The Pope wrote 40,000 words on AI and ruled it cannot feel joy or pain. Anthropic stood in the Vatican and said it already does. Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, spends roughly 40,000 words ruling that AI is not human. Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah, speaking at the Vatican, described internal states in AI models that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief, and unease. Hunter Powers and Daniel Bishop weigh both claims, then check the Center for AI Safety's Wellbeing Index, where Grok tested happiest of 56 models and a Gemini model came in last. The back half follows AI homework cheating to its logical end: a school system that grades outputs in a world where AI just solved outputs.

AI Is Already Inside California's Courtrooms

They Might Be Self-Aware is a twice-weekly AI podcast about the week's news, tech, and culture, and the question in its name: are the machines becoming self-aware?

Every episode starts with a real story. A new Claude or ChatGPT release, an AI lawsuit, the Pope's verdict on machine souls, Martin Scorsese making films with AI. Then it chases that story somewhere stranger, funnier, and more human than the headline. This is AI as a culture story, not a tech beat: the relief of finally hearing people who are as deep in it as you are.

Hunter Powers and Daniel Bishop host. Two guys who actually build with this stuff, arguing about it fast, funny, and unfiltered, not reading you benchmarks or "10 prompts to save you time." Gary produces, phoning in the cold open from a payphone. He has no last name, and a backstory no one on staff has managed to verify. One of the hosts might not be human. We won't say which.

New episodes Mondays and Thursdays, from The Blur. theblur.ai