From campus to the Vatican, is an AI backlash growing stronger?
The Global Story
BBC
3.8 • 667 Ratings
🗓️ 29 May 2026
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
At the Vatican on Monday, Pope Leo XIV issued his first encyclical, a letter issued to the world’s bishops. In it, he criticised artificial intelligence and what he called the “culture of power” fuelling its rise, urging world leaders to regulate the technology more forcefully.
The Pope’s scepticism towards AI does not exist in a vacuum. It comes after several weeks in which numerous commencement speakers championing artificial intelligence on US college campuses were booed by Gen Z graduates.
Is a backlash to AI brewing? We speak to BBC religion editor Aleem Maqbool about the Pope’s AI-critical encyclical, and to Rachel Janfaza, founder of the Gen Z research firm The Up and Up, about why Gen Z’s relationship with AI is far more complicated than many think.
Producer: Xandra Ellin, Cat Farnsworth, and Valerio Esposito
Executive producer: James Shield
Sound engineer: Travis Evans
Senior news editor: China Collins
(Photo: Pope Leo XIV during a meeting with Italian bishops in Vatican City, 28 May 2026. Credit: Vatican Media/EPA)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:06.0 | We were all told that artificial intelligence was our great societal hope, |
| 0:11.1 | that this new technology would transform our lives, |
| 0:14.6 | free us up from tedious tasks, help eradicate diseases, and make the world better. |
| 0:20.2 | The AI revolution, apparently, will be the biggest change in our lives, and we ought to jump |
| 0:26.0 | on board whether we like it or not. |
| 0:28.5 | The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution. |
| 0:40.3 | But in recent weeks, a backlash has been brewing. |
| 0:44.3 | From college students. |
| 0:46.3 | Okay, we've got a bipolar topic here, I see. |
| 0:50.3 | To protesters angry about data centers. |
| 0:52.3 | No, that's center, To the Pope, artificial intelligence needs to be disarmed. |
| 1:01.0 | From the BBC, I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. |
| 1:04.6 | And I'm Tristan Redmond in London. |
| 1:06.6 | And today on the global story, signs of resistance to the AI revolution. |
| 1:18.5 | So Tristan, we have both been speaking to different people this week about the apparent backlash to AI. |
| 1:24.7 | And our big question really is, has the tide toward AI turned in some sort of |
| 1:31.8 | permanent way? Well, we're trying to get a handle on that. And I've been speaking to a woman |
| 1:36.3 | called Rachel Jan Faza, and Rachel runs a consultancy. It's literally her job to understand |
| 1:43.6 | what Gen Z are thinking. |
| 1:46.9 | And she says that Gen Z might be the generation who use AI the most, but may also be the most opposed to it. |
| 1:55.4 | So we're going to do that a little bit later. |
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