Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical places Artificial Intelligence at the center of a moral debate about human labor, dignity, and power. In over 42,000 words, he contrasts the story of Babel with the rebuilding of Jerusalem under Nehemiah to argue that society faces a choice between domination and shared responsibility. That framing gives publishers and journalists a way to think about Artificial Intelligence not as a simple battle over tools, but as a broader struggle over who controls the systems and who bears the costs.
The argument is not presented as opposition to Artificial Intelligence itself. The core concern is the imbalance of power surrounding it, especially when technology companies move quickly while the industries affected by their systems have little leverage. Pope Leo points to “hidden, often exploited workers” as essential to how these models are built and maintained, and that logic extends to publishers whose work may be used to train models without consent or compensation. In that view, one-off licensing agreements favor the largest labs, while collective bargaining, shared licensing frameworks, and a common approach to training data would better reflect mutual responsibility.
The media industry is also confronting rapid operational changes. The Associated Press has signed OpenAI as a customer for its U.S. election results data, giving ChatGPT users access to AP vote counts for national, state, and local races through the 2028 cycle. The arrangement places real-time political data inside a consumer chat product, raising questions about how attribution and context hold up when information is delivered in compressed conversational form.
Search disruption is putting further pressure on publishers’ business models. Referral traffic from search is down 60% for small publishers and 47% for medium ones over the past two years, according to research cited by Axios, and Artificial Intelligence Overviews are making the drop worse. Cashback and loyalty sites retain an advantage because users still need to click through to activate rewards, while coupon affiliates are more vulnerable when Artificial Intelligence systems can surface discount codes directly. Against that backdrop, publishers are increasingly being urged to prepare for a future in which search contributes far less traffic.
YouTube is also tightening its approach to synthetic media. The company said it will automatically apply labels to videos with “significant photorealistic AI use,” even when creators do not voluntarily disclose that content. Creators will be able to challenge incorrect labels, but YouTube said some labels will remain permanent, including content made with its own Veo or Dream Screen tools. The policy arrives alongside a broader likeness-detection program that is now available to all creators 18 and older.