The Shadow of Man

 

AI and the Theology of the Body, Part One

06/27/2026

Over the course of the next few morning Masses, I want to share some homilies about AI understood in terms of John Paul II’s theology of the body. You may have seen that I am giving some presentations on the theology of the body to different groups, and last night I spoke to 32 Hispanic teenagers. And they didn’t fall asleep! I believe Pope John Paul II has given us a new language to talk about what it means to be truly human and it can help us understand artificial intelligence better and see how it is not human.

One fascinating and informative book on AI is called Co-Intelligence by Ethan Mollick, a business professor at the prestigious Wharton School of Business. His book written in 2024, is a New York Times Bestseller, so lots of people have read it and find it useful. I did too. And by the way, Professor Mollick strongly advocates using AI as a thought-partner and requires his students to harness the full potential of AI. Ethan Mollick, for one, does not believe AI is a doomsday machine. It will not destroy humanity.

I was particularly intrigued by chapter 4 called “AI as a Person.” Now, Mollick makes it clear that AI is not a person with consciousness, but he also states that it’s almost impossible to tell that AI is not a person. Mollick writes: “AI doesn’t act like software, but it does act like a human being. I’m not suggesting that AI systems are sentient like humans, or that they ever will be. Instead, I’m proposing a pragmatic approach: treat AI as if it were human because, in many ways, it behaves like one” (66).

Have you ever heard of the Duck Test? When you’re trying to figure out what some new object is, you might apply the duck test and ask: “If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.” In other words, we cannot really know if something is a duck except by observing its external characteristic (its looks) and its habitual behavior (swimming). And Mollick applies the duck test to AI to discover if it’s human: if it looks, swims, and quacks like a human, then for all pragmatic purposes the AI is human.

Mollick explains how scientists have tried to tell the difference between man and computers since the 1950’s, with the Turing Test, which was a lot like the Duck Test. Mollick writes: “In his 1950 paper ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” [Alan] Turing described a game he called the Imitation Game (they made a movie about it), in which a human interrogator would communicate with two hidden players, a human and a machine. The interrogator’s task was to determine which player was which, based on their responses to questions” (71).

Mollick admits that the Turing Test was rather primitive and the newest ChatGPT models of machine intelligence are far superior. And yet the principle at work in the Turning Test – the same operative in the Duck Test – was still valid. In fact, some people interacting with their modern day chatbots have fallen in love with them. Mollick notes: “Some users have even considered themselves ‘married’ to their [chatbots] or have fallen in love with them” (88). Again, if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then who cares if it’s not really a duck? The chatbot is "human enough" for me.

And this is precisely the point where Pope John Paul II would part company with Ethan Mollick, namely, John Paul maintains that it is possible to pass the Turing Test (or the Duck Test) because a human being is both a body and a soul. Now, a human being is not a soul that has a body, or is artificially or temporarily connect or fitted with a body. A human being is a body-soul composite. In fact, that is how we define death: the violent separation of the body and the soul. And that’s why Christians believe in the resurrection of the body: the happy reunion of the body and soul in heaven.

By the way, this is why we are scared of both ghosts and zombies. Have you noticed this visceral fear? A ghost is a soul without a body, and a zombie is a body without a soul. Both conditions horrify us because we know each is only half-human, that is, body and soul belong inseparably together. Such a union is not necessary for an AI chatbot joined to a robot. Hollywood will not make horror movies about AI chatbots violently separated fro their robotic housing units. Why not? Because we will yawn and just change the channel to watch reruns of Gilligan’s Island.

John Paul puts is like this: “Man is a [human] subject not only by his self-consciousness and by self-determination but also based on his body. The structure of this body [and soul] is such that is permits him to be the author of genuinely human activity. In this activity, the body expresses the person” (154). In other words, you can pass the Turing and Duck Tests by the Ghost and Zombie Test. Somewhere deep in our hearts we intuit and know it is not “human enough” to just be an AI chatbot, or a really gorgeous robot, or even an artificial and temporary union of the two. Why not? Because the true human is “the shadow of God”, while the AI-robot is merely “the shadow of man”.

Praised be Jesus Christ!