In the wee hours of Memorial Day, my friends and I stayed up past 4:30 AM California time to listen to the announcement of Pope Leo's first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence. We were excited albeit sleepy, eagerly anticipating the event and upcoming essay by the world's foremost religious authority on a question so central to our world. Still we were an odd audience for this presentation: none of us are practicing Catholics, and most of us didn’t really know what to expect.

I thought Pope Leo's own speech was good, and addressed the current moment in AI with some of the seriousness it deserves. I thought the other speeches, including by Chris Olah, were less impressive. But that's okay, I’m not the target audience!

A specific cardinal's point struck me, however:

Cardinal Parolin made much of a specific prepositional choice in the subtitle: “sulla custodia della persona umana nel tempo dell’intelligenza artificiale,“ which the live translator translated to something like “on the safeguarding of the human person in the time of AI,” and not “sull’intelligenza artificiale“ – “on AI.”

This was supposed to be a big deal. “In the [...]

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Outline:

(04:02) Significant fractions of the recent papal encyclical are written by AI

(07:17) Statistical Evidence and Tells

(07:40) Em-dashes

(10:04) "Genuinely"

(10:51) How often is the phrase "genuinely" used in Magnifica Humanitas?

(11:43) Is this due to subject matter?

(15:30) Is this just a personality quirk of Pope Leo XIV specifically?

(16:58) Tricolon density

(19:15) Pangram analysis

(21:21) Comparison to other encyclicals

(22:45) Comparison to Pope Leo XIV's speech

(23:14) Sidebar: Pangram has a very low false positive rate in general

(24:20) Probably not a translation artifact

(24:46) The same signs of AI I observe in English are essentially preserved verbatim in the Italian version

(25:58) The Italian version of the current encyclical also gets flagged as AI by Pangram

(26:47) Backtesting AI translation of past encyclicals get 0% on Pangram

(27:55) The specific AI used is likely Claude

(28:44) Textual

(29:30) Against ChatGPT

(30:06) Different sections of the encyclical have very different rates of apparent AI usage

(30:59) Conclusion

The original text contained 20 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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