Can Catholics as consumers drive a better AI future?

ROME (OSV News) -- As a small group of tech companies race to dominate the artificial intelligence era, much of the world has been left wondering whether ordinary people have any voice in the AI future that is being built.

But one AI ethics expert says the world's 1.4 billion Catholics hold more influence than they realize, and that Pope Leo XIV's new encyclical, "Magnifica Humanitas," could be the catalyst for a collective response.

Ron Ivey, a research fellow at Harvard's Human Flourishing Program and founder of the Noesis Collaborative, a nonprofit focused on steering AI development toward human benefit, says Catholics, through collective action and as consumers, can help shape the AI landscape.

"We do have alternatives. We do have different ways of using AI," Ivey told OSV News in an interview following the promulgation of Pope Leo XIV's encyclical, "Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence."

"We make choices about how we buy and use these products."

In "Magnifica Humanitas," Pope Leo wrote, "It is difficult for parents by themselves to resist the influence of business models that monetize attention and time. Therefore, it is essential to form an alliance among policy-makers, educational institutions and families that is capable of concretely supporting adults in this task."

For Ivey, it is exactly the kind of call to action the moment demands.

Ivey argues that AI companies need customers and Catholics represent a meaningful share of the global consumer base.

Artificial intelligence companies "have to develop customers and they have to develop business models, and they have to develop revenue sources," Ivey said. "And we're on the revenue source side. So we do have cards if we can work together and have collective action and have coordination."

He pointed to the recent movement to remove smartphones from schools as one example of how public pressure can shift technological norms, and argued that faith communities are well positioned to organize similar efforts around AI.

Ivey also pointed to alternatives on the horizon of open-source, smaller-scale AI models he expects to emerge within months as evidence that the current centralized AI landscape is not inevitable.

"There are going to be two different models that come out in the next six to eight months that are open source, that are small language models that I think you're going to see people making different choices that aren't so inevitable and aren't necessarily all so centralized and are a little bit closer to the principles of solidarity and subsidiarity," he said.

Some tech companies creating "AI companions" build business models off of what venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has termed the "loneliness economy," the practice of designing products to profit off the emotional voids of isolated users. Ivey has written extensively about why selling human-like AI to vulnerable people, including children, is financially lucrative but potentially devastating for society.

"While these product strategies are a boon to investment, they could spell doom for future generations that never fully develop social and emotional capabilities," Ivey wrote in a recent essay.

Pope Leo XIV addressed this dynamic directly in "Magnifica Humanitas," writing that "the subtler forms of addiction linked to the ‘digital attention economy’ should not be underestimated, since platforms and services are often designed to capture users’ time and attention, exploiting their vulnerabilities and weakening their inner freedom."

"When business models thrive on human weakness, the person is treated as a means rather than as an end; those who design or finance such systems bear a moral responsibility that cannot be ignored," the pope wrote in the encyclical.

The encyclical's call for "more active political involvement that is capable of slowing things down when everything is accelerating" may seem idealistic against the backdrop of fierce commercial competition in the AI industry. But Ivey said the development of increasingly powerful AI systems, like Anthropic's Mythos and Chat GPT 5.5, has brought a new awareness at the policy level that we might have to rethink our model of how to govern these extremely powerful technologies.

"I think there are new risks that very serious players on both the policy side and the company side are realizing that they can't just let the market incentives drive the speed of this," Ivey said, "because we don't have the policy and governance infrastructure and the institutional capability to manage these things as they get more sophisticated."

Ivey recently helped inform the GUARD Act, legislation restricting human-like AI to adult users that passed the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously and has been introduced in the House of Representatives.

Ivey also advocates for pre-market and post-market testing of AI products to assess their developmental impact on young people, an accountability standard he argues should be a baseline before any AI tool is placed in front of children.

"Until we have that data and that insight, we shouldn't be putting these things in front of kids because we just don't know the developmental impact," he said.

One way to judge an encyclical is what institutions and movements it helps inspire.

Ivey said he is eager to see what civil society institutions and Catholic institutions emerge from "Magnifica Humanitas" in the coming decade, and whether a distinctly Catholic ecosystem of AI products and services might take root alongside the dominant commercial platforms.

"There could be an alternative ecosystem of AI tools and AI use that could be very successful even in the midst of a bigger dominant network," he said.

"There's a lot of people that have to get to work to both build the institutions and build the tools and build the products," Ivey said. "But that's exciting, and that's an opportunity and I think it's not all in the hands of a few at this point."