The introduction to Pope Leo’s Magnifica Humanitas closes with a paragraph entitled “remaining human.” This is the encyclical’s focal point, asking the one question that matters: What does it mean to be human? What truly sets us apart from all else in nature?

Since the usual answer are language, abstractions, and reasoning, AI is unsettling because it shows how much of this can be done by machines. Our signature skills are not so special anymore. AI assistants might soon start talking to one another and be more interesting than ordinary talk shows. The AI assistants could draw on much more knowledge than any human could.

But what else could it mean to be human? I answer with a beautiful quote from the late Pope Benedict XVI:

“The clay became a human at that moment in which a being for the first time was capable of forming, however dimly, the thought ‘God’. The first Thou that—however stammeringly—was said by human lips to God marks the moment in which spirit arose in the world.”

Not a genetic mutation, not a new skill acquired, nor a tool discovered, but a relationship made the first human human. Such an offer of a personal relationship must have been God’s initiative. It would have been a concrete offer in a concrete moment to a concrete person.

However, this person would not have been alone. This person would be one individual, standing in the long lineage of our hominid ancestors, but be called out of their midst. Our biological species, Homo sapiens, developed gradually. But the divine-human relationship had a distinct beginning, starting with the first individual who was invited by God to respond to God’s call.

And this call changed everything. What we perceive in the world is never just what it is out there; it always depends on what we are capable of perceiving, which depends on what was given to us through relationship with others. From the first time our eyes met the eyes of our mother, or whomever it is who took care of us as infants, we depended on recognition to recognize.

All is different in relationship with God. Now there is no longer just a world of facts, some supportive of life and some threatening, but a world of meaning. Everything we see becomes meaningful, and everything we do can add to it.

But not all of us find God. This, too, is a fact about being human. But we became human, and remained so in the brokenness of the relationship with God. Not all seek God any longer, but all seek meaning. This is what makes us all of us human, and this is what we must protect.

Technology is not just a tool to make life easier. It can make life easier, and it often does, but it can also make it more complicated. It can cause divisions between people and degrade the quality of life, which is why there are small communities such as the Amish who reject it. But such rejection is something I would never consider, as it seems like a lack of trust in our abilities to find meaning and add to it.

Therefore, I love AI when it aids me in research, fixes errors in my writing, and suggests clarifications. But what I mean to say, this is what I decide, and if others find it meaningful as well, then I show myself to be a human, not a chatbot.