| schema:text
| - In March 2026, a rumor circulated online that Pope Leo XIV had criticized U.S. President Donald Trump, warning people against letting "power turn leaders into kings."
For instance, on March 10, a Facebook page posted an image featuring text that quoted the pontiff as saying
The post's caption claimed Leo had "
(Facebook page Guided By Grace)
The rumor mainly spread on Facebook, while readers contacted us to ask whether Leo had indeed produced the quote.
We first used search engines such as Bing, DuckDuckGo, Google and Yahoo to locate possible evidence from credible sources about Leo's statement. If the comments were authentic, journalists with reputable news outlets, such as The Associated Press or Reuters, would have reported on them. That was not the case. (We did find nearly identical posts that replaced the pope with actors Kevin Costner and Rowan Atkinson, though).
In short, the quote was fictional and incorrectly attributed to Pope Leo XIV. The claim originated from a Facebook group called Guided By Grace and an accompanying blog page. Both used artificial intelligence tools to create the fictitious story about the pontiff.
Creators of such content capitalize on social media users' willingness to believe and share made-up stories and quotes, profiting from advertising revenue on external websites to which the posts link. (Snopes has previously reported on the business strategy.)
We contacted a manager of the Guided By Grace Facebook group to ask why it had created the false story and quote about Leo without a disclaimer to note its inauthenticity. We will update this article if we receive a response.
Both the Guided by Grace social media post and the accompanying article had indicators suggesting they contained AI-generated text. Both provided little information about what had supposedly happened and lacked specific detail that would be included if the story were real. The article also used non-English characters in place of the letters "n" and "u," while the social media caption featured strange punctuation.
GPTZero, a tool that aims to detect AI-generated text, determined with 100% certainty that the article was AI-generated, while suggesting at 75% confidence that a human wrote the Facebook post's caption, before being "polished by AI."
Let us note here: These types of AI detection tools are fallible. Snopes cautions people against using them for definitive answers on media's authenticity without supporting evidence.
While the image associated with this claim did not appear to be AI-generated, some of the Facebook page's other posts did seem to feature AI images — AI-generated content in one spot of a social media page often means the page uses AI-generated content in other areas.
The Guided By Grace page also used an image with the characteristic art style often associated with AI-generated "illustrations" in its header. Software that screens images for signs of AI, like Sightengine, determined that the header image was almost certainly created with the generative technology.
Snopes has debunked similar rumors before. For example, in September 2025, we traced two separate, false quotes attributed to Leo about Trump that spread via similar methods.
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)
![[cxml]](/fct/images/cxml_doc.png)
![[csv]](/fct/images/csv_doc.png)
![[text]](/fct/images/ntriples_doc.png)
![[turtle]](/fct/images/n3turtle_doc.png)
![[ld+json]](/fct/images/jsonld_doc.png)
![[rdf+json]](/fct/images/json_doc.png)
![[rdf+xml]](/fct/images/xml_doc.png)
![[atom+xml]](/fct/images/atom_doc.png)
![[html]](/fct/images/html_doc.png)