The collection of books that make up the Bible is commonly called the “Word of God,” because the three monotheistic religions believe that they were directly inspired by God.

For Christians, the Bible is also a fundamental part of encountering the Word of God, which became incarnate in Christ, the eternal Word of God, who manifested to humanity and generated the Christian community, as stated in the incipit of the Gospel of John: “Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος” (In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God), indicating that God revealed Himself through Jesus, His Word, from the very beginning. Christian faith is the encounter with Jesus, the living Word.

If the “word of Christianity” today is a message striving to remain relevant, combining fidelity to sacred texts with the need to respond ethically and practically to the complex realities of the contemporary world—where artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly plays a significant role—the word of sacred texts—Logos—is also reasoning, an expression of the human mind and intelligence: it is the articulation of humanity’s essence.

The human word, generated by humans, today seems to face off against the word generated by AI algorithms, as if they were two separate realities, as if the algorithm did not stem from the training of machines by humans themselves. We must not fear the entry of AI into our lives, whether in work, personal relationships, or the public sphere. What we must fear, instead, is the possibility of “losing ourselves” in this encounter—losing a fundamental part of what makes us human: the ability to “understand” the value of words. If we reach the point where we can no longer assign meaning to our words and must rely on machines to interpret them in our interactions, then we will have truly lost something essential.

We must start by acknowledging an epochal change that could challenge one of the cornerstones of our society: the word, which possesses a profoundly divine and human essence. The storytelling of our experiences, the legal traces of our decisions, scientific experiment data, and expressions of our artistic work could all be at risk. The dystopian world depicted in George Orwell’s 1984, where Big Brother arbitrarily changes the content of books and newspapers, could become reality—or rather, a nightmare.

Therefore, it is necessary to identify societal antidotes to avert this danger. Schools, at all levels, could teach the conscious use of artificial intelligence, particularly generative AI, now freely available, instead of demonizing or banning it. AI should be experimented with in classrooms, under teacher supervision, by analyzing and studying “artificial words.” It should be made clear that AI is not a priori a reliable source of knowledge. The media could extensively discuss both the risks and benefits of AI proliferation, reporting successes and failures promptly. Politicians, like everyone else, could use AI to produce content, provided it is authentic and accurate. Observing these principles can prevent an apocalyptic scenario in which artificial entities generate content that they later use for their own training, creating a perverse cycle of self-consumption.

The CSAIA ETS Association seeks to ensure that words remain human—promoting ethical AI, generated by humans for humans, guided by values that are shareable and inherent to humanity. Words are intelligence; they are knowledge: AI must embody this as well.

In pursuit of this goal, we are proud to showcase the sacred and poetic narrative of the artist Carlo Pizzichini, professor at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera and member of the Art and Humanities Department of CSAIA ETS, who in 2013 created the stained glass windows for the two mullioned windows flanking the high altar of the medieval Basilica of San Domenico, the site of the visions and theological education of Saint Catherine of Siena, who, as a young illiterate commoner, became a learned mystic and Doctor of the Church through the grace of God’s Word.

Specifically, one of the two stained glass windows, the left one, is dedicated to the Logos: a monochromatic blue glass—representing the divine and infinity in all religions and cultures—hosts scenes related to the history of the Word. Thick strokes of blue, green, and gray-black enliven and invert the dark lead lines of the historical windows, which remain present for the essential architecture of the work itself. Like the ancestral paintings of early Western art, these strokes create strong sign-symbols that emerge through backlighting with iconic power, woven with small red glass fragments in relief to depict the notes of the musical composition In Paradisum deducant te Angeli by contemporary maestro Gianluigi Gelmetti: the pictorial register becomes a musical register. Pizzichini places a virtual staff on the flow of symbolic writing, so that the stained glass becomes a score that can be played: light, signum, and the music of the Word.

Thus, we read the story of the coming of Christ-Logos through signs, archaeological expressions of the human word, communication factors that connect us in life and in community. Signs and symbols concretize the Dabar, the Logos, and the Kalamit, the Word in the three monotheistic religions; ancient and modern signs, in the skilled hands of the artist, are used and transformed into elements of his craft, telling the human word… sacred word… the Word.

Through this artistic animation, CSAIA ETS symbolically aims to show how the long journey of the word—composed of signs, later letters, images, and musical notes—can continue, for a present that is already the future, with a past that must not be forgotten but must inspire both humans and machines, human and artificial intelligence, in the signum of the Word.