Artificial intelligence must never replace authentic human connection according to the Catholic Archbishop and Primate of All Ireland Eamon Martin.
In a statement marking the Church’s 60th World Day of Social Communications on Sunday, the Archbishop of Armagh warned that the rapid advances in AI technology risked reducing people to “content”, “data” and manipulated images.
He said Pope Leo had called on society to “preserve human voices and faces” in the digital age.
“He is speaking into a world where technology can now copy a voice, create a face, imitate emotion, and produce words that sound human,” he said.
“But the Pope asks us to go deeper and think about: What is a person? What does it mean to truly communicate?”
Archbishop Martin stressed the need for Christian communication to remain rooted in human dignity and personal encounter rather than efficiency or technological imitation.
He also warned that AI-generated content and algorithm-driven platforms could undermine truth, conscience and meaningful human interaction if left unchecked.
Parents have been urged by the Archbishop to help young people use technology “without losing real conversation” and he appealed for greater resistance to “disinformation, manipulation and the dehumanisation of opponents” in public life.
The statement comes a week following an address by the Church of Ireland Archbishop John McDowell to the church’s General Synod when he highlighted the challenges of artificial intelligence.
Archbishop McDowell said efficiency and convenience should not be used to become “the primary values against which we measure whether this information is worth the resources expended to generate it”.
