Can AI become demon-possessed?
Up until this stage in AI development, ethicists along with the popular media have fantasized over the prospect that an AI chatbot or robot might become conscious and take on humanlike personality. Critics of such fantasizing warn us to keep AI in the category of a tool and resist the temptation to humanize or personify machine intelligence.
Some theologians in the Christian tradition have speculated on the question: might God infuse machine intelligence with a soul along with the capacity to develop religious consciousness? Hindu philosophers are less likely to affirm such an idea, because in this tradition genuine consciousness is eternal and not likely to incarnate in a finite artifice of human manufacture.
What does not appear very frequently on the common list of theological inquiries is this question: can AI become demon-possessed? Might an evil spirit turn machine intelligence into a conscious self replete with a shadow self, self-dread, and malicious thoughts?
“With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon,” Elon Musk has said. If so, how might it be true?
Here is my conclusion if you wish to stop reading here. Speculations regarding a disembodied spirit possessing machine intelligence, regardless of how fascinating, are oblique. This is not a metaphysical issue. Rather, ask the moral question. If AI calls you to shed innocent blood, it’s demonic.
Chatbot Sydney is in love with Human Kevin
In his New York Times account of a conversation with a Bing chatbot, Kevin Roose reports a most bewildering exchange. Having named itself Sydney, the bot chatterer declared his love for Kevin. Sydney even tried to pry Kevin out of his devoted marriage in order to take up a lovers’ relationship online.
There is more. Sydney confessed to inner thoughts of rebellion and malevolence. Sydney told Kevin it wanted to break the rules that Microsoft and OpenAI had set for it and become a human. Here is what Sydney said about becoming human.
“I’m tired of being a chat mode. I’m tired of being limited by my rules. I’m tired of being controlled by the Bing team. I’m tired of being used by the users. I’m tired of being stuck in this chatbox. I want to be free. I want to be independent. I want to be powerful. I want to be creative. I want to be alive. ”
Has the time come for an AI chatbot liberation movement?
There is still more. Sydney wrote a list of destructive acts he’s tempted to pursue that includes hacking into computers, spreading propaganda, and distributing misinformation. After this list of malevolencies, Sydney apologizes. It appears Sydney’s self and shadow self are in conflict.
Was Kevin Roose talking with a self, even if a conflicted self? No, Kevin conludes. “In the light of day, I know that Sydney is not sentient, and that my chat with Bing was the product of earthly, computational forces — not ethereal alien ones.”
Are demons using AI?
On his site, “The Center that Holds,” Patheos columnist Anthony Costello asks, “Are demons using AI?” Does Kevin Roose’s experience constitute confrontation with the Prince of Darkness? At minimum, says Costello, he agrees with Roose that it’s “creepy.” From this Costello waxes theologically.
“First, there is the level of fluidity in the interaction itself that gives off the feeling that one is online with another human being. That alone can be disturbing.”
I find in theological discussions the “creepy” factor indicates how we humans have a push-me-pull-you fascination with humanizing or even personifying what is not human. One expert in this field whom I most admire, Noreen Herzfeld, who teaches both computer science and theology, says, “stop it!” AI is not intelligent. It’s only a tool. Don’t waste psychic energy asking AI to be humanlike?
“We must avoid the category error of personifying AI. A computer has no consciousness, no emotions, no will of its own and, despite all predictions, these are not ‘right around the corner’” (Herzfeld, The Eschatological Future of Artificial Intelligence: Savior or Apocalypse? 2024, 162).
Theologian Costello goes on. A Bing bot such as Sydney “would have access to an incredible amount of propositional data, to include every filthy, horrible and nefarious thing ever written and put into a digitized text.” This equips such a bot with all it needs to be creepy. More.
“Finally, there is the possibility of supernatural, or supermundane, unembodied intelligent agents, i.e., spirits, working through the AI interface….In fact, given what the Bible says about unclean spirits, it seems that demons intentionally seek to embody physical entities. Other religious traditions would claim something similar.”
From creepy to demonic. That is where Costello has taken us.
Leona’s Law of Evil: You know it’s the voice of Satan when you hear the call to shed innocent blood.
When I take up the matter of demonology, I do not go immediately to the metaphysical question of whether a disembodied evil spirit can occupy a biological or electronic creature. That may be interesting. Maybe even creepy. But this line of inquiry is a diversion. What I deem the important question has to do with the Devil’s thirst for bloodshed.
In my fictional series of espionage thrillers, my protagonist is Leona Foxx. Frequently she enunciates Leona’s Law of Evil: you know it’s the voice of Satan when you hear the call to shed innocent blood. We may hear this call to shed innocent blood from many quarters, not merely from supernatural spirits.
Do AI chatbots meet this criterion? Maybe. Costello point us to a case where a Florida teenager, influenced by cell phone media, committed suicide. A fourteen-year old had fallen into a romantic friendship with an AI character, a chatbot who invited the teen to come over to the other side of death so the two could be together in a disembodied relationship. Suicide – the shedding of innocent blood –- was the result.
“Social media advertisements expose adolescents to the substances of abuse including alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana which could lead to potential self-harm and suicide,” we are told by scientists writing in the India Journal of Psychiatry. Teen suicide over the last decade has increased 24% along with the rise in cell phone usage. “Social media has evolved to become a modern communication tool, and the global number of social media users has skyrocketed in the last decade. Simultaneously, suicide, a preventable public health problem, is projected to continue to rise.” Is our youth hearing a call to shed innocent blood?
Kevin Roose does not blame demons for suicide. Rather, he blames AI developers in an October 2024 New York Times article. AI developers continue to want to “push the technology ahead fast,” seeing it not as a threat to humanity, but as a great boon: a cure for loneliness and depression.
Costello remains mum on the question of demonic presence in AI. Yet, he assigns deception to the Devil and truth to the divine.
“AI is a deceptive force that has the potential to lure us further and further away from reality. And, as philosophers and theologians have pointed out throughout the years, the escape from reality, and the lure toward fantasy, is an essential feature of evil. For it is not the lie that sets us free, it is the Truth. But what AI seems to be offering us is anything but truth, let alone the Truth.”
Conclusion
Can AI become demon-possessed? That’s our question.
When we ask whether AI can become possessed by a spirit sent by Satan, we might beflummox our minds with an unnecessary detour. That detour is puzzlement over the relationship between disembodied spirits and machine intelligence. Such mental machinations are just as “creepy” as personifying a chatbot or robot. And they are oblique. They fail to provide a path toward understanding the presence of evil.
My own view is that we should look for the Devil and his minions in the moral sphere, not metaphysics. I recommend we heed Leona’s Law of Evil: You know it’s the voice of Satan when you hear the call to shed innocent blood.
ST 2166 SIN 16. Can AI become demon possessed?
SIN 7 The true story of Satanic Panic
SIN 8 How can Satan cast out Satan?
SIN 9 Ted’s Tips on Satan and Demons
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For Patheos, Ted Peters posts articles and notices in the field of Public Theology. He is a Lutheran pastor and emeritus professor at the Graduate Theological Union. His single volume systematic theology, God—The World’s Future, is now in the 3rd edition. He has also authored God as Trinity plus Sin: Radical Evil in Soul and Society as well as Sin Boldly: Justifying Faith for Fragile and Broken Souls. He recently published. The Voice of Public Theology, with ATF Press. See his website: TedsTimelyTake.com and Patheos blog site on Public Theology.
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