High School Graduation Homily 2025
I was recently doing what we all do at the end of the day, but what we all should do less of – mindlessly scrolling through social media.
It can be mindless, but it can also be quite fascinating. And one of the things that fascinated me just the other day was alighting upon a TikTok clip of a speech by Pope Leo XIV, in fact not just one but a number of them given that the algorithms had already begun to engage my interests. The clips had the pope give a rather edifying speech about something quite constructive. The content was in fact quite spiritual. The only problem was, of course, that the clips were fake. They had been engineered with AI. The face, the expressions, the voice were of the pope, but the words were not from the pope. Even in the last few days I have had parishioners send me messages of the pope quite excited and even inspired by them. They have been quite touched by the messages. But then, I have had the sad responsibility to reply to them that they are, in fact, fake. They, in turn, become both disappointed and confused.
In an AI saturated world how do we tell fact from fiction? This is one of the most important questions of our generation. It is a critical one because when a society cannot tell the difference between what is a truth and what is a lie, it loses entirely its capacity to discern what is right and what is wrong. I would go so far to suggest that this confusion, peddled by social media, is one of the great moral challenges of our time. Truth has become what we make it to be; it is the narrative that the powerful create it to be for their own agendas. Reality no longer matters.
The late Pope Francis was clear that we are not only in an epoch of change, but that we are in a change of epoch. Our world is in a transition of fundamental change, and at the forefront of this is the revolution in artificial intelligence. When you started school, it barely existed. Now it is all pervasive. When the internet was introduced nearly 30 years ago, it took about a decade for there to be 100,000 users. When the smartphone was introduced about 12 years ago it took forty days for there to be 100,000 users. It took 10 hours for 100,000 people to be using ChatGPT, two months for there to be 100 million users. The speed of distribution of the new technologies is breathtaking. And this means that the world you are entering is an entirely different world in which you have been educated. Given the rate of change, it is a sobering fact that what you have learnt over the last twelve years, even over the last six, may have little relevance for the life that awaits you. You enter a world whose features are not easily known with the availability of opportunities not readily predictable. And this is both exciting and daunting at the same time.
Yes, AI provides us with extraordinary opportunity but the new digital revolution that is the mark of our time calls us, especially, in a new and deeper way to draw from what has been most significant in our education. As the real Pope Leo teaches, access to data should not be mistaken for true intelligence. As he has said, “authentic wisdom has more to do with recognizing the true meaning of life than with the availability of data.” AI’s “static memory” needs to be contrasted with the “creative, dynamic power of human memory, personal life, relationships, and spiritual growth [which can never] be reduced to algorithmic patterns.” A conference in Rome in January this year, highlighted that “[AI’s] capacities – though seemingly limitless – are incomparable with the human ability to grasp reality. So much can be learned from an illness, an embrace of reconciliation, and even a simple sunset: indeed many experiences we have as humans open new horizons and offer the possibility of attaining new wisdom. No device, working solely with data, can measure up to these and other countless experiences in our lives.”[1] Therefore, in the end, “AI should not be seen as an artificial form of human intelligence but as a particular product of it.”[2] It must be used to preserve and promote the intrinsic dignity of persons and human agency. It must be “accompanied by an ethic inspired by a vision of the common good, an ethic of freedom, responsibility and fraternity, capable of fostering the full development of people in relation to others and to the whole of creation.”[3] For “[a] person’s perfection is measured not by the information of knowledge they possess, but by the depth of their charity.”[4]
Whatever we may have learnt intellectually over these years at school, the most important education we have hopefully received has been in those qualities foundational to a Catholic school – the insight of our inalienable dignity as those brought into existence by a God who loves, the qualities of human agency, the importance of belonging and contributing, the concern to build a new social order which works to overcome the forces of marginalisation, the centrality of responsibility for one another and for creation, the recognition that we find ourselves in forgetting about ourselves and serving others, the acknowledgement that happiness comes from purpose and not from achievement. These are the critical lessons from which we will need to draw in the navigation that lies ahead. If we have learnt them well, then we will find our stepping stones into the future whatever the changes swirling around us. We will be able to engage those changes not only for our benefit but for the benefit of others. If we have not learnt the lessons, then how easily we may become lost and overwhelmed.
As we step into this new world, the skill that will be critical is that of discernment, the capacity to see truly and hear truly, the capacity to ask questions, to weigh everything, to evaluate – not to take things at face value but always to inquire underneath. The capacity to know reality. It is my prayer that you have been educated as fully as possible in this way so that you might become those who always can recognise the different between what is real and what is fake, fiction and fact, lies and truth, wrong from right. May you be people not afraid of reality, people of genuine imagination and not digital hallucination. And then, through you, our world will become all that God intends it to be.
[1] Vatican Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Dicastery for Culture and Education, Antiqua et Nova: A note on the Relationship between artificial intelligence and human intelligence, (January 2025), n.33.
[2] Antiqua et Nova, n.35.
[3] Antiqua et Nova, n.48.
[4] Antiqua et Nova, n.116.
