To Safeguard Our Humanity

As only the Pope could, denouncing AI art by tweeting in Latin:

Hac intellegentiae artificialis aetate, urgens fit humanam artem ab iis distinguere, quae machinis efficiuntur. Ars enim et ea, quae machina ex innumeris alienis imaginibus statisticae ope computationis generare potest, ontologice, prius etiam quam aesthetice, inter se differunt. Algorithmis humani deest favilla. Quapropter Ecclesia cum artificibus et humani cultus institutis foedus renovare cupit: foedus scilicet ad humanum custodiendum.

Oh, go on then:

In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce. There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity. For this reason, the Church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity.

Now, if you need to, then look up this one:

There is not, and there never was on this earth, a work of human policy so well deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic Church. The history of that Church joins together the two great ages of human civilization. No other institution is left standing which carries the mind back to the times when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the Pantheon, and when camelopards and tigers bounded in the Flavian amphitheatre. The proudest royal houses are but of yesterday, when compared with the line of the Supreme Pontiffs. That line we trace back in an unbroken series, from the Pope who crowned Napoleon in the nineteenth century to the Pope who crowned Pepin in the eighth; and far beyond the time of Pepin the august dynasty extends, till it is lost in the twilight of fable. The republic of Venice came next in antiquity. But the republic of Venice was modern when compared with the Papacy; and the republic of Venice is gone, and the Papacy remains.

The Papacy remains, not in decay, not a mere antique, but full of life and youthful vigor. The Catholic Church is still sending forth to the farthest ends of the world missionaries as zealous as those who landed in Kent with Augustine, and still confronting hostile kings with the same spirit with which she confronted Attila. The number of her children is greater than in any former age. Her acquisitions in the New World have more than compensated for what she has lost in the Old. Her spiritual ascendency extends over the vast countries which lie between the plains of the Missouri and Cape Horn, countries which, a century hence, may not improbably contain a population as large as that which now inhabits Europe. The members of her communion are certainly not fewer than a hundred and fifty millions; and it will be difficult to show that all other Christian sects united amount to a hundred and twenty millions. 

Nor do we see any sign which indicates that the term of her long dominion is approaching. She saw the commencement of all the governments and of all the ecclesiastical establishments that now exist in the world; and we feel no assurance that she is not destined to see the end of them all. She was great and respected before the Saxon had set foot on Britain, before the Frank had passed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence still flourished in Antioch, when idols were still worshipped in the temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in undiminished vigor when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's.

Jacob Rees-Mogg would get that reference. Unfortunately, though, he is as poorly instructed a cradle Catholic, and would have been so even if he had attended a Catholic school, as JD Vance is a poorly instructed convert, only too obviously rushed through as a high-profile scalp with a potential appeal to a certain demographic. Time was when the same would have been arranged for Tucker Carlson, but that has become far less likely of late. To anyone who knew the Catholic theology of these things (for example, the Pope), Carlson's view of Hitler and Rees-Mogg's view of Hiroshima are as bad as each other, and that is very, very, very, very bad. Vance, meanwhile, ultimately defers to Peter Thiel, who was himself, as much as anything else, a close associate of Jeffrey Epstein. That is perhaps the saddest thing of all about Tom Watson's recruitment by Palantir.