by Antonio Spadaro (article published on UCA News, February 16, 2026)
Last spring, an image generated by artificial intelligence won a major photography prize. Boris Eldagsen, the photographer—if that is the right word—had typed a prompt, refined it, and submitted the result. The judges were impressed.
When the provenance was revealed, the art world convulsed with a question it had been avoiding: What, exactly, makes a creative gesture human? The tools have changed before. But this time, the tool claims to create.
An answer comes from an unexpected place. In his Message for the Sixtieth World Day of Social Communications, Pope Leo XIV raises a question that exceeds both technology and theology, touching the core of contemporary creativity itself.
"Safeguarding Human Faces and Voices", the title reads. Considered carefully, it becomes more than a pastoral exhortation—it reads like an aesthetic manifesto for the age of intelligent machines. "The face and the voice are unique and distinctive traits of each person", Leo writes.
They are not merely instruments of communication but living surfaces where identity emerges and exposes itself, at risk—where one "shows one's face", as the Italian idiom has it. Every work of art, regardless of medium, originates in this embodied condition.
Even when art turns conceptual, minimal, digital, it carries an irreducible remainder: lived experience, a point of view, an interior tension seeking form.
Artificial intelligence can imitate styles and recombine archives with an expertise that borders on perfection. But it does not possess a face or a voice in the sense Leo intends. It does not know the exposure, risk, or accountability of the person who takes the floor. It does not know what it means to be answerable for what one creates.
One of the most incisive passages in Leo's Message concerns AI's capacity to "simulate human voices and faces, wisdom and knowledge, empathy and friendship".
The word he chooses is telling: simulate. Not create. The distinction may seem slight, almost academic, but it is everything. In the realm of art, it becomes decisive.
'Death of the author'
Generative systems recombine what already exists: they learn patterns, replicate styles, and produce variations. The results may be dazzling. But they lack lived memory, formative struggle, the labor that shapes and transforms.
Art, by contrast, always emerges from an encounter with reality. Even when it refuses narrative, even when it presents itself as pure formal device, it bears a biography, a wound, a desire.
It is a situated gesture, undertaken by someone who assumes responsibility for it. A work of art is not merely an object; it is a position taken in the world, a way of inhabiting time and responding to it.
Leo's reflections carry significant weight in current debates about art and AI, particularly in the context of the risk that art dissolves into mere "artifice".
He warns that "a large part of the human creative industry risks being dismantled and replaced with the label Powered by AI,' transforming people into passive consumers of unthought thoughts, anonymous products without authorship, without love. Meanwhile, masterpieces of human genius in music, art, and literature are reduced to a training ground for machines".
These words speak directly to the art world—and, one might add, to fashion and design. What happens when the author disappears? What happens when a work no longer emerges from vision but from an automated process, and when masterpieces become raw material for algorithmic refinement?
Art history has repeatedly unsettled the traditional idea of authorship. But it has always done so through deliberate, risky human acts. Even the "death of the author" was, paradoxically, signed.
'Do not bury talent'
An algorithmically generated work answers to no one. It risks nothing. It loses nothing. For that very reason, even when it produces flawless images, it remains estranged from what we call artistic experience.
Another word threads its way through Leo's message, running counter to our efficiency-obsessed age: effort. He warns against delegating to machines "the effort of one's own thinking."
In art, that effort is not incidental; it is constitutive. Creativity is born not of efficiency but of resistance—of prolonged gestation, doubt, error, the real possibility of failure. It is through this labor that the artist forms and transforms, often against himself.
When artificial intelligence promises instant solutions—ready-made images, fluid text—it risks eroding not only artistic labor but also what might be called the education of making: the way the act of creation changes the creator.
To renounce that process, Leo suggests, is to "bury the talents we have received in order to grow as persons." There is, perhaps, an elegance in that effort worth recovering.
Leo also warns of a "world of mirrors", in which algorithms return reassuring versions of ourselves, constructed "in our image and likeness." Historically, art has done the opposite: it introduces alterity, disturbance, and unforeseen space.
Every significant work is an encounter with something that does not coincide with us. Even when we recognize ourselves in it, we do so by traversing a distance that transforms us.
AI, oriented toward personalization and predictive taste, tends to collapse that distance. It gives us precisely what we want, mirrors our preferences, and confirms our desires. But without distance, there is no desire. Without desire, no imagination. One of art's fundamental tasks—to make visible what we had not yet seen, to confront us with what we did not anticipate—becomes impoverished.
There is also a further confusion to resist: between human imagination and artificial "hallucination". Imagination is intentional and responsible; it knows it is opening possibilities beyond the real. Hallucination is the involuntary production of falsehoods that the system cannot distinguish from truth.
Arts' three radical tasks
Leo's Message does not indulge nostalgia for an analog past. It does not reject technology. It offers something rarer: an aesthetic compass for the future. Art is where life rehearses freedom—where knowledge is not merely organized but set in motion, anticipated, felt before it is understood.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit palaeontologist and philosopher whose thought has influenced Catholic intellectual life for more than half a century, arrived at a version of the same insight: the more the world rationalizes and mechanizes, he wrote, the more it needs "poets" as its ferment and safeguard.
Leo proposes three pillars: responsibility (clearly identifying AI-generated content and protecting artistic authorship), cooperation (among technology industries, lawmakers, artists, and educators), and education (developing critical thinking and digital literacy).
Above all, he insists: "We are not a species made of biochemical algorithms, predefined in advance. Each of us has an irreplaceable and inimitable vocation."
Face and voice thus become aesthetic criteria before they are moral ones. They remind us that creativity cannot be reduced to calculation, and that art—even in the age of artificial intelligence—remains a place where the human being exposes himself, risks, and speaks.
In a time of flawless images and synthetic voices, Leo suggests that art's most urgent and radical task may be precisely this: to safeguard imperfection, singularity, the irreducibility of human experience. To defend what no machine will ever replicate: the artist's soul, his personal search, his love for truth and beauty—that sacred dimension, as Leo calls it, in which we recognize "a reflection of divine love."
The point is not to avoid the machine or to halt innovation. It is to learn how to enter genuine dialogue with it, without allowing ourselves to be encapsulated in algorithmic filters.
The future of art will not be decided in competition with algorithms, but in fidelity to that vocation of creation that constitutes us as human beings.
To safeguard faces and voices in art is to safeguard our own humanity—not against technology, but beyond the algorithm.
