The two Dicasteries frame artificial intelligence within Christian anthropology, distinguishing functional, data-driven systems from human intelligence as an embodied, relational, moral, and spiritual capacity ordered toward truth, goodness, beauty, and communion with God. Human beings, created in the image of God as a unity of body and soul, remain responsible for directing technology toward the common good; AI is a human tool, not a person, moral agent, or object of worship.

The note applies this criterion to social life. It calls for accountability, transparency, human control, and protection against bias, manipulation, surveillance, social scoring, misinformation, deepfakes, privacy violations, and concentrated corporate power. AI may assist education, work, healthcare, environmental stewardship, and economic development, but must not replace teachers, caregivers, workers, or human judgment, nor deepen inequality or reduce people to productivity or data. Autonomous weapons receive particular condemnation, with no machine permitted to make life-or-death decisions. Against technocratic and transhumanist reductionism, the note urges a “wisdom of the heart,” sustained by truth, charity, spiritual discernment, and attention to the vulnerable, so that technological progress serves human dignity and genuine fraternity.