Naming the Machine
Artificial Intelligence and the Human Person
Prologue: What Do We Mean by Artificial Intelligence?
Definitions, Misconceptions, and the Modern Imagination
Reality is first received as gift, then understood, then named, and finally stewarded.
This ancient pattern forms the intellectual doorway into any serious conversation about artificial intelligence. Before we can rightly judge AI, we must first define it accurately. Before we can steward it, we must name it truthfully. Much of the confusion, fear, hype, and ideological posturing surrounding this technology today arises from a failure at this first step: we have not yet named the machine honestly.
The Gift of Reality
As St. John Paul II taught, creation is not merely something that emerges from nothingness. Its deeper mystery lies in the fact that it is given. “The essence of the mystery of creation,” he wrote, “is also expressed in the category of gift. Creation is a gift, because in it man appears, who, as the image of God, is capable of understanding the very meaning of gift.”¹
Existence itself reaches us as gift. We do not create reality. We receive it. From that reception we seek to understand it with our reason, name it with our words, and exercise responsible stewardship over it, not as absolute masters, but as servants continuing the Creator’s work.² For St. Thomas Aquinas, the intellect’s task is to form concepts and definitions that correspond to reality as it truly is, rather than to mere appearances or human constructs.³ This framework, rooted in Scripture, illuminated by Aquinas, and powerfully articulated in the anthropology of St. John Paul II, offers the surest foundation for approaching any significant technological development, including artificial intelligence.
Why Names Matter
Names are not arbitrary labels. In the opening chapters of Genesis, the Lord brings the animals to Adam “to see what he would call them” (Gen 2:19).⁴ Adam’s naming was an act of intellect and authority, the beginning of ordered knowledge and responsible dominion. To name something truthfully is to understand its nature and place within the created order. A wrong name inevitably leads to wrong treatment. A misleading name breeds confusion and fear.
The term “artificial intelligence” illustrates the problem. Etymologically, “artificial” derives from the Latin artificium, meaning something skillfully crafted by human hands, a tool or artifact. “Intelligence” comes from intellegere, to perceive, understand, or choose between. By joining these two words we create a powerful rhetorical illusion: the suggestion of a crafted thing that truly perceives and understands. The question is not merely where the words came from, but whether the name accurately describes the reality before us. A definition that fails to correspond to reality distorts our relationship to the thing itself.
Aaron Kheriaty and the Marketing of “Intelligence”
Psychiatrist and bioethicist Aaron Kheriaty has rightly criticized this nomenclature. The phrase “artificial intelligence” was chosen largely for its marketing power. It evokes something almost magical, conscious, thinking machines that rival or surpass human minds. In reality, what we call AI is advanced statistical pattern-matching, data processing, and predictive modeling running on massive computing power and training data created by human beings.
Kheriaty states the matter plainly: “I don’t like the term artificial intelligence because whatever this thing is, it’s not actually intelligent. It’s not actually thinking. It’s aggregating information and trying to provide answers from stuff that’s already out there that’s been created by human beings.”⁵
What Artificial Intelligence Is and Is Not
At its core, modern AI is continuous with earlier forms of computer technology. It operates on the same fundamental principles: hardware, algorithms, data, and logical instructions. What has changed is scale. These tools can assist in medicine, education, scientific discovery, logistics, and countless everyday tasks. They represent genuine human ingenuity and can serve the common good when properly directed.
Yet artificial intelligence is not conscious. It is not creative in the human sense. It remixes existing patterns. It possesses no will, no moral agency, no soul, and no interior life. Treating it as any of these things distorts our relationship to the tool and leads either to utopian fantasies or apocalyptic fear-mongering.
Artificial intelligence should also be distinguished from social media and the broader digital ecosystem. While these technologies often interact, they are not identical. Artificial intelligence concerns the capabilities of computational systems to analyze data, recognize patterns, and generate outputs. Social media concerns the distribution of information, the formation of online communities, and the incentives created by digital communication platforms. Confusing the two often obscures important questions. Concerns about attention, polarization, outrage, or online discourse may involve social media more than artificial intelligence itself, even when AI contributes to those dynamics.
Tools Always Disrupt and Bless
We should not be surprised that a powerful new tool brings both benefits and costs. History shows this pattern repeatedly. The development of modern air conditioning by Willis Carrier in 1902 began as a solution for humidity control in a printing plant but evolved into central air conditioning. Its impact throughout much of the American South was profound. It made hot, humid regions habitable year-round, drove economic growth, enabled population booms, improved health outcomes, and transformed daily life for millions of families.⁶
This series is not primarily about technology. It is about how Catholics understand, receive, and respond to periods of profound cultural and technological change. The first essay looks backward to the Church’s encounter with the Industrial Revolution. The second examines why contemporary Catholic reactions to recent Church teaching on artificial intelligence have been so varied. The third considers how Catholics might approach AI with prudence, confidence, and hope. Before any of those questions can be addressed, however, we must first define what artificial intelligence is.
Why Catholics Specifically Should Care
Catholics have a particular responsibility to engage these questions. The Church has always insisted that technology must serve the human person, not the other way around. From the care of the sick and orphaned in the early Church, through the founding of universities and hospitals in the Middle Ages, to the great social encyclicals of the modern era, Catholicism has consistently defended the dignity of every human person made in the image and likeness of God. When a powerful new technology emerges, the Church speaks not out of fear or nostalgia, but out of love for the human person and fidelity to revealed truth.
This series is not primarily about technology. It is about how Catholics understand, receive, and respond to periods of profound cultural and technological change, and the four pieces that follow are organized around the same pattern introduced at the outset. The first essay looks backward to the Church’s encounter with the Industrial Revolution and the institutions she built in response. The second examines why contemporary Catholic reactions to recent Church teaching on artificial intelligence have been so varied, and what that variation reveals about a deeper crisis of confidence. The third considers how Catholics might approach these tools with prudence, subsidiarity, and hope. By receiving artificial intelligence truthfully as a created tool, understanding its real nature, naming it accurately, and stewarding it responsibly, we position ourselves to use this powerful instrument in service of the human person made in the image and likeness of God, neither seduced by its promise nor paralyzed by its dangers. That is the work the following essays attempt to begin.
Endnotes
- John Paul II, “A Meditation on Givenness,” inTheology of the Body: Human Love in the Divine Plan (Boston: Pauline Books & Media, 1997), 45–46.
- John Paul II, “God Made Man the Steward of Creation,” General Audience, January 17, 2001, sec. 3.
- Thomas Aquinas,Summa Theologica, I, q. 16, a. 1.
- Genesis 2:19, Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition.
- Aaron Kheriaty, “Transhumanism and AI,” Hillsdale College CCA Seminar, February 2, 2025, YouTube video, 53:51.
- “Willis Carrier Timeline,” Carrier Corporation, accessed May 28, 2026.
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