Like many conservatives, evangelicals have broadly begun to embrace artificial intelligence — but at the same time, a growing subset of the Christian world is claiming that the technology is quite literally demonic.
In a recent Medium blog post — yes, people still post on that site — self-proclaimed "biblical Christian author" and regular AI user Zack Duncan suggested that an image generator's cartoonish outputs regarding Satan may be the result of some demonic influence.
"I’ve seen a trend of weird results when it comes to image requests for certain parts of the Bible. Specifically, the parts of the Bible where satan suffers defeat," the author wrote. "It’s almost as if the AI seemingly can’t (won’t?) generate the kinds of images that I’m looking for."
As examples, Duncan included images from Microsoft's Bing image creator to illustrate that AI is, as he puts it, "minimizing the 'bad PR' for Satan."
To our minds, it seems that the image generator has some sort of guardrails surrounding Satanic imagery, and each time the writer used the actual term "Satan," it would spit out cartoonish or otherwise strange responses. Despite being able to easily circumvent those filters with modified language, Duncan insists that its odd Luciferian outputs are evidence of some sort of conspiracy — and not, as he noted earlier, that AI behaves in nonsensical ways that its creators can't parse because they don't really know how it works to begin with.
Things take a decidedly darker turn on the more fire-and-brimstone corners of the Christian blogosphere. As flagged by Roll to Disbelieve, a blog that takes a skeptical look at the weirder aspects of modern Christianity, more and more of that ilk have begun to profess a belief that AI is some sort of conduit for bad demonic vibes.
"The world is riddled with spiritual powers, the majority of which seem to have rebelled against the Lord," English pastor and blogger Tim Suffield wrote on his blog. "If the air is full of demons who hate you, why wouldn’t AI be?"
Other Christian commentators, as Roll to Disbelieve notes, may be falling for a phenomenon Futurism has painstakingly documented in recent months: the mistaken concept that AI is somehow possessed by powerful spiritual entities. The biggest difference between these AI-fearing Christians and the delusion-sufferers we've covered seems to be that the Christians have names for those entities: demons, or Satan himself, instead of woo-woo beliefs about aliens or emergent intelligence.
Of course, that's assuming that the religious figures propagating the idea of demonic AI are sincere believers in the idea themselves. Some unquestionably are, but as Harper's painstakingly documented in an extensive feature last year, a spectacle-first exorcism industry with deep ties to the evangelical media has become a popular form of entertainment in recent years. It's not hard to imagine groups like that squeezing all the attention they can out of a buzzy new tech like AI.
More on AI delusions: Experts Warn that People Are Losing Themselves to AI
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