Remaining Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: Spiritual and Psychiatric Reflections on Magnifica Humanitas.

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly shaping the ways in which psychiatry understands, predicts, communicates, and responds to mental suffering. Although ethical discussions have rightly emphasised safety, transparency, privacy, accountability, and bias, the psychiatric implications of AI also require deeper anthropological and spiritual reflection. Developed from Paraguay and situated within international psychiatric and spiritual-health scholarship, this conceptual paper examines AI in psychiatry through the lens of Magnifica Humanitas, the first encyclical of Pope Leo XIV, which addresses the safeguarding of the human person in the age of AI. Using an interdisciplinary conceptual approach, the paper reads the encyclical as a spiritual and anthropological resource rather than as a narrowly doctrinal text, and asks what vision of the human person is assumed when psychological distress is translated into data, prediction, and automated response. Drawing on the encyclical's contrast between Babel and Jerusalem, the paper distinguishes between a digital psychiatry oriented towards control, optimisation, and standardisation, and one oriented towards dignity, vulnerability, communion, and the rebuilding of bonds. It further explores vulnerability, loneliness, digital suffering, moral injury, structural determinants of well-being, and the therapeutic relationship in AI-assisted psychiatry. The central argument is that AI may assist psychiatric care, but it cannot replace the moral, relational, spiritual, and interdisciplinary significance of human accompaniment. A spiritually informed human-centred psychiatry should therefore adopt AI with neither fear nor uncritical enthusiasm, ensuring that technological innovation remains ordered towards dignity, meaning, trust, community, justice, and hope.