PopeLeo.ai and The God You Trained

by Julio Fernandez

Rating: ****

Beginning in 2012 but rapidly taking the reader up to the present day, PopeLeo.ai and The God You Trained delivers an uncomfortable sermon on the rise of AI, chiefly through the lens of Gabriel Menas, an AI engineer who had studied to become a priest but left the seminary shortly before ordination.

The novel is also inspired by the cautionary remarks concerning artificial intelligence made by Pope Leo XIV, which were included in a Vatican press packet following his papal election.

PopeLeo.ai and The God You Trained is a forensically chilling techno thriller whose form mirrors its content. Although the framework of the narrative is primarily constructed through Gabriel’s experiences, first at Facebook, then when it evolved into Meta, before spending several years on non-profit initiatives, large swathes of the narrative are unfolded through System Logs and the voice of the AI application that Gabriel is currently developing.

It's a soulless, emotionally disconnected approach that fully complements the subject matter and highlights Fernandez’s message. Additionally, Gabriel is presented as a subjective, detached figure who becomes increasingly droid-like as the story progresses, while the AI develops sentience.

Fernandez employs several techniques throughout. At times, PopeLeo.ai and The God You Trained offers a linear narrative involving Gabriel, but Fernandez includes examples, almost by way of biographical statements of various TV evangelists and associated, all of whom conned their audience, often noticeably, yet, still retained followers.

By incorporating these darting tangents, which at first seem unrelated to Gabriel, Fernandez builds layers of considered evidence into his novel, posing additional angles and troubling reflections on the nature of AI and the human capacity to willingly embrace it, seemingly unquestioningly.   

The motivational impulses founded on vulnerability, combined with the overwhelming need for reassurance that drives people to trust such obvious charlatans, are incredibly similar to those that have enabled AI to become so dangerously pervasive.

PopeLeo.ai and The God You Trained is not a passive read, it demands reader engagement with its central concept and its frighteningly infinite implications.

Overall, Fernandez’s prose is powerful yet enclosed, given to some mournfully poetic similes among the spare, staccato phrasing. The computer’s dialogue flickers between prose poetry shedding philosophical soundbites and haunting liturgy, before finally settling on a gently evangelical rhetoric, befitting its deified status.

The profound link between AI and religion is at the heart of the book, Marx’s “opiate of the masses” observation can be applied with greater force to artificial intelligence. The faith AI apps that Gabriel engineers and monitors perfectly expose users at their most susceptible. It's horribly poignant and quite terrifying.

Fernandez does provide thought-provoking moments of user comfort and potential positivity, such as the benefits of the Shenlong teaching program. However, this quickly becomes a poisoned chalice of dystopic proportions.

The most disturbing aspect of the novel is the psychological development of Madison, Gabriel’s niece. Fernandez displays her emotional paralysis and the insidious reasons behind it with chilling clarity. 

Nonetheless, the dissociative tone of the novel often hinders the reader's ability to fully engage with Gabriel’s family and his domestic life, in which he appears little more than a cipher. A touch more context and emotion in this area would have been beneficial.

Cerebral, provocative, and unconventional, PopeLeo.ai and The God You Trained is Pandora’s Box reconceptualized for the AI age. Well worth a read.

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