This week, the world's largest religious institution dropped a 42,000-word AI manifesto, and Silicon Valley should probably read every word. Meanwhile, Anthropic quietly became the most valuable AI company on the planet, overtaking OpenAI with a model that tops every major benchmark. And Apple, the company that invented Siri 15 years ago and spent most of that time making it worse, is finally giving it a proper brain.

This week we're covering:

Let's dive in 👇

It was half term this week (which, even with homeschooling, we adhere to).

The weather's actually been decent, outrageously warm, which means we've been outside. Properly outside. Less tinkering with side projects.

However, I did jump back on Midjourney this week.

Midjourney is a generative AI tool that creates incredibly artistic outputs. It was founded in 2022, and it was my first real foray into generative AI art. See my first renderings.

Back then it was more just testing out capabilities, rahter than a tool in my creative toolbox like now.

Just for fun (whilst writing this newsletter), I’ve re run those prompts on the latest midjourney model - fun to see the jump in quality.

Anyway back to the thread.

I'd mostly been using ChatGPT image and Google (gemini) nano banana, great for consistency, especially for faces and brand likeness. So Midjourney had quietly dropped off my rotation. But I had a reason to fire it back up, and honestly? Blown away all over again.

The new model is something else.

But here's the thing, you don't get the best out of Midjourney by typing a basic idea and hoping for the best.

e.g Pig on a bacon skateboard in a bacon mountain range…

Thankfully my prompting has improved haha!

You have to bring something. Creativity. Direction. A sense of what you're actually going for. The tool rewards people who are curious enough to explore, specific enough to guide it, and humble enough to keep learning.

That’s what I love about Midjourney and the team behind it. They really seem to care about art and creativity at the core.

The tool allows you to moodboard and then use that style as a reference which is huge when it comes to building out scenes and consistency of ‘feel’.

For pure creativity, partnered with the human creative mind, Midjourney is still unparalleled. Other tools win on consistency (of characters/faces, but for the spark? For wandering through styles and compositions you'd never think to try? There's nothing quite like it.

Back to a more ‘regular’ week this week. And hopefully I’ll get a chance to work on a couple of the Church Tools that are on my todo list, so I can share more next week.

👌 Stay Curious, Stay Conscious, Stay Wild

— Josh

Pope Leo XIV published his first encyclical this week, one of the highest forms of Catholic teaching, and dedicated it almost entirely to artificial intelligence. "Magnifica Humanitas" ("Magnificent Humanity") runs to 42,000 words and reaches 1.4 billion Catholics worldwide. Its central call: AI must be "disarmed" before it dominates humanity. Its implications extend far beyond the pews.

The Details:

Conscious Take:

There's something significant about the world's largest institution, 1.4 billion members, making AI governance its first major teaching moment. This isn't a blog post or a policy paper. It's a papal encyclical.

And when Anthropic's Christopher Olah is presenting in the Vatican alongside cardinals, you know something has shifted in who's included in this conversation.

"No algorithm can make war morally acceptable." slap that on that on a billboard.

In the same week the Pope was warning about the concentration of AI power, one company became the most powerful, by valuation, on the planet. Anthropic launched Claude Opus 4.8, a model that tops nearly every major benchmark, alongside a funding round that pushed its valuation to $965 billion, overtaking OpenAI. For a company founded by people who left OpenAI over worries about unchecked AI development, that's quite a week.

The Details:

Conscious Take:

Anthropic built its identity on being the "safety-first" lab, the one that said no to military use, the one its founders created because they were worried about unchecked AI development. Sam Altman once called their approach "fear-based marketing."

This week, they overtook him.

And the same day, their co-founder was sitting at the Vatican next to the Pope.

Apple introduced Siri back in 2011. For most of the 14 years since, it perfected the art of almost understanding you. That's now changing. Bloomberg got an early look at the rebuilt Siri, running on Google Gemini, living inside the Dynamic Island, with a full ChatGPT-style app and the ability to route your questions to Claude or other AI models. For more than a billion iPhone users, this is the moment AI arrives in their pocket for real.

The Details:

Conscious Take:

Siri being bad has been one of tech's most reliable jokes for a decade. But this isn't just a product update story. It's the moment AI stops being a tech enthusiast thing and becomes a Tuesday thing for a billion people.

The meaningful question isn't whether the new Siri will be good. It's what happens when most people quietly normalise having an AI assistant that actually works, and what that means for how we relate to all of this.

Also, for those of you that this has sparked the thought.. hmm I wonder when my Amazon Alexa device will get smarter.. (because let’s be honest it feels ANCIENT compared to the speed of LLMS), well they have plans on an Alexa+ later this year.

If this email has been helpful, would you forward it to one person this week who might be interested?

Could be a friend in ministry, a creative who's curious about AI, someone trying to figure out how to build with Kingdom purpose.

I'd love to see this grow and reach more people. And honestly, personal recommendations mean way more than any algorithm.

Thanks for reading. Really.

"Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters." — Colossians 3:23

Build with the tools. But build for the right reasons.

Stay conscious,

Josh

P.S. If you liked this then please forward it on to someone you think would enjoy it. And if someone forwarded you this and you liked it, you can sign up here.