Pope Leo's Encyclical on AI with Sr. Rose Pacatte

Well, it wasn't so recent for me because I met John Pagente when he moved to Toronto.

And John has had a huge impact on the Association for Media Literacy.

Very, very formative, partly by just literally teaching us and then also by putting us in touch with other media literacy educators around the world.

So we owe him a great debt for that.

It's a large part of who we are.

The other thing that is important to us, and our listeners will know this, is that we are formed from the thinking of Marshall McLuhan.

And a lot of what you were just saying touches very much on figure and ground theory, which comes from Marshall McLuhan and which John Pagente worked on.

I was fortunate to work with John on several of his major projects.

And so through that association, through his friendship and his teaching, and then also working, I was able to make some additional contributions.

And so that figure and ground notion, I think, is really going to be significant in this conversation as well.

So thank you for that.

John was very, very proud of the Catholic Church's roles in media literacy education.

And I wanted our listeners to be aware that this is not...

This is not a casual conversation.

This is not a casual document.

This is a very, very carefully constructed and pointed document.

And it's something that I think anybody could use.

In other words, Catholics and non-Catholics could see this as a useful document and literally a provocation that they could take into either their professional work or into classrooms in some cases.

Carol or Chelsea, would you like to comment on this?

Well, I can jump in, if I may.

Something that you just said, a couple of things anyway, Neil, is this, the focus on figure ground.

It came to me in a flash last night, and I hadn't thought about it before, but the more I read about it, the more I realized that In a sense, in a very odd, strange sense, AI has forced us, forced us and foregrounded the question, what does it mean to be human? And I'm not sure that anything else could have done that.

Also forcing us into the question as well, what is the nature, in other words, of human learning and thinking? We have to grapple with that now.

So it's a profound figure ground moment in that way that we're forced to pay attention to the human versus the machine.

It's an obvious compare contrast now.

Well, it wasn't so recent for me because I met John Pagente when he moved to Toronto.

And John has had a huge impact on the Association for Media Literacy.

Very, very formative, partly by just literally teaching us and then also by putting us in touch with other media literacy educators around the world.

So we owe him a great debt for that.

It's a large part of who we are.

The other thing that is important to us, and our listeners will know this, is that we are formed from the thinking of Marshall McLuhan.

And a lot of what you were just saying touches very much on figure and ground theory, which comes from Marshall McLuhan and which John Pagente worked on.

I was fortunate to work with John on several of his major projects.

And so through that association, through his friendship and his teaching, and then also working, I was able to make some additional contributions.

And so that figure and ground notion, I think, is really going to be significant in this conversation as well.

So thank you for that.

John was very, very proud of the Catholic Church's roles in media literacy education.

And I wanted our listeners to be aware that this is not...

This is not a casual conversation.

This is not a casual document.

This is a very, very carefully constructed and pointed document.

And it's something that I think anybody could use.

In other words, Catholics and non-Catholics could see this as a useful document and literally a provocation that they could take into either their professional work or into classrooms in some cases.

Carol or Chelsea, would you like to comment on this?

Well, I can jump in, if I may.

Something that you just said, a couple of things anyway, Neil, is this, the focus on figure ground.

It came to me in a flash last night, and I hadn't thought about it before, but the more I read about it, the more I realized that In a sense, in a very odd, strange sense, AI has forced us, forced us and foregrounded the question, what does it mean to be human? And I'm not sure that anything else could have done that.

Also forcing us into the question as well, what is the nature, in other words, of human learning and thinking? We have to grapple with that now.

So it's a profound figure ground moment in that way that we're forced to pay attention to the human versus the machine.

It's an obvious compare contrast now.