(ZENIT News / Seoul, 11.27.2025).- The Catholic bishops of South Korea have issued an unusually stark warning: do not trust every episcopal face or sermon circulating online. Behind the calm cadence of well-produced video clips, they say, may lie neither a bishop nor the Church’s teaching, but an algorithm trained to imitate both.
Their alert, released in mid-November, marks the most forceful intervention yet by the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Korea (CBCK) regarding the use of artificial intelligence in religious media. According to the bishops, a growing number of online channels have been generating videos in which opinions, speculations and even historical fabrications are presented as authoritative statements by Church leaders. Some of these clips employ images of real bishops—lifted from diocesan websites or news media—and then digitally alter their faces or voices to create the illusion of official pronouncements.
What troubles Church leaders most is not simply the technical manipulation, but the pastoral impact. The CBCK warns that these videos have misled the faithful, compromising trust within Catholic communities and “eroding the public authority of the Church.” In other words, the problem is not only misinformation but a distortion of ecclesial relationships themselves: when believers can no longer distinguish genuine teaching from synthetic mimicry, the foundations of pastoral guidance begin to wobble.
The phenomenon is not limited to internal Korean debates. Some of the AI-generated content has included invented speeches attributed to Pope Leo XIV—fabrications that circulated widely in English and Spanish and prompted hesitation even among seasoned journalists and Church officials abroad. The CBCK highlights these examples to illustrate how rapidly falsified religious content can propagate across linguistic and national borders once produced.
Legal concerns compound the pastoral ones. Under South Korean copyright law, modifying photographs or video of a person without permission breaches that individual’s rights to reproduction, public transmission and derivative works. Penalties can be severe: up to five years of imprisonment with labor or fines reaching 50 million won. If the manipulated content defames the person depicted or is used to deceive the public, separate criminal liabilities apply. The bishops’ statement underscores that many of the AI-produced videos appear to violate these protections outright.
Their counsel to Catholics is unequivocal: rely only on official sources—Vatican outlets, diocesan communications and accredited Catholic media (like ZENIT). Any material circulating outside those channels, they caution, carries a “high possibility” of having been modified or fabricated. The aim is not to stifle online religious engagement but to anchor it in trustworthy reference points at a moment when synthetic content is proliferating at unprecedented speed.
South Korea’s embrace of generative AI has expanded dramatically. Government data cited by the Yonhap News Agency show that in 2024 roughly one-third of all internet users in the country experimented with systems such as ChatGPT—almost double the share from the previous year. This rapid adoption, while fueling innovation, has also created fertile ground for misuse in sensitive domains like religion, where the authority of a single image or phrase can shape public perception for millions.
The CBCK’s warning comes, therefore, as both a pastoral plea and a cultural diagnosis. It reflects the Church’s concern that in an era of deepfakes and voice clones, the line between authentic preaching and algorithmic fiction is blurring more quickly than safeguards can be built. Yet it also signals an invitation: for Catholics, and for society more broadly, to develop new habits of discernment, where credibility is no longer assumed from the mere presence of a familiar cassock on screen.
The digital environment may evolve, but the obligation to speak truthfully—and to listen wisely—remains unchanged.
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