Line Zhang’s post on LessWrong hit the forum like a punch in a quiet room. The claim? The new encyclical, *Magnifica Humanitas*, could be partially a machine’s draft. He ran the document through Pangram, the popular AI detector, and the numbers rose sharply.
“Between forty and one hundred percent?” Zhang wrote. The variance echoes the tool’s own confidence bands, a sign it sees too many hallmarks of automated prose. The encyclical, crowned by Pope Leo XIV, tackles AI’s footprint on humanity—a topic that feels oddly mundane for a letter of theological gravitas. Yet the numbers make the moral question feel urgent.
Key to Zhang’s argument is the word “genuinely.” It appears at a higher rate in this text than in earlier popes’ letters. Other AI editors, like Anthropic’s Claude, tend to sprinkle that term sparingly. The spike in usage points, Zhang says, directly to the signature of an algorithm’s thumbprint. You can’t see this in the Pope’s earlier encyclicals, nor in typical human theological style.
One reviewer split the document section by section for a more granular view. The first part of the encyclical saw an anomaly—a 62 % AI tag from Pangram, a figure that lights a warning shot. The rest of the letter, lower in the hierarchy of paragraphs, slipped back into a humanish tone. Whether that pattern is an editorial choice or a sign of digital tinkering, the line makes a case for further investigation.
But why would a papal office even flirt with AI? The focus is swarming around content control and reach. A machine can draft in seconds what a theologian would spend weeks polishing. That speed can eschew the mistakes that come from human fatigue but also sidestep the deeper layers of reasoning that a slow, reflective cleric would add.
And yet, if a pop;al text bears the ghost of algorithmic glue, readers must ask: Does the message stay sacred, or is it diluted by lines that have never been handed over a pen? The choice sits between preserving centuries of pilgrimage information and surfing a new, untested wave of technology. Will faith commit to authenticity, or will convenience just win?
