AI, Authorship, and the Temptation of Catholic Luddism
Is the kneejerk rejection of AI as a writing tool among some Catholics in sync with Magnifica Humanitas?
Recently, a Catholic publication announced that it had received an excellent submission -good enough, by its own admission, to publish- but rejected it after the author honestly disclosed that he had used artificial intelligence during part of the research process.
That decision strikes me as not merely excessive, but counterproductive. It punishes transparency while quietly encouraging less scrupulous writers simply not to disclose what tools they used. It also reflects a broader tendency among some Catholic editors and writers to treat any involvement of AI as a contamination of authorship; as though consulting a chatbot during research were morally equivalent to presenting an entirely machine-generated essay as one’s own.
These are plainly not the same thing.
Tyler Cowen confronts this anti-AI absolutism, with characteristic humor, in his recent essay for The Free Press titled “You’ll Learn to Love AI Writing”. He readily acknowledges that much current AI prose is irritating, predictable, and recognizable by its clichés. But he asks: “Do I wish to eschew AI writing for the rest of my life? Absolutely not.” What he wants is better AI writing: writing capable of escaping the obvious formulas that currently betray its origin. Indeed, he provocatively says: “I want AI writing that can fool me.”
That line will scandalize some readers. But Cowen’s deeper point is reasonable: the categorical rejection of AI-assisted writing is unlikely to survive once the technology becomes sufficiently good, convenient, and integrated into ordinary creative work.
And it is becoming integrated. Rapidly.
My own position is that especially serious, original writing, should remain primarily a human endeavor. The writer must still supply the idea, the judgment, the intention, the intellectual architecture, and the final responsibility for every sentence published under his or her name. AI should not become a mechanism for manufacturing opinions one has never seriously considered or arguments one could not personally defend.
But that does not mean refusing every form of assistance.
I use AI extensively to help draft ideas and, especially, to polish my English. English is not my mother tongue, although professional circumstances require me to write in it frequently. If AI can help me express my own thoughts more clearly, precisely, and elegantly for the reader, I see no betrayal of authorship in that. The thought remains mine, as well as the decision about what stays and what goes. Most importantly, I remain responsible for the result.
An editor does not become the author of a book by improving its prose; nor does a translator erase the original author by finding better words in another language. Spell-checking software does not invalidate an essay. Research databases, dictionaries, search engines, transcription programs, and grammar tools have already become normal parts of writing.
Granted, AI is more powerful and morally complicated than these tools, but power and complexity demand discernment rather than automatic condemnation.
Creativity Has Never Meant Creation From Nothing
Cowen illustrates his argument with Paul Simon’s “American Tune.” Its celebrated melody is closely associated with a chorale used repeatedly in Johann Sebastian Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. Yet Bach himself did not create the underlying melody. It originated around 1600 as a secular love song by Hans Leo Hassler, was later adapted for Christian use, and eventually received Bach’s magnificent harmonization before being repurposed centuries later by Simon.
Does that make Paul Simon or Bach, for that matter, plagiarists?
Obviously not. It shows that human creativity is often cumulative. Artists inherit, adapt, rearrange, translate, answer, and transform what came before them.
Genuine creativity does not always mean producing something without precedent. Strictly speaking, only God creates ex nihilo. Human beings create as creatures: receiving a world they did not make and working with materials, languages, traditions, melodies, images, and ideas inherited from others.
Catholicism should understand this better than almost anyone. The Catholic intellectual tradition is built upon reception and development: Scripture and commentary, faith and reason, ancient philosophy and Christian transformation, inherited forms continually applied to new historical circumstances.
Of course, that does not abolish plagiarism. Plagiarism occurs when a person deceptively claims another’s intellectual work as his own. AI introduces difficult questions because its sources may be opaque and because the line between assistance and substitution can become blurry. But those difficulties cannot be resolved by declaring that any AI involvement destroys authorship.
Thus, the moral question is not simply “Was AI used?”
The serious questions are: Who originated the central idea? Who exercised intellectual control? Who verified the evidence? Who made the decisive creative judgments? Was the machine’s contribution substantial enough that disclosure was reasonably owed? Were readers deceived? Were sources fabricated or misrepresented? And who accepts responsibility for the final work?
Those questions require prudence. A blanket prohibition requires almost none.
What a Catholic Standard Should Look Like
A sensible Catholic approach should defend several principles.
First, no writer should use AI to fabricate facts, quotations, experiences, or sources. Second, no one should present machine-generated work as the fruit of intellectual labor he did not perform. Third, the author must verify factual claims and remain accountable for every word bearing his name. Fourth, material AI involvement should be disclosed when its concealment would give readers or editors a false impression about how the work was produced.
But disclosure should be proportionate. A writer should not need to append a technological confession because AI corrected grammar, suggested a clearer sentence, generated possible headlines, transcribed an interview, or helped locate research leads. Requiring that would be both absurd and unenforceable.
The decisive issue is whether AI has assisted human authorship or replaced it.
That distinction is entirely compatible with Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas. The encyclical does not frame the challenge as a simplistic choice between accepting or rejecting technology. It insists that technology is never neutral because it bears the imprint of those who design, finance, regulate, and use it. It therefore calls for shared discernment and teaches that education must help people determine not only how to use AI, but when and for what purposes it should not be used.
That is a far more demanding approach than technological phobia. It asks Catholics to judge specific practices according to truth, justice, human dignity, responsibility, and the common good.
The Luddite Option Is Not an Option
The absolutist position is also historically unserious. Technologies that offer dramatic convenience do not disappear because cultural guardians disapprove of them. The printing press did not retreat before defenders of the manuscript: even if those defenders included a genius like Johannes Trithemius. The internet was not stopped by editors who preferred paper. Search engines did not vanish because research once required hours in a library.
Some old crafts were weakened. Certain disciplines were lost. New temptations appeared. But the technologies remained because they expanded human possibilities too powerfully to be ignored.
AI will be no different.
Catholic publications can establish intelligent standards. They can insist upon disclosure where it genuinely matters, punish deception, demand factual verification, preserve human accountability, and protect the distinctive value of human testimony and style. What they cannot realistically do is pretend that serious writers will never use AI, or that every writer who does has somehow betrayed the human vocation to create.
That attitude will not preserve human authorship. It will merely drive AI use underground while making Catholic institutions appear frightened, confused, and technologically unserious.
The right Catholic response is neither surrender nor prohibition. It is disciplined collaboration. AI may assist research, challenge an argument, identify weaknesses, improve organization, translate ideas, and polish language. But the human author must remain the originator, judge, moral agent, and responsible bearer of the work.
This boundary will not always be easy to draw. As AI improves, some cases will become more difficult, not less. We will need policies, professional norms, transparency, and continued moral reflection. But difficulty is no excuse for an infantile binary in which unaided writing is pure and any technological assistance is corrupt.
The history of culture has always involved tools, inheritance, adaptation, and collaboration. AI is a new and unusually powerful participant in that history. The task before Catholics is not to deny that reality, but to enter it with confidence, prudence, and moral clarity.
Human authorship does not require the writer to work without tools. It requires that the tools remain ordered to a genuinely human act of intelligence, freedom, creativity, and responsibility.