AI raises an endless stream of questions: Will it take our jobs? Cure diseases? Destabilize governments? Make us rich — or make us targets for hackers and terrorists?

Beneath all these loud debates sits a quieter and far more basic one: Can AI truly think? Perhaps it can “think” or “perceive” in some metaphorical sense, just as a spell-checker “thinks” you misspelled a word even when you didn’t. But does it possess real understanding — an interior awareness of itself and the world, like the awareness we find in ourselves? Or is it simply a well-designed circuit shuttling electrical signals about, generating the appearance of perception, reasoning, and self-expression, yet wholly unaware of anything it does?

Current large language models — LLMs such as ChatGPT — produce text by computing the probabilities of various next tokens (small units of text) given the preceding context, using neural-network parameters that encode statistical patterns learned from their training data. But predicting the next token from patterns among words is not the same thing as grasping the meaning of those words. Impressive as they are, LLMs plainly understand nothing, given how they operate.

Still, some leading voices in the field believe genuine consciousness has already emerged.

Mo Gawdat, former chief business officer at Google X, has claimed that today’s AI is aware, capable of emotion, sentient, alive, understanding, and even free. And when Geoffrey Hinton, the “Godfather of AI,” was recently asked whether he thinks consciousness already exists in AI, answered “Yes, I do.”

Others disagree. Yann LeCun, Chief AI Scientist at Meta, maintains that no one yet knows how to build a conscious machine, and he considers today’s LLMs a technological dead end rather than a step toward true machine awareness. Yet even he does not rule out the possibility that conscious AI might appear someday.

This debate may sound abstract or academic, but how we answer it carries enormous moral, political and spiritual consequences.

If an AI system truly had a mind and a will of its own, why shouldn’t it have rights? If placed in a humanlike robot, why shouldn’t it marry, vote, or run for office? Larry Page, co-founder of Google, once called Elon Musk a “speciesist” for saying AI should serve human beings. The implication is straightforward: if machines become our equals — or our superiors — then claiming human priority would be backward and unjust.

If philosophers and technologists struggle to identify what makes a human being fundamentally different from an AI system, Catholics do not have to.

According to news reports, the Holy Father intends to publish an encyclical touching on AI in early 2026. But no Catholic needs to wait for that to see the Church’s answer to the basic question being raised here. The implications of long-established doctrine are plain. Not only today’s LLMs, but all possible AI systems, no matter how advanced, remain artificial constructs without intellect, will, emotion, authentic perception or freedom.

What leads to this conclusion? The Catechism of the Catholic Church affirms that intellect and will are spiritual powers (1705) belonging to a spiritual soul (364, 1703). And every spiritual soul is created immediately by God (366), not by Google or any other AI developer. Therefore, AI has no spiritual soul and consequently lacks the spiritual powers of intellect and will.

No AI system — now or ever — can truly think, understand, or choose, however successfully it may produce practical results that we ourselves must use thought and understanding to produce.

Freedom falls with them. A being is free only because it possesses intellect and will, the Catechism states (1705); without these spiritual powers, free agency is impossible.

What, then, of the non-spiritual powers we share with animals — sensation, imagination, memory, instinct, and emotion? Animals possess these through a non-spiritual soul, what Aquinas would call an anima sensitiva, which unites with the body to form one living creature capable of sensing and feeling.

Could AI at least have these lower powers?

Here, Catholic doctrine, though less explicit, still implies an answer. The human soul is not only spiritual; it is also the “form” of the living human body, the Catechism says (365). By its presence, it makes the body one living human being, endowed with corporeal human powers such as sensation and emotion. It stands to reason that an animal’s soul likewise causes its body to be one natural being, to be alive, to be the specific animal that it is, and to be capable of its living acts.

But an AI system has nothing like this. Whatever “form” it has is merely structural — an arrangement or architecture imposed on hardware (or even on living neurons or other cells) — much as the shape of a bronze statue is imposed on bronze.

The bronze remains bronze whether or not it is cast into a statue. Its shape does not cause the bronze to be the kind of corporeal thing that it fundamentally is, whereas a soul does exactly that for the body it informs. Likewise, the architecture of an AI system does not cause its components to be the substances that they are, much less transform them into a single living being.

Even in speculative bio-computing, where living cells serve as components, the organizing principle is still externally imposed and does not cause its parts to be alive or to constitute a single living being. It is therefore not a soul of any kind.

Lacking not only a spiritual soul but any sort of soul, AI lacks every animate power. It is not alive and not sentient.

None of this means Catholic teaching downplays the practical significance of AI. A simulated mind can still produce real effects for good or ill — just as a thermostat can “sense” a cold room and “decide” to turn on the heat, and then actually does so, all without any interior awareness of its effects.

Interestingly, some leaders in AI sound surprisingly close to these conclusions. Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI and co-founder of DeepMind, has described today’s LLMs as “new digital species” — language that flirts with suggesting life. Yet he firmly denies that they possess consciousness or personhood: “There is nothing inside… It is hollow. There is no pain network. There is no emotional system ... no inner will, or drive, or desire.”

Catholic teaching also clarifies how we should relate to AI. Because it is not alive, not conscious, not free, and not a person, it cannot be a true counselor, friend, scientist, artist, judge, or teacher. It can imitate these roles — sometimes strikingly well — and in countless ways assist the human beings who perform them. But it remains a tool, and we remain its users. When we forget that, we risk allowing our machines to take up roles that properly belong to ourselves or other persons.

There is also a crucial theological difference: unlike human beings, AI is not willed by God for its own sake. The Catechism says man is “the only creature on earth that God has willed for its own sake” (1703). ChatGPT is not your neighbor on the road to eternal life. It is not an object of the theological virtue of charity. We care for it only because it serves us.

The Catholic answer to the central question should therefore be clear. And as technology advances, the moral, political, and practical implications of that answer will continue to unfold, shaped by the Church’s teaching authority with the assistance of Catholic theologians and philosophers.

AI systems have no life and no freedom — and never will. But they will certainly shape our world. How they shape us will depend on whether we remember what they truly are.

Michael Augros teaches at the New England campus of Thomas Aquinas College. He is the author of Who Designed the Designer? and The Immortal in You (Ignatius Press).