Catholic Church England and Wales / Flickr
YouTube has shut down a channel that used artificial intelligence to fabricate sermons falsely attributed to Pope Leo XIV.
The channel, “Pope Leo XIV’s Sermons,” had amassed nearly one million views and nearly 18,000 subscribers before the platform took action, Aleteia reported.
“We terminated the channel in question for violating our policies covering spam, deceptive practices, and scams,” YouTube spokesperson Jack Malon told Aleteia May 21.
The videos, though sometimes loosely based on the Pope’s public remarks, were entirely AI-generated. None of the sermons featured actual content spoken by Pope Leo.
The takedown follows another recent example of AI-generated misinformation involving Pope Leo. As previously reported by CatholicVote, the YouTube account “Pan African Dreams” published a 36-minute deepfake video falsely portraying the Pope addressing Burkina Faso’s President Ibrahim Traoré.
Using digital manipulation, the creators altered real footage from a May 12 audience to match AI-generated English narration, giving the false impression of a detailed speech on justice and exploitation in West Africa.
Despite the Vatican publicly stating that the video was a fake, the footage remains online and has now surpassed 1 million views. YouTube has not removed the “Pan African Dreams” account.
