Opponents of AI-generated art have gained an ally that not even the loudest illustrators on the internet can boast of: the Bishop of Rome and Supreme Pontiff of the Catholic Church. Pope Leo XIV posted a message on X on Friday morning in which he drew a line between art created by a human and what a machine produces, with a call to protect human art from the encroachment of AI.

"In this age of artificial intelligence it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce," the pope wrote. "There is an ontological difference, even before the 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."

The key lies in those few words: "images created by others". The pope isn't concerned with whether a generator's image is beautiful. He says what artists have been repeating for years: the models don't create out of nothing, they calculate on top of other people's work. Back in May, in an encyclical letter, Leo XIV put human dignity at the centre of an increasingly automated world. The industry isn't giving up, though: according to a recent New York Times report, Anthropic actively lobbied the Vatican to reconsider its position on consciousness in non-human beings, apparently without much success.

In the Balkans, where an icon has for centuries been written, not merely painted, the difference between the hand and the calculation is no abstract theology. If AI companies are already knocking at the Vatican's gate, how long until an AI-generated icon turns up on a stall outside a monastery?