An organization in Australia has confirmed that a collection of speeches and writings by Pope Leo XIV was written by a human, not by artificial intelligence. The certification came less than two months after the Pope called AI the greatest threat to humanity. The Guardian

The organization, called Proudly Human, carried out the certification with help from the Australian Catholic University and cardinals in the Vatican. Dr Alan Finkel, Australia's former chief scientist and the person behind Proudly Human, told Guardian Australia that the process took less than a day. The writings are collected in a book called Maps of Hope, published in the same week in May 2026 that the Pope released his first encyclical — a formal letter to the Catholic community — called Magnifica Humanitas.

That encyclical warned about the dangers of artificial intelligence and the risk of the technology's power being controlled by a small group of people. Pope Leo XIV wrote that AI should be stopped "from dominating humanity" and should be "human-friendly", available to everyone, and open to discussion and debate.

Proudly Human describes itself as an independent organization that verifies and labels content, services, and products as human-created. To get certified, authors must sign up, show identification, and sign a declaration that they did not use AI to write their work. The organization then uses four or five AI detection tools — computer programs that try to tell whether text was written by a machine — along with its own system to combine the results and make a judgment. Proudly Human

Dr Finkel holds the title Companion of the Order of Australia (AC) and serves as Chancellor of Monash University. Prof Zlato Skrbis, president of the Australian Catholic University, said it is valuable to "say with confidence that a work is a product of human reflection and judgment."

The broader context here is a world where AI-generated content has grown so much that figuring out who or what created a piece of writing has become a real concern. Proudly Human's website shares numbers to show the scale of the problem: 44% of new music uploaded to streaming platforms each day is AI-generated, 30 billion AI-generated images have been created since 2022, and 77% of new self-help books on Amazon are likely AI-written. The organization also notes that one author published 200 books in a single year, which it calls "not humanly possible."

The Vatican's decision to put the Pope's own writings through an outside certification process is meaningful. Leo XIV's encyclical named AI as a threat and warned against too much technological power in too few hands. Having his own work certified as human-created matches the principles he laid out in Magnifica Humanitas. It is one thing for a pope to say AI should stay "human-friendly" and accessible to all; it is another for the same pope's writing to go through a formal verification process designed to tell human work from machine output.

The speed of the certification, finished within a day according to Finkel, raises questions about how thorough AI detection methods really are. Proudly Human's approach combines detection tools, its own calculation system, and a signed promise from the author. Whether this mixed method becomes the standard for well-known institutions and public figures is still an open question. But the Vatican's involvement gives the model attention that few other backers could provide.

For organizations trying to balance the benefits of AI with rules for how it should be used, this episode shows one example of how a major voice on AI ethics has chosen to be transparent about its own creative work. The partnership between an Australian startup, a Catholic university, and Vatican cardinals is an unusual combination. It links a technical process run by a secular organization with a religious authority's moral view of AI, at a time when the question of who wrote what is being debated across publishing, schools, and media.