A friend of mine recently came home from a haircut with quite a story.
His barber told him about another client, a professor from a prestigious university here in Los Angeles who had come in for a haircut the day before.
The barber noticed the professor was preoccupied and mentioned how distracted her customer seemed. The professor’s response suggested some urgency about what Pope Leo recently wrote in his new encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas (“Magnificent Humanity”).
While he was holding office hours for students contemplating their next class schedules, several of his students had requested that their partner join them for the discussion. Nothing unusual there.
What was unusual was that several students arrived for their meeting with AI-generated partners on their laptops and iPads. The female students had computer-generated “male” companions who were uniformly masculine, handsome, and attentive about their academic future. The male students had female AI-generated partners with exaggerated feminine features who were not so much attentive as they were compliant.
While Magnifica Humanitas is more about geopolitical realities than interpersonal AI idiosyncrasies, the Holy Father’s words on the macro level speak poignantly to someone enthralled by an AI partner of their own making.
“There is a kind of idealism that, in order to preserve its own worldview, tends to choose facts selectively, distorting and renaming them. Its proponents eventually inhabit a reality constructed to fit their own convictions,” wrote Pope Leo (paragraph 218).
All these AI partners were encouraging, never negative, and basically parroted the input every living, breathing student presented to them. The professor was gobsmacked. At first, he thought the students were pulling some kind of sophomoric prank. But as more students arrived with similar relationships with an algorithm, it was apparent that the situation was as serious as a midterm on the meaning of James Joyce’s “Ulysses.”
A 2025 study commissioned by Common Sense Media found that 33% of teens use AI companions “for social interaction and relationships, including conversation practice, emotional support, role-playing, friendship, or romantic interactions.” So, many — if not all — of the professor’s college students had already been using AI for companionship, long before entering the hallowed halls of a university.
I will go out on a limb and claim this is not the way God wants us to live. The Old and New Testaments are rife with interactions, not only between God and mankind, but between men and women. Some of those interactions are sweet. Some of them are sour. Some of them are shocking even by today’s jaded standards. But they are human, and since we believe we are created in the image of God, our humanity is a gift that should not be taken so lightly as to believe we can artificially improve it.
The professor asked one of his young female students about what she found appealing about her AI-generated partner. The young woman happily gushed about how she and her artificial partner never argued. They liked the same movies, and “he” was always attentive toward her.
What this woman created, either knowingly or unknowingly, was a perennial “honeymoon” phase, and that is not conducive to healthy personal growth or human maturity. If any married couple you know says they never quarrel, they are hiding something.
With AI, there is no sacrifice, no real giving of oneself. A computer-generated entity can only give what its creator has programmed it to give. There are no AI or real children in this matrix, either, and more academic papers about the growing birth dearth in developed countries are easy to find. And there is certainly not the exercise of moral and spiritual discernment that such trifling with AI demands.
The God-generated entities— us — have been programmed, too, with an innate desire to find the truth and beauty of this world. If we are called to marriage, we are wired to give of ourselves for the good of our spouse and children. But as marriage likes to remind us, we get our wires crossed and don’t always perform as our designer desired.
Anyone, young or old, seeking true companionship in a computer-generated image is traveling on a one-way street that ends in a cul-de-sac. Though it may be nice to know that if your AI partner were to glitch, you could always hit the power button, real life has no such application. We are made for so much more, as Leo stresses in the encyclical: “Men and women are created in the image and likeness of the Triune God … every human person is planned and willed by God to enter into communion with Him, with others and with creation.” (50)
Anyone who creates an AI in their own image is short-circuiting the God-planned wiring that Pope Leo defends in authentic humanism, which reverberates throughout his entire encyclical.
That remains true whether the topic is AI, social doctrine, or civilization in general, as Leo points out: “The human person always remains the ‘way of the Church’ and the heart of every authentic path of integral human development.” (50)
