Pope Leo XIV Meets Catholic Mother Who Lost Son to AI Chatbot Suicide

In this story from the National Catholic Register on Megan Garcia’s meeting with Pope Leo XIV, Vatican correspondent Courtney Mares highlighted insights from the HumanConnections.AI Salon:

The Hidden Dangers of AI Chatbots

Experts on both sides of the AI companion debate agree that this new experimental technology poses risks to developing minds. 

Eugenia Kuyda, the founder of Replika, a leading AI companion app, told a San Francisco audience recently that her platform has always prohibited users under 18. 

“I just think we can’t be experimenting and building it with kids,” she said.

Sherry Turkle, an MIT professor who studies human-technology relationships, said children and teens seeking empathy from chatbots instead encounter “a voice from nowhere” that does not care for them and cannot walk with them through life. 

EWTN News correspondent Courtney Mares speaks with Megan Garcia in Rome.(Photo: EWTN News )

“Those relationships should be with real human beings for children,” Turkle said. “It’s an intimate machine and it really is touching on such fundamental processes of laying down the groundwork for connection, for how to handle loss and attachment. Let’s just not mess around. Let’s not play with fire.”

This story also shared insights from Noēsis founder and CEO, Ron Ivey:

“Ron Ivey, a research fellow at Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program and founder of the Noesis Collaborative, a nonprofit organization dedicated to steering the development and use of AI technology, told the Register that while older users typically turn to chatbots for help with tasks, younger people are more likely to engage with chatbots on a deeper level, asking, “what’s the purpose of my life? How should I think about this particular relational problem?”

“That’s happening across the board,” he said. But when a child turns to a machine for moral insight, it creates a special risk.

“These machines don’t care about the child. They don’t have heart. They don’t have a capacity for that,” Ivey said.

“In the context of social relationships, what does it mean for young people to be spending, in some cases with these chatbots, two hours a day interacting?” Ivey asked. “How does that impact the moral development, the emotional development, social development of that child or teen? Are we really thinking about that before we’re allowing kids to interact with it?”