DAVAO CITY (October 5) — FOR Davao’s artists, freelance creators, students and cultural groups, the rapid spread of artificial intelligence is no longer a distant technology issue. It is already reshaping how creative work is produced, taught, marketed and paid for.
That makes Pope Leo XIV’s October 2 call to protect human creativity particularly relevant to a city whose creative sector helps tell local stories and sustain cultural traditions.
Speaking to artists and curators, Leo urged the Catholic Church, artists and cultural institutions to work together as AI-generated images, writing, music and other content become increasingly common.
“In this age of artificial intelligence, in which we urgently need to distinguish human art from what is produced by machines,” he said.
Leo said the difference is not simply aesthetic.
“There is an ontological difference — even before an aesthetic one — between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others,” he said.
He described authentic art and culture as preserving the “spark of the human.”
“For all these reasons, the Church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions; an alliance for safeguarding what is human,” Leo said.
A local creative-economy question
In Davao, the implications reach classrooms where students are learning to create with digital tools, freelance workers competing for creative projects, businesses commissioning visual and written content, and cultural groups documenting the city’s communities and traditions.
For these sectors, generative AI offers obvious benefits, including faster production and new creative possibilities. But it also raises practical concerns over who gets credit, who gets paid, whose work is used to train AI systems, and how local cultural material is represented.
The stakes are especially significant for creators whose work depends on distinctly local stories, languages, traditions and experiences. If those materials are reproduced or transformed without proper attribution or community consent, technology could make it easier to circulate local culture while making its original creators less visible.
Leo’s remarks therefore point to a concrete challenge for Davao: use AI to expand what local creators can do, while ensuring that technology does not erase their authorship, livelihoods or cultural voice.
His first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, issued in May, similarly calls for AI to remain under human responsibility and to serve the common good.
For Davao’s creative community, that principle could mean developing clearer practices in schools, workplaces and cultural institutions on responsible AI use, attribution and the protection of creative and cultural rights.
