Leo XIV, who dedicated the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas to the protection of the human person in the age of artificial intelligence, will not be happy. Even the director of Espresso Emilio Carelli and his readers would have the right to ask Nicola Zingaretti some questions. The ghostwriter union, if it existed (it used to be a journalist’s job), should raise the issue. Because it is not nice to do these things: with the pope, the historic left-wing weekly, and even half of ethics. Premise. Those in the profession and a little savvy recognize texts written with artificial intelligence at a glance. At least those “commissioned” to the chatbot without giving precise instructions, and then copied and pasted by a Judas executioner. Artificial intelligence tends to use stereotyped ways of arguing, “canned” phrases adapted to different circumstances. As the British weekly The Economist recently wrote, “if language models continue to improve, in a few years they could be on par with word professionals. For now, however, their flabby prose makes editing work particularly valuable.”
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All this to say that already at a first reading the article that appeared in yesterday’s issue of Espresso and signed by Zingaretti to support the campaign for the pope’s candidacy for the Nobel Peace Prize has exactly those characteristics: stereotyped arguments, phrases that smell of recycled fluff, flabby prose.
The former secretary of the PD and current head of the delegation of the Democrats in the European Parliament paints a world in which strength is presented as “the only possible answer.” The voice of Pope Leo XIV, on the other hand, represents “a reference of extraordinary importance” that “firmly recalls the value of human dignity, reconciliation, and mutual responsibility.” Nominating him for the Nobel means recognizing “the value of leadership capable of speaking to the entire international community, believers and non-believers,” affirming that the world needs “moral reference points that remind us that peace is a project to be built every day,” and so on. There is even a passage on artificial intelligence: Zingaretti describes new technologies as “extraordinary,” but in need of “an ethical compass so that they remain at the service of the person.”
In short, there is a strong smell of hot air packaged and served by a generative artificial intelligence system, like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. The smell, however, counts for nothing. There are specialized tools to identify texts written by AI. One of the best is Pangram 4.0, developed by an American startup and used by publishers, universities, law firms, and platforms like Substack. Independent studies attribute to it the lowest false positive rate (cases where it attributes AI to a text written by a human) in the sector: one in ten thousand. The article signed by the MEP was submitted to Pangram, and the verdict is unequivocal: “100% AI generated,” issued with “High Confidence,” the highest degree of certainty. According to Pangram, no sentence in that article was written by a human being.
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“We believe that this entire text is written by AI,” reads the report generated by the control software. For comparison: the article supporting the pope’s Nobel Prize candidacy written by philosopher Giacomo Marramao and published by Espresso on May 7, also according to Pangram, is “100% written by a human.” Some can and some cannot. There are other AI detectors in writing. One is ZeroGPT. After “studying” Zingaretti’s article, it gives a somewhat more lenient but still embarrassing response: 52.6% of that text, and in particular the entire second part, the heart of the reasoning (so to speak), “is suspected of being very likely generated by AI.” The pope who wrote an encyclical on the ethics of artificial intelligence is thus indicated as an example of ethics in an article written by artificial intelligence. Quite a paradox.
Also because Zingaretti is not just any MEP. In addition to leading the PD delegation in Strasbourg, he is the “shadow rapporteur” of the EU Socialists on the Cloud and AI development act. That is, the “expert” who on behalf of his group must follow the new European regulation on artificial intelligence. Also for this reason, he talks about it often: a few days ago, commenting on the deplorable phenomenon of music created with AI, he warned: “Those who consume have the right to know what they are listening to,” and for this he approves the introduction of a labeling system. The same could be done with articles and politicians’ speeches: their own work or algorithms by Sam Altman and Dario Amodei? Labeling, please. Then there is the other aspect of the issue: the – how to say – progressive one. It is known that Zingaretti, a dental technician graduate from the De Amicis institute in Testaccio, is not comfortable with reading and writing. But with all the unemployed and underpaid intellectual labor there is in Italy, one of the many faults of the government, say Elly Schlein and company – it is a pity that the PD does not have a hundred euros to give to a graduate in Migration Sociology in exchange for a couple of better pages than those.
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