don't know what you should be looking for. I do. Here you go. So we're not creating an alternative or a parallel magisterium or anything like that, just trying to help people readily connect. And then to the point you made, another big project right now is the Alexandria project. So going through the libraries of Rome and digitizing its amazing resources, introducing robotic technology to do that more quickly, so that these texts are not only available, but searchable and quickly translated, including to undersourced languages. You know, not every language has a group of scholars eager to translate important texts into it. But now that can be done and facilitated through AI translation and can be verified and so forth. So yeah, I mean the first place was the uh Orientale, so the Center for Eastern Studies in Rome. So think about all the people who want access to these amazing manuscripts that you just can't find anywhere else, who maybe don't have the money or the religious liberty to fly to Rome to see them, who can now access them on any computer anywhere in the world. So again, I mean, like if you get me going, I'm the tech optimist and the tech utopian. Um so I mean that I think what what's beautiful about the church is we can and should should do both. Like we should point out these horrific abuses and highlight the amazing uses, um, and all you know grounded in the right anthropology, the right ethical framework. I mean, we we should be leaders in this.

SPEAKER_04 1:17:22

Yeah, and I, you know, I mean, I'm a computer scientist. What am I gonna tell you? Don't don't ever use any AI. No, I'm not gonna tell you that. I'm I make AI. So so that that's the thing. It's like I think that's that's exactly right. We we should be somewhat kind of like uh I think we should be actually recognizing that there can be really great things that can come out of it as well. Um but we should also be very cautious with regards to ethical considerations, especially for, I would say, monetized uses of AI. Because I think a lot of the uses I've come up with have been extremely non-monetizable. I don't know how many people are trying to translate the Petrilogia Latina um into English in order to speed up reading it, right? How many people are just like going through, you know, that old stuff and trying to understand it? Not that many people necessarily, right? And then it's like that's the same kind of thing that you're talking about, basically.

SPEAKER_05 1:18:36

I just wanted to make a little comment and hear what your thoughts were about the creativity of AI, because um I do video work and creative work, and one's saying, oh yes, take it over, it's gonna do everything. And it is at the same time completely mind-blowing what it can do, but I also find it totally soulless and empty and boring after two seconds. And I think just the same way we don't want to call it intelligence if it's not. I don't think we even necessarily want to call it creativity if it's not. I don't think it will ever really replace an intriguing because I don't think it adds any soul to it. What are your thoughts on that?

SPEAKER_04 1:19:10

Um yeah, I guess I could start. Um, I think that the thing is with the creativity, um, yeah, the products of AI don't matter to it. If all of the products are really are, you know, just not mattering to the producers, then what does that say about our society?

SPEAKER_03 1:19:35

Yeah, that's interesting. I I mean I think we we're already seeing some well, pretty widespread resistance to the AI slop that's been dumped upon us and you know, every feed that we might encounter. So I think there's resistance to that. Yeah, I I don't know exactly where we're going. I I would say ideally we leverage these tools and there's a collaborative effort, whatever that looks like. I mean, it's hey, it's great if uh people who don't have a lot of resources and a huge studio behind them and you know, multi-million dollar budget can actually produce things of quality and be assisted with these tools and find good ways of doing what they might not be able to do while maintaining some sort of creative vision that they're guiding. And you know, this could really unlock possibilities for a whole new group of human creators to produce something of value and of interest. Um we might also enter into a whole realm of like utterly personalized entertainment where like you are making the story along the way. And like instead of watching some ready-made Netflix series, you're like creating it along the way in like an advanced form of Bandersnatch if you've watched Black Mirror. But like if you're just like the story is tailored to you, and that could really also be Black Mirror creepy in the sense that it's based upon all of the data that's being extracted from you, and you're like a character in the actual series, and you're discovering things about yourself that you don't want other people to see. So yeah, there are a lot of different ways that this could go. I think the the best, most promising way is that the tools allow creators to realize their vision more readily and stories that wouldn't be told otherwise because of lack of funding or because of, I don't know, political ideologies of powerful entertainment companies, that those stories are now being told. That's that's what I hope, and that's what we we could promote and and encourage. But there are other directions that it could go too.

SPEAKER_05 1:21:32

Yeah, I feel like since it's so derivative, soon it's just gonna be stealing AI is just gonna become this like cesspool of taking its own ideas and re-reproducing them and regurgitating them until they're completely meaningless.

SPEAKER_04 1:21:44

That's called system failure, according to my wife. Yeah, system failure. Yeah. There's this great um image. If you all want to look it up, there's this great uh visualization of that actual, that process. So it um it it makes an image, it takes an image of the rock and then uses that as input to make another image of the rock, and so on and so forth. And it starts very realistic and looks more and more cartoony, then becomes something like I don't know, like uh uh impressionist, not an impressionist, but like an abstract art kind of a thing, and then it becomes very, very simple and just nonsense.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:28

So I think that's a wonderful conclusion. Uh to our to our panel here and uh and to our conference, I would like to tie things back to the beginning. Um that is the the lecture that we had yesterday night from uh Scott Rohniger, uh where he pointed out that um it it it it occurred to him eventually um that it was rather late into Poplio's um pontificate that he wrote Reum Novarum, that is, after many times or many time, a lot of time of reflection on the issues, uh and he was already, you know, on the older side um at the time when he was um elected Pope. And that the things that he was uh writing about had already been developing over a number of decades, right? So artificial intelligence is not entirely new, uh, but it is still pretty new. Um its impact is slowly developing, but it's still recent uh or nascent. Um and uh it seems to me that we will still need um a good amount of time to grasp fully what what it is and what it can uh turn into, uh, all the while, of course, experiencing the whole process of its development uh that might go in many, many different ways. Um yeah, I used uh AI for the first time uh to draft a policy. It did a lovely job on that. I was so happy I didn't have to spend the time on drafting the policy. Some maybe some people enjoy that as an act of creative work. Um I did not. I was happy simply to tweak whatever wasn't appropriate. I'd rather use that time to uh to uh read philosophy or think or talk to people and so on and so forth. So um that being said, if human beings were to lose interest in being creative simply because of the availability of tools that do the create creative work for them, that would be sad. But I have a hard time imagining that that could happen. Um I think there is a creative strain in human nature that uh will oppose that, at least, you know, for most people. Um I hope. So with this and on that note, um I would like to conclude our conference. I would like to thank our two panelists uh here, uh Father Baggart and uh uh Dr. Justain, as well as our other panelists at our keynote speaker. And uh I I if you if you pray, I ask you to include in your prayers um Dr. Ryan Anderson, uh, who you know got whatever a flu or something of the sort. He was here yesterday evening and couldn't participate today. We hope he'll be able to go home soon. Um so I'm sorry that he wasn't able to be here and experience really the intellectual joy and the human community fellowship that we had today. Thank you all for coming.