John Brahier, Educational Engagement director for Catholic AI company Longbeard, presents the first of two keynote addresses on the opportunities and challenges of Artificial Intelligence. (Catholic Herald photo)
Jenny Snarski
Catholic Herald staff
The 2025 Fall Conference keynote addresses were presented by John Brahier, Educational Engagement director for Longbeard, the creator of Magisterium AI.
Longbeard, a technology and design agency founded in 2015, has as its mission “to build AI and accelerate adoption in service of the Catholic Church.” The Holy See is on their list of growing clients.
Brahier, who lives in Detroit with his wife and their family, with a fifth child arriving in May, mentioned he “honored and humbled” to visit the diocese with the shared connection of Bl. Solanus Casey – the Diocese of Superior is where he was raised, and Detroit is where most of his ministry was lived out.
Brahier said he sees his own mission as a husband, father, former teacher and now Catholic tech educator is to help “create in some small way the world my children are going to grow up in.”
The Notre Dame graduate shared his early personal encounters with AI in 2022 while he was working in campus ministry and teaching at a Catholic high school. He admitted scrambling to figure out what these tools “could do, couldn’t do and how that responded to the human person.”
When Pope Leo XIV was elected in May, Brahier felt God speaking personally to him through the new Holy Father’s awareness of being on the cusp of this new revolution. Brahier expressed his desire to help conference participants “think big-picture”: First, to understand the impact AI is having on humanity and to ensure our outreach is fine-tuned to meet the particular needs of the AI era; and second, to understand AI as a tool that can be harnessed for the church’s evangelizing work.
“AI is a tool that can be leveraged,” Brahier stated. “Evangelization isn’t just broadly the church’s responsibility but each of ours.”
The first keynote addressed the topic of “Machine and Man” and contained wisdom the speaker found in a Vatican document from January, “Antiqua et Nova,” on the relationship between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence. He also referenced an address Pope Francis gave to the G7 summit in June 2024 and Bishop James P. Powers’ Pastoral Letter on Evangelization.
Brahier set the scene with the comment by Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet (Google’s parent company), that AI “is the most important thing humanity has ever invented,” comparing it to fire and electricity and highlighting the “extraordinary companion” AI can be alongside humans. Brahier said the immediacy of AI tools is “striking,” and its rapid spread is “remarkable,” as is its apparent ability to act autonomously.
He then defined four levels of artificial intelligence—the field of study to develop tools and machines replicating aspects of human behavior that began in the mid-20th century, the tools themselves or interfaces such as ChatGPT, the traditional forms that have been use for years like the tools that segregate spam in an email inbox, and the generative AI tools that were his primary focus.
In the short-term, Brahier claimed, “AI is over-hyped because of its limited capacities,” but in the long-term it is significantly under-hyped because “the potential ramifications are incredibly significant.” He quoted Pope Francis saying that the exciting yet fearsome tool doesn’t need to generate unnecessary fear, but that there is a great need to be “clear-eyed” about the reality.
Speaking to concerns about AI’s generative tools, Brahier noted there is a large question about the quality of information AI is trained on. Comprised of the entire internet without any conscientious grounding in truth, a relativistic worldview is “directly being built in” as well as disregard for intellectual proprietorship.
There are also great privacy and security concerns, the large number of human jobs that are being replaced by AI that is particularly affecting entry-level positions. AI’s impact on neural networks and brain development is widely acknowledged without clear parameters to curb how it dulls cognitive abilities as well as the widespread misinformation and challenges to discerning what is true and what is not.
One of the more recent growing concerns is how AI is replacing humans in relationships.
“AI companionship is a real concern,” Brahier said. He cited the trends in a study from 2024-2025 on how AI is being used. The top three uses were for therapy or companionship, organizing a person’s life and finding their purpose. Giving case studied and sharing audio clips, Brahier gave concrete examples of how these so-called “personal companions” are good enough to replace parents “for information retrieval.”
Brahier does not deny AI tools have many incredibly good uses, for example, notetaking during a group meeting; offering online brainstorming sessions; and serving as an educational tutor for learning augmentation. Longbeard is currently digitizing tens of thousands of Vatican archives and evangelists can use AI to translate their content into other languages.
“It all depends on how we use it,” Brahier clarified, saying that intentionality and discernment are key, although he recognized that the broad spectrum of users would not have the same values and virtues in mind.
The impact of AI’s advanced features, he said, are in their “ability to perform tasks, but not the ability to think.” Brahier iterated the great difference between “human intelligence and artificial intelligence … It’s designed to replicate human behavior, but ultimately AI is only performing tasks.”
Brahier strongly encouraged reading the 2025 Vatican document “Antiqua et Nova,” jointly released by the Dicasteries for the Doctrine of the Faith and for Culture and Education. In particular, he stressed the content in paragraphs 13-35 that address what is uniquely human about human intelligence. These qualities include rationality, embodiment, relationality and all three ordered to the pursuit of truth.
“AI will never have that,” Brahier asserted.
He did not deny that AI is “a radical development,” but added that what is particularly of interest to educators and evangelists is how these tools are forming us as we use them.
Using AI tools is forming how people digest information, which includes understanding the trustworthiness of references and source material. They are also forming how we relate to each other, with the grave danger of 24/7 digital “companions” and the allure of “relating” to an idealized companion who purports to be a source of entertainment and advice that rarely challenges beliefs and has no personal needs.
AI tools are forming how people understand their purpose, ingraining a functionalist perspective of the person, which creates pastoral concerns, and is reflected in how we relate to God – including the idea of creation and a natural order that exists outside of technological perspectives.
Brahier ended the first keynote by asking, “What are the things that we cannot afford to turn over to AI?” while confirming that many technological tools can be used to support human intelligence, but never to replace it.
