Episode Details
Back to Episodes“Many portions of Magnifica Humanitas appear to be AI-written” by DanielFilan
Description
Magnifica Humanitas is a recent ‘encyclical’ by Pope Leo XIV, leader of the Catholic Church. It outlines a vision for how humanity should interact with artificial intelligence, emphasizing the importance of human dignity and ensuring that AI does not replace human relationships, among other topics. Interestingly, many portions appear to be written by AI.
Why I thought to check this
Friends of mine Linch Zhang and the Axolotl noticed that parts of the English text appear to be AI-generated, and twitter user kartr found that the Italian text had the largest fraction of AI-generated content out of all the translations published by the Vatican, speculating that it was the original copy, and translations by humans appear less ‘AI-generated’ to various tools.
What I actually did
I took the Italian text of Magnifica Humanitas, and ran it thru the Pangram AI detector software.
Why the Italian text? As mentioned in the previous segment, it had previously been claimed to be the most AI-ish version. Also, given that the Vatican is in Italy, it's a reasonable guess that the text was initially drafted in Italian (presumably by a few different people with the Pope's input).
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Outline:
(00:34) Why I thought to check this
(00:58) What I actually did
(01:42) My results
(01:59) The introduction
(02:15) Chapter 1
(02:40) Chapter 2
(02:53) Chapter 3
(03:08) Chapter 4
(03:34) Chapter 5
(03:56) Conclusion
(04:11) Should you trust these results?
(04:46) Studies indicate Pangram works pretty well
(05:23) When I play around with Pangram, it works pretty well
(05:58) If you've seen examples of AI detectors claiming that obviously human-written text was AI, those were probably not Pangram
(06:36) Does this matter?
(12:20) Future work
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First published:
May 26th, 2026
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.