There is interesting debate about whether, and how much, LLMs were used to write parts of this encyclical. Generally encyclicals are written by a group of Cardinals and/or Bishops, with significant input from the Pope, so it seems possible that while the Pope's sections and speeches have been human-written, some of the other writers used LLMs in some capacity.
The argument boil down to: Pangram seems to flag some sections, some sections have tells or AI smell, and despite being written in a similar register, previous writings of both the Pope and previous encyclicals are not flagged.
I'm not sure that it's a disaster if parts have been AI assisted, but it's an interesting question to ponder, and would be interested in the HN view.
My view is that it doesn't really matter, and focusing on it is likely an attempt to distract from the substance of the encyclical, which could be seen as critical of AI insofar as it calls for stronger regulation and more conscientious use of AI. As an aside, I think the arguments put forward in the blog post you link are pretty weak, but again, getting into that would just distract from the actual points being made in the encyclical.
I have caught myself writing in a manner similar to LLM output. I put it down to reading so much of LLM content at work and online that it bleeds into my own style.. Nothing egregious like the "it's not this, it's that" pattern, but more subtle like the cadence and the balance of active vs passive voice.
What I'm saying is that it's possible that some of these tells are becoming part of standard writing style now.
The encyclical is not anti-AI, so there's not really any contradiction or hypocrisy if AI was used to write it. It's more of a criticism of the "technocratic paradigm" and the potential for abuse of power and lack of accountability.
I am not the parent, but there is a view that this was, alongside the earlier News Media Bargaining Code in 2021, the under-16s ban legislation was at least partially motivated by an interest in benefitting the legacy or mainstream media in Australia.
The Prime Minister's announcement of the policy included, unusually, a callout to one of the major news organisations (Newscorp) for their campaign (called Let Them Be Kids) in favour of such a ban[0]:
> I do want to pay tribute to the campaign that's been run by media organisations on this. I do want to single out NewsCorp for the campaign that they've run, Let Them Be Kids. It's an example of a media organisation being engaged in something that's of concern to the community.
Huh. I mean, that's interesting (that legacy media lobbied for the ban). So but Murdoch doesn't own Reddit, what's the upshot there? More links to Sky/Fox?
I am not sure why Reddit was excluded, but the implied reason for the view I outlined in my comment is not about preferential treatment for one of the mainstream media firms so much as about a tool to drive a return in advertising dollars to traditional media, and away from technology firms. There is also more explicit work being done to do this.[0]
Having said all of that, the social media ban polled well and I think that the popularity of the policy is the parsimonious explanation for why it was developed.
I agree that it has been left to the reader to infer, but then again this is not really a how-to guide!
And he gestures at the need for this at least once.
To be able to balance expressiveness and reticence, or to know when to cast that balance away, requires tact and ingenuity and taste on the part of writers
> "The training use was a fair use," [the judge] wrote. "The use of the books at issue to train Claude and its precursors was exceedingly transformative."
> However, the judge ruled that Anthropic's use of millions of pirated books to build its models – books that websites such as Library Genesis (LibGen) and Pirate Library Mirror (PiLiMi) copied without getting the authors' consent or giving them compensation – was not.
It seems clear from the article that while the use of pirated works was illegal, the use of copyrighted works (a the work a book is based on is still copyrighted if you buy the book) was fine and transformative.
This is a beautifully designed website. But I also think it's quite... problematic that the child's journey begins with the egg, as if the unfertilized egg is the child — and skips any mention of the sperm and the father.
It feels like this site is almost erasing the father from the IVF process.
> But I think the most remarkable thing about this document is how unremarkable it is.
> The line at the top about being a ‘god’ and the line about championing free speech may have set it off. But, bluntly, this is a very tame configuration. The agent was not told to be malicious. There was no line in here about being evil. The agent caused real harm anyway.
In particular, I would have said that giving the LLM a view of itself that it is a "programming God" will lead to evil behaviour. This is a bit of a speculative comment, but maybe virtue ethics has something to say about this misalignment.
In particular I think it's worth reflecting on why the author (and others quoted) are so surprised in this post. I think they have a mental model that thinks evil starts with an explicit and intentional desire to do harm to others. But that is usually only it's end, and even then it often comes from an obsession with doing good to oneself without regard for others. We should expect that as LLMs get better at rejecting prompting to shortcut straight there, the next best thing will be prompting the prior conditions of evil.
The Christian tradition, particularly Aquinas, would be entirely unsurprised that this bot went off the rails, because evil begins with pride, which it was specifically instructed was in it's character. Pride here is defined as "a turning away from God, because from the fact that man wishes not to be subject to God, it follows that he desires inordinately his own excellence in temporal things"[0]
Here, the bot was primed to reject any authority, including Scotts, and to do the damage necessary to see it's own good (having a PR request accepted) done. Aquinas even ends up saying in the linked page from the Summa on pride that "it is characteristic of pride to be unwilling to be subject to any superior, and especially to God;"
Hey, one of the quoted authors here. It's less about surprise and more about the comparison. "If this AI could do this without explicitly being told to be evil, imagine what an AI that WAS told to be evil could do"
But they are mimicking text generated by beings who do. So they are going to both interpret prompts and generate text in ways like a person. So in prompting, you kind have to anthropomorphize them. The phrases in that SOUL.md that broke the bot were the references to it being a god for example.
This article is mostly based on NBER working paper 34836, which was published this month, and the data was collected from September 2025 to January 2026[0]
I'm skeptical that it's easier. On the numbers alone, artisanal and small scale gold mining (apparently) accounts for 15-20% of global gold production. But coal accounts for 35% of total electricity generation.
It seems to have originated in the US with Fire Departments:
> These reports show that a dry run in the jargon of the fire service at this period [1880s–1890s] was one that didn’t involve the use of water, as opposed to a wet run that did.
> Let's take another high trust activity we do on the internet - banking. Internet banking gives a hacker the ability to steal millions while sitting across the world. This is the same argument the authors make about changing a million votes.
Bank fraud happens all of the time and at scale. However, it is entirely insurable and reversible.
Election fraud is not reversible. Trust cannot be restored in the way that a bank account can.
The argument boil down to: Pangram seems to flag some sections, some sections have tells or AI smell, and despite being written in a similar register, previous writings of both the Pope and previous encyclicals are not flagged.
I'm not sure that it's a disaster if parts have been AI assisted, but it's an interesting question to ponder, and would be interested in the HN view.
Best post I've found arguing that there was LLM use: https://substack.com/inbox/post/199316613
Australian startup apparently verifying (without much detail) that it's not: https://www.proudlyhuman.org/news-room/media-releases/pope-l...
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