By Elena Perri • Posted December 5, 2025

Advances in artificial intelligence, happening at lightning speed, are dramatically changing how humans interact with the world.

As use of artificial intelligence expands, the dehumanizing effect of AI becomes a greater concern, especially in the context of the Catholic faith.

Joseph Vukov, author of “Staying Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence,” addressed this subject during his presentation this fall at the Collegium Institute at the University of Pennsylvania.

The institute, founded at Penn in 2013, is an independent academic community that “draws contemporary learning into conversation with the Catholic intellectual tradition and cultivates reflection on the catholic, or universal, questions that animate every human life.”

“In 21st century culture, there’s a tendency toward simulated rather than real experiences and digitized rather than embodied experiences,” said Vukov, associate professor of philosophy at Loyola University Chicago and associate director of the Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage at Loyola.

His talk, presented through the Collegium Institute’s Magi Project, emphasized how the Catholic Church has been a thought leader on issues related to artificial intelligence.

“Pope Francis addressed AI a number of times,” Vukov said. “Pope Leo said he chose Leo the 14th to signal his affinity with Leo the 13th who led us through the industrial revolution, and now we’re undergoing a similar revolution.”

He noted that the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Dicastery for Culture and Education collaborated on Antiqua et Nova, a document that addresses the relationship between artificial intelligence and human intelligence. A dicastery is a department of the Roman Curia, the body that helps the pope govern the Church.

The document states that “the Church encourages the advancement of science, technology, the arts, and other forms of human endeavor.”

However, it also addresses the “ethical challenges raised by AI – issues that are particularly significant, as one of the goals of this technology is to imitate the human intelligence that designed it.”

While the Church has stated that modern technology is not inherently evil or problematic, Vukov argues that Catholics “need to be careful and intentional about where we’re inviting it into our lives.”

“If we’re going to maintain more human aspects of living, we’ll have to discern where modern technology is going to be a good thing for us and where it’s going to detract from more human modes of living,” he added.

One example that Vukov gives is relying on Amazon book recommendations rather than getting recommendations from friends.

“I suggested that sometimes we’ll have to intentionally say, ‘Even though the Amazon recommendations are very good, because I want to maintain this friendship, I’m going to keep getting recommendations from this friend of mine,’” he said.

Vukov also highlighted the dependence people have on GPS navigation systems while driving their cars.

While it may seem like a daunting or frustrating option, he suggested that people take a different path by not relying on technology for geographic navigation.

“We’re going to have to be intentional and make decisions where we say, ‘I’m not going to let the technology do this for me, I’m going to keep doing it in very human ways,’” Vukov said.

In his book, Vukov identifies the aspects of 21st century culture that are dehumanizing because they swap out more human experiences for less human ones.

“AI is accelerating a lot of those trends,” he said. “It’s going to be increasingly difficult to continue living genuinely human experiences because we’ll be offered personalized digital simulated experiences.”

Vukov noted this issue will be important for Catholics to pay attention to, given the rapid developments in AI technology.

“For Catholics, we think that God meets us most particularly in the sacraments, and the sacraments meet us in our humanity,” Vukov said. “The more that we’re not living in distinctively human ways, the harder it’s going to be for us to appreciate the ways in which God meets us in the sacraments.”

Vukov’s motivation for writing the book centers on the premise that AI makes people question what it means to be human.

“All of a sudden, we have technology that does very human-like things, so I think it’s natural to say, ‘Are we special in ways other than what AI can do?’” he said. “It’s making us ask those questions, and it’s also making us ask questions about how we want to put the technology to use.”

Vukov emphasized that the Catholic Church can share important insights on this topic because of its long tradition of thoughtfully considering the nature of what a human being is as well as social and technological action.

“We are in a special moment right now because we can offer some of our thoughts and frameworks to the world for thinking through these issues,” he said. “That is a real gift that we can offer to both Catholics and non-Catholics.”