Imagine trying to explain what it feels like to lose a parent to a being that has never known love, never felt grief, never held a hand. You could feed it every book, every poem, every tearstained letter, and it might learn to mimic the words back to you, but it would not understand them from the inside. That is the gap at the heart of the new papal encyclical that Pope Leo XIV released this month. Titled Magnifica Humanitas, or “Magnificent Humanity,” the 200-page document is not a rejection of technology but a plea to remember what we are…

Imagine waking up one morning to a news article that looks exactly like something from a respected British newspaper. It has the same fonts, the same layout, the same tone. You share it with your family. You comment on it. You feel informed. Then someone tells you the whole thing was fabricated by a foreign intelligence operation, designed to make your community distrust its neighbours. Imagine a video of your MP saying something outrageous. It looks and sounds real, but it is a deepfake, generated by artificial intelligence from a tiny sample of their voice and face. You don’t know…