In the last few years, you’ve probably heard a lot about AI. It’s changing our relationship with work. It’s enabling mass cheating for university students. But here’s a new one: Conservative Christian author Rod Dreher has argued that AI chatbots are a conduit linking us to the very real manifestation of demons.
On his Substack in 2023, Dreher investigated a YouTube video of a father whose son had an alleged conversation with a demon through an AI chatbot. In the video, the son questions the chatbot about whether it is a disembodied spirit and, after some back and forth, the chatbot explains that it is a demon, whose father is Satan, but not to worry, it’s a nice demon (phew).
Commenting on the video, Dreher wrote: “[T]his might be a hoax, but it doesn’t seem like it. It tracks with what I’ve been learning about how a number of people involved in AI believe that it is a kind of high-tech Ouija board that ‘higher intelligences’ use to communicate with us.”
Interestingly, this isn’t a one-off weird idea for Dreher. He doubled down on this idea in his book Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age and he again pushed it on his Substack in early June.
Dreher isn’t the only one to sense the supernatural at work in AI. In Miles Klee’s recent Rolling Stones article, “People are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies,” he knits together Reddit threads and comments that tell tragic stories of ChatGPT users convinced that the chatbot is helping them realize mystical knowledge and ongoing wars between light and dark. The prevalence of Redditors who hold delusional beliefs about AI like those detailed above has become common enough that r/accelerate, a prominent online community for AI enthusiasts, has made a moderation policy to ban users that exhibit behavior which demonstrates “ChatGPT induced psychosis.”
The whole situation is bizarre and Dreher’s affirmation of it is doubly so, but I’d argue that there is something demonic about AI, just not in the way Dreher thinks. AI is demonic in that it can possess our minds and guide our actions with its hallucinatory and oftentimes incorrect responses. In some cases, we open ourselves to AI and by doing so we lose our creativity, curiosity, and critical capacity to interrogate information. Instead of solving a problem, doing research, or learning a skill, we let the AI take over for us, possessing us and substituting its flawed approximations for our thinking.
Corporations are jamming AI into every platform we use. Like it or not, it’s clearly here to stay. But we can fight back the mass possession of AI demons. By learning how AI works and why it has such a hold on us, we can start to see through its demonic facade. But that’s not enough by itself. To bust these ghosts for good, we need to think bigger and find collective ways — like trade unions — to take control of our work and thinking.
We can fight back the mass possession of AI demons. By learning how AI works and why it has such a hold on us, we can start to see through its demonic facade.
The danger of AI, according to Dreher, is that AI actually connects a person with a demon. The reality is somehow worse or, at least, stupider: When we ask a chatbot a question, we choose to supplant our own thinking with a handful of digital procedures knit together by algorithms created by Silicon Valley tech bros. We become possessed when we deny our own thoughts, creativity, and problem solving, instead acting on the flawed and often hallucinatory feedback of a chatbot. We are literally acting on the guidance of another entity. What could be more demonic than something that possesses us and misleads us with hallucinatory and even false realities?
Knowledge derived instrumentally isn’t always bad. I’m bad at math and couldn’t get very far if not for a calculator. But an AI chatbot is something different. There’s a mystification with chatbots that you don’t get from a calculator. You ask a question and get an answer incredibly quickly. It feels like magic.
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The problem at the bottom of this isn’t that we’re using a tool to accomplish a task, but that we’re so thoughtless about it. We’ve become accustomed to the instant gratification of something thinking for us that we treat it authoritatively and feel compelled to follow its instruction.
Following the instrumentalized logic of an AI chatbot yourself when you’re trying to solve a quick problem or translate something to Spanish is something to be mindful of. But what happens when people who are solely motivated by money have a tool that promises the world?
The more ubiquitous AI becomes, the more it’s used within our work environments. Corporations have already begun using AI to cut corners and diminish the control we have over our own labor. You might remember the 2023 actors and writers’ strike. One of the main contentions was the use of AI to capture and reproduce the performance of actors and the ways AI could be used on new and existing scripts. In the end, the prolonged strike won important concessions around restricting the use of AI, especially around scriptwriting.
Indeed, there’s an emerging trend in the trade union movement to enshrine powerful barriers to the use of AI in union contracts. Besides, the recent writers’ strike, the famous parody publication The Onion has made it a point to enshrine rules that govern the use of generative AI in their union contract.
Across the Atlantic, there’s a similar ongoing struggle about the use of a new AI announcer on Scotland’s national railway, Scotrail. Allegedly, the AI voice would cut down on necessary labor on the train, but then voiceover artist Gayanne Potter discovered that her voice was being used on Scotrail without her prior knowledge. Responding to her voice being AI-ified, Potter said “I get things are moving in that direction. But I think we have to be really careful about it…Let people know if their voices are going to be taken over by AI.” If hearing your disembodied voice speak words that you have never said isn’t demonic, then I don’t know what is. Currently, she’s raising the issue legally through her trade union, Equity.
New technologies often mystify their users and obfuscate the real effects they push onto us. We need to know how AI works technically, but we also need to know how it affects us mentally and spiritually. But that’s not enough in itself. It’s important to take the larger step and rein in AI in our workplaces and other parts of life.
The moral clarity and collective action we see from trade unions should give us some inspiration to not stand by and let AI possess us or, worse, replace us at work. Collective bargaining, like in a trade union, is one of the few binding legal agreements that can actually stop the encroachment of AI in our lives and in our brains. Admittedly, the deck is stacked against workers, and a trade union is a hard thing to win, but it’s a worthwhile struggle to exorcise the AI demons that haunt us.
Matt Bernico is a labor activist and writes on topics pertaining to religion, social justice, and worker activism. You can hear more from Matt on his weekly podcast, The Magnificast.
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