When Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, the world stood up and took notice.
The reason was simple: the Pope’s words reflected a concern close to the hearts of people everywhere, regardless of their faith.
AI. That is, AI and what it means for the future of humanity.
Ever since generative AI reached the point where human-written content could easily be mistaken for AI-generated work, the origins of what we read and consume have become increasingly difficult to identify. So, when His Holiness published a nearly 43’000-word thesis on the importance of “safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence,” his message resonated far beyond the Catholic Church.
Predictably, it wasn’t long before people online began questioning whether the Pope’s encyclical about protecting humanity from AI had itself been generated by AI.
One widely shared analysis claimed that the AI-detection tool Pangram had flagged 46% of the Pope’s words as AI-generated. While another suggested that individual passages returned scores ranging from 40% to 100% when run through various AI detectors.
The allegations spread so far that The Atlantic reported on the story. Had the Pope admitted to using an AI tool to write the encyclical, it would have made for an irresistible headline. However, a Vatican journalist rejected the claims as “100% false” and reported that Pope Leo XIV had drafted the document by hand.
It turns out that when it comes to AI, trust in what we see is no longer the default. Now, everything written, filmed, recorded and created is fodder for public scrutiny.
So, when the Australian Catholic University, in collaboration with the Vatican’s Dicastery for Culture and Education, released a collection of Pope Leo XIV’s early speeches, homilies and writings on education and AI ethics, titled Maps of Hope, Proudly Human offered to process the text for verification.
“We always had confidence in the Pope’s writing, and Maps of Hope passed the ProudlyHuman™ certification process with flying colours,” said Proudly Human Founder and Executive Chairman Dr Alan Finkel.
That confidence didn’t mean a shortcut. The collection was assessed in exactly the same way as work submitted by every other creator.
The process included a formal application, an identity check, a legally binding declaration about any use of AI, an assessment using multiple detection tools, and a final review by a human editor.
Recent criticism of AI-detection tools has highlighted how easily their results can be misinterpreted or treated as definitive proof.
At Proudly Human, we believe confidence that words were written by a human must come from verifiable provenance, not the unreliable result of any single AI detector.
The purpose of certification is not to tell people what they should consume, but to give the reliable information about whether it came from a human, or was generated by a machine.
As Dr Alan Finkel said, “If people are informed, and they still choose to read a romance written by AI, good luck to them. That’s not the choice that I would make, but they’ve at least had the information so that they can make an informed decision.”
Maps of Hope is now the first religious text to carry the ProudlyHuman™ trust mark.
The credibility of that trust mark comes from Proudly Human’s position as an independent global organization, applying the same evidence-based standards to certifying all creative work, regardless of the creator’s platform, reputation or status.
Professor Zlatko Skrbis, Vice-Chancellor and President of Australian Catholic University, explained: “What we have done with this certification is acknowledge the complexity that has been opened up in terms of authenticating and separating out what is human and what is not. It was a way of testing and affirming the challenging environment that we operate in, and highlighting the importance of human discernment.”
With the line between AI-generated and human-created work becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish, the ProudlyHuman™ trust mark gives people clear information that a work has been independently verified as human-created. It allows them to make an informed choice without suggesting that one kind of work is inherently superior to another.
Whether an application comes from a first-time author in Manila or the leader of the Catholic Church in Rome, it is assessed against the same independent standards, with no exceptions for the name behind the keyboard.
Know a creator who should be certified?
Visit ProudlyHuman.org to learn more about certification, the de minimis standards, and the growing movement for verified human authorship.
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