What the Pope’s encyclical means for ad tech
Opinion
Pope Leo’s first encyclical is focused on the impact of AI. Lumen’s Mike Follett discusses three implications for ad tech.
As a bad Catholic, I have to confess that I have never read a papal encyclical before. They tend to be long, abstruse theological documents relevant to the faithful but with little impact on mundane reality. However, Pope Leo’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas (‘magnificent humanity’), is focused on the impact of artificial intelligence, an issue of pressing importance to us all, especially in ad tech.
Pope Leo uses a central organising metaphor of two biblical cities: Babel and Jerusalem. Babel represents technological power organised around uniformity, domination and self-assertion. Jerusalem represents a society rebuilt through shared responsibility, human relationships and the common good.
“The primary choice,” Leo writes, “is not between a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to technology, but rather between constructing Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem.”
For ad tech, three implications stand out.
1. The danger of machine-legible humanity
One of the strongest themes in the encyclical is the Pope’s resistance to reducing people into systems that are cleanly measurable and easily optimised. Leo warns against “the pretence that a single language – even a digital one – can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance.”
Ad tech naturally gravitates toward models that are scalable, machine-readable and operationally convenient. Clicks, completions, conversions and engagement rates all fit neatly into optimisation systems.
Human beings do not. Real people are inconsistent, emotional, distracted, contradictory and socially shaped. Communication effectiveness depends on the vagaries of attention, memory, trust, emotion and context. We can create models that attempt to express this complexity, but we need to remember that they are just that – models.
The risk is that the industry gradually accepts simplified representations of people because they are easier for machines to process. Advertising then starts optimising toward machine legibility rather than human reality. The encyclical is essentially warning against confusing elegant systems with truthful ones.
For ad tech, that suggests a future where the winners may not be the companies with the smoothest abstractions of people, but those that remain closest to the complexity of actual human behaviour.
2. Convenience can quietly diminish capability
A second theme running through the encyclical is the idea that technologies shape not just what we do, but what we become. Leo writes that “human capacities diminish when responsibility is surrendered to systems that promise ease without wisdom.”
That feels highly relevant to the current AI moment in advertising. AI tools are already transforming planning, optimisation, copywriting, design and creative production. Many of these tools are genuinely useful.
But the encyclical raises a deeper concern than simple automation anxiety. What happens when an industry gradually loses the human capabilities that made it valuable in the first place?
Junior strategists may no longer learn how to interrogate audiences because synthetic insights appear instantly. Designers may rely on generative systems rather than developing visual judgement. Planners risk becoming operators of recommendation systems instead of students of culture and behaviour.
The short-term productivity gains are obvious. But this digital deskilling may reduce our appetite or capacity to ask interesting questions or generate innovative answers in the long term. A tool that could expand our abilities may end up restricting our horizons.
3. Creative work has dignity beyond efficiency
The final theme is perhaps the most relevant to the debate around the displacement in the creative industry caused by generative AI.
Like Rerum Novarum, an encyclical written during the turbulent changes engendered by the Industrial Revolution, Magnifica Humanitas insists that “[w]ork is participation in human dignity, not merely economic exchange.”
We tend to judge the value of work solely by the value it creates for the customer. But it also creates value and meaning for the worker – overcoming challenges, working as part of a team, expressing ourselves. This is a broader definition of ‘value’ that encompasses market realities while adding an extra dimension of humanity.
We have to earn our daily bread by creating value for customers. But how we earn it is also important. Technology should empower us to create value by enhancing our humanity rather than reducing us to machines. As Jesus himself once said, ‘man cannot live on bread alone’.
As AI transforms advertising, the industry increasingly talks in near-mythic terms about infinite production, infinite optimisation and infinite prediction.
The Pope offers a useful counterbalance. The real question is not whether AI gives us extraordinary powers. It is whether, in the process, we retain a serious understanding of what human beings actually are.
Mike Follett is the founder and CEO of Lumen Research.