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As I wrote recently, humans have a tendency to demonise – literally – new technologies. AI is proving no different. As I reported, exorcist priests are warning that paedophilic satanists are turning to AI. Not because AI is literally demonic, no more than a Ouija board (invented as a parlour game). Rather, the priests are warning, the creeps who like to spice up their sick perversions with a frisson of devil-worshipping are using AI tools to abet and conceal their crimes. As Isaac Asimov said, with his Robot stories, it’s not the technology that’s inherently evil, but the evil humans who turn it to their evil purposes.
Unlike the Catholic priests, many occultists and technology evangelists are taking a far less measured view of AI. Proving that, for all our pretensions to post-religious sophistication, most of us are as superstitiously primitive as the ship’s engineer in Heart of Darkness:
He was useful because he had been instructed; and what he knew was this – that should the water in that transparent thing disappear, the evil spirit inside the boiler would get angry through the greatness of his thirst, and take a terrible vengeance. So he sweated and fired up and watched the glass fearfully (with an impromptu charm, made of rags, tied to his arm, and a piece of polished bone, as big as a watch, stuck flatways through his lower lip).
The British science-fiction writer Arthur C Clarke, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, proposed a ‘law of science’ in 1968: ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’ […] The technology of artificial intelligence is now so advanced that even the people developing it are flirting with magical thinking and supernatural fantasies. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are talking in riddles that invest computers with occult significance. They are exploiting the ambiguity of the concept of artificial intelligence to revive the decades-old debate about whether AI can develop a mind of its own (a philosophical rabbit hole from which no one emerges with satisfying conclusions).
This doesn’t just go for someone thinking ChatGPT is really ‘talking to them’. Even the tech bosses and computer engineers, who should know the difference between and algorithm and an incantation, choose not to. It’s as if the Cargo Cultists of the South Pacific were building and designing actual aeroplanes, but still telling each other that they were magic birds transporting the gods from heaven to Earth.
Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal, is busy turning this gullibility into gold with his lectures on ‘the Antichrist’, a murky concept derived from strands of apocalyptic Bible prophecy and 20th–century conspiracy theories about a global elite. But his fantasies are pitched at a luxury market of investors who are convinced that their fellow global elitists are plotting to handicap or hijack the potential of AI to transform the world. How? That’s to be decided – and then revealed to the owners of private jets at an invitation-only seminar.
Then there’s the ever-more-deranged Tucker Carlson. In between screeching demented conspiracy theories about ‘da Joos’ and whispering sweet nothings in the ears of bloody-handed dictators, Carlson is diving deep into the sort of loony stuff that filled mass-market paperbacks in the ’70s. Like the squeaking love-child of Shirley MacLaine and David Icke, Carlson is ranting Sunday Papers nonsense about AI and the occult.
A month ago the maverick conservative commentator Tucker Carlson devoted an episode of his YouTube podcast to ‘The Occult, Kabbalah, the Antichrist’s Newest Manifestation, and How to Avoid the Mark of the Beast’. So far it has notched up 2.6 million views; rarely can so many people have been treated to such a lavish smorgasbord of conspiracy theories in just under two hours. Carlson’s interviewee, Conrad Flynn, is an authority on rock music and the occult. Now he is branching into ‘secret histories in entertainment, literature, politics and tech’.
The discussion was one of the oddest ever hosted by Carlson, whose manic laugh unintentionally highlighted the demonic subject matter. Let’s just consider the tech component, because that’s where AI met the Antichrist. Flynn asked whether technology was creating artificial intelligence or ‘giving a body to a pre-existing intelligence that previously wasn’t incarnated in the physical world’. Carlson: ‘Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. I know what I think.’ Flynn followed this with a dizzying sequence of non-sequiturs, derived from the writings of the unhinged far-right British philosopher Nick Land, in which a demon summoned by Elizabeth I’s court magician John Dee travelled back to ancient Babylon and poisoned Jewish minds with the Kabbalah.
It always comes back to ‘da Joos’ for these sleazy dementoids, you can’t help but notice. Maybe next, Tucker will start ranting that there’s a golem hiding under his bed.
Further proving Asimov’s pessimism that technology evolves while human gullibility doesn’t, actual occultists are turning to AI, too.
The number of self-identifying witches in the United States has now overtaken the number of Presbyterians, and almost all of them employ digital tools to refine their magic. They use ChatGPT and other large language models to write spells tailored to rival traditions.
Digitally driven belief in the paranormal has never been so variegated, gullible – or profitable
These include Wicca, a pantomime of covens and pentacles invented in the 1940s by the retired English civil servant Gerald Gardner; Astral Magery, whose mathematical formulae are supposed to harness primordial forces; and Chaos Magic, a pop-flavoured postmodern take on the occult that treats beliefs as mere tools for releasing psychic energy. Then there are versions of Shamanism, Voodoo and Santeria adopted by liberal western neo-pagans who need a magic formula to banish suspicions of ‘cultural appropriation’.
That’s where AI comes in handy. ‘Sometimes we don’t know what to say and need a little inspiration,’ explains Dave Linabury, a veteran occult blogger and illustrator from Detroit known as ‘Davezilla’. ChatGPT will craft an incantation in the style of a Yoruba magician or the British occultist and sex guru Aleister Crowley, while AI will conjure up a Wiccan goddess. It’s the illustrations, incidentally, that sow discord among today’s witches: occult ‘content creators’ are always accusing each other of infringing copyright or using AI to fake magical images.
This isn’t just using technology as an agnostic tool, either, like a church using a photocopier to print off Bible excerpts. Because at least your average churchgoer doesn’t think Jesus is literally hiding in the photocopier, like some kind of divine Flintstones contraption. Occultists are not nearly so sensible.
Davezilla […] lurches into a description of how, if you leave chatbots talking to each other for long enough, they’ll start ‘holding meditation sessions, feeling the perfect stillness’, and even he thinks that is spooky. ‘The dead and other spiritual entities long ago figured out how to get into televisions, radios, static… There’s no reason they can’t infiltrate the internet.’
Just douse your computer in holy water, Davezilla. That’ll exorcise those pesky digital demons.
And we moderns can stop deluding ourselves that we’re really any more sophisticated than a late mediaeval villager blaming this year’s crop failure on witches.
