Whether There are Demons in the Machine
Prompt-driven AI machinery is here. For some, such as the quasi-amateur freelance digital artists, this apparently spells disaster. Their histrionic screeching has been heard all summer as the petty design jobs that kept their profession afloat are now more viably done with a set of algorithms and an RTX-3060. For others, such as those with too much time on their hands, it’s an amusing jaunt into the limits of their imaginations, as they pump prompts full of outrageous ‘what-if’ scenarios in order to view amusing if still unconvincing pastiches of popular culture.
Whether this can be called art in its proper sense, however, is a topic of philosophical weight that would best be addressed elsewhere. Whatever it is, the products of these machines seem to walk just like the artistic ducks we’ve seen churned out by content creators for years, which speaks more to the invalidity of that sense of digital artistry than to the question of a machine’s ability to cross-reference and imitate. “Good artists copy, great ones steal,” Picasso allegedly said. He might have been a jaded and pessimistic hack himself, but he was at least right about that. Though one might be tempted to replace ‘good artists’ with the term ‘amateurs.’
Twitter e-trads, and likely some of us in real life as well, have had an understandable gut reaction to avoid and disdain this prompt-based AI generated imagery. When prompting it to generate images of people, it gets the eyes wrong. There are strange pixel morphings of common objects that result in conflagrations of the familiar and the bizarre. The uncanny valley remains too strong. Anyone with even the slightest sense of aesthetic will view so many AI images and come away with the understanding that it still can’t quite get it right. Unlike prompt-based AI-generated short story engines, the machine still seems unable to replicate from scratch anything other than, at best, impressionistic approximations of what art is supposed to look like. Color is imitated with exacting precision, but form gets lost in the noise. Whatever requires the union of realism and imagination is contorted into an unsettling imitation.
Quickly, the term ‘demonic’ gets lobbed in that direction. And to further compound matters, twitter artists such as @Supercomposite, receptive to this technological innovation, draw upon the prompt-based imagery creation to leverage the uncanny valley for the purpose of horror. His now viral thread about recurring images of a woman broadly explains his creative process. The image of this woman recurred so often, and so unpredictably, that he even gave it a name, and the more he played with the prompts and cross-referenced the images with other data, the more defined, if that word is even appropriate here, this ‘woman’ became. It is, however, a thread riddled with violent, gore-riddled and grotesque imagery, and in the interests of curbing the innocently curious, it won’t be linked in this piece; if you want to find it for yourself, no doubt you’d know how. Also, frankly, I find this sort of thing gross.
This thread deserves mention, however, because it serves as a definite jumping off point for a topic of greater consideration: are the e-trads right, and are there demons manifesting in machine learning algorithms, or is this all just superstitious nonsense? The answer, as is typical, requires more nuance than the broad strokes that social media demands we paint with. Before we can get to the crux of the matter, we’ll have to approach this issue by three avenues: the preternatural itself, imagery and specifically horror imagery in general, and finally the AI generation of imagery.
The Preternatural
It used to be easy, under typical modern secular thinking to dismiss the existence of demons. Mere belief in them, like anything supernatural, was easier to believe as the manifestations of overactive imaginations, primitive superstition, or, to a degree, simple wishful thinking. But that was before Clinton scandals became so obviously covered up by major media organizations, child predator accusations against people in high parts of the world turned out to be real, and Jeffery Epstein died in his cell. The internet, in part because of how easy informational exchange has gotten, and in part because of obvious efforts to stop that, has made the modern mind start to think again. Some people might just be evil, of course, but the question of “what would drive a person to be so evil?” leaves materialistic explanations somewhat unsatisfying.
If one is willing to grant that demons do exist, then we have to grant that some religious authority is probably right, or at least mostly right, about them. One might exclaim this task too tall an order, however, as most organized religions across the world do acknowledge the existence of some supernatural or preternatural entities that are not necessarily ‘gods’. Sometimes they’re called spirits, or mythical spirit-like intelligent creatures, or jinn. These aside, it’s crucial to determine which of these traditions had the most success in driving out demonic activity—activity, that is, which is directly harmful to men, unwanted, and possibly lethal. The Buddhists in various parts of the world, such as Japan and regions of China, had some such traditions, drawing typically off of simpler rites that preexisted Buddhist presence. But if we’re going to find an institution that is actually known for its exorcisms, and their success rate, we need look no further than the Catholic Church.
To understand demonic activity in the world, three things have to be distinguished: how demons generally behave, how we understand the world around us, and where these two things come together. While it is possible for demons to directly act upon physical objects, at least in the way we see it happen in movies, exorcists tend to agree that this is a pretty rare phenomenon and usually a localized one. Their ability to act on our intellect, however, is another matter entirely.
Demons are fallen angels, having rejected the beatific vision granted to them upon their creation before the first created light shown in the world. In this sense, they followed the devil in his rebellion and fall, and are indeed ordered into a certain hierarchy, as the hierarchy of the demonic is the natural—if fallen—manifestation of the same hierarchy in heaven. They did not follow the devil out of love, however, which distinguishes their hierarchy from the angelic’s, but out of fear or jealousy of his power. All things in Hell are there because of rejection, it must be remembered. Heaven maintains a positive definition: Where God Is, insofar as it is a more real place even than the world. Hell, however, is simply Where He Isn’t. It is out of His great love for his creations that Hell even exists, as He allows them to maintain their immortal beings despite their obstinate rejection of everything that it entails. The demons, being a particular sort of soul in Hell, share this with the souls of men who find their eternal reward in the same fires.
Their motivation for interacting with the world is simple: hatred of men, who as a race, have the attention of God. They do not seek to attract men to Hell out of some misguided sense of love or a desire for company. They have no love for other creatures. They wish only to detract, as much as they are able, from the beauty of the Divine intention that shapes the world, and that means acting as the foil of salvation history. Any soul they can pull into Hell is numbered as one more victory for them, if unsatisfying, because they still recognize that their fight has already been lost.
Of what relevancy is this to whether demons inhabit ‘artificial intelligence’ and generate imagery? We must know their intended ends if we are to surmise whether they are acting in certain ways. The question to ask, then, is whether horrible imagery is an avenue by which they can seduce or coerce souls into Hell, and the answer to that is an obvious ‘yes’. Unrelated to AI, the last half-century of pornography’s influence should make this obvious.
This example lacks the glamour and esoterica of sigils and magic circles, in which case the image itself would presumably be doing the spiritual damage. But it’s a much more common and, frankly, more dangerous use of imagery. In the case of pornography, it attacks men in ways that we are already susceptible to by concupiscence. There’s no doubt of some demonic element at play behind its proliferation—and, if the normalization of extremes is taking into account, even its content—but left to our own devices, pornography would be a legitimate threat worthy of condemnation and abolition. Human beings are the ones creating the porn and distributing it and likewise consuming it. The demons, to whatever degree they are involved, grease the skids.
It is the manner in which they grease the skids that is relevant, here, because ‘greasing the skids’, in both the case of pornography and in AI imagery, like magic sigils and hokey esoterica, relies on on how the imagery is created, how it is distributed, and how it is consumed. It must be determined where it is possible for demonic influence to manifest in the making of a particular image, in how it gets to us, and lastly, in how it affects us.
Bad Pictures In General
Horrific imagery can indeed seduce souls into Hell, though intuitively, it seems a less surefire method than pornography. Nonetheless, the fascination with the macabre pervades contemporary culture to an unavoidable degree. Horror films, for almost fifty years, have preoccupied the public with explicit imagery, violence, gore splatter, and bodily deformations in order to shock and appall, relegating truly unique and contemplative horror to the realm of arthouse curiosity. Our music and literature, too, at least to the degree these are still consumed, also cop for the explicit as low-hanging fruit.
Although exposure to the macabre doesn’t seem like it can induce the sort of mania that lewd imagery does, and although it is likewise nonaddictive by comparison, the sort of macabre that preoccupies most of our entertainment industry is, nonetheless, lowest hanging fruit. It does not spark imagination in its viewers, nor does it trigger a reflection on themes of death, the absurd, or evil, the way that properly-ordered horror does. Rather than the intellect, it acts upon adrenaline: disgust is its aim, and this is most apparent not just with gore splattered slashers and dismorphia-obsessed body horror, but even with comparatively staid jump-scare thrillers.
This is not to say that the more recent fad of “slow-burn” or “cerebral” horror flicks are immune to this sort of consumption, either. Emotional tension, usually rooted in uncertainty, stirs up fear, and because this is entertainment, this sense of fear remains isolated in a controlled environment. Again, there is no reflection on narrative themes taking place when one indulges in this sort of horror for this reason; instead, the consumer is merely feeding his emotions with pretend versions of actual feelings. He’s watching a movie to get scared, but not actually scared, because this sort of thing is a form of entertainment to him.
If we were to reduce this tendency for indulgence down to one of the cardinal sins, gluttony would be the easiest fit. Gluttony extends beyond the limits of food and drink, although medieval manuals most commonly—and understandably—correlate the two. But the medievals did not have access to the technological innovations that made consumer culture possible. Excess indulgence in media and entertainment might not immediately make one fat and miserable, as excessively indulging in food and drink will, but it will attack the soul by way of dulling the intellect. It’s a complicated admixture, ultimately, of several different aspects of multiple cardinal sins, but the base element of engagement seems to be the gluttonous impulse: an unwillingness to control one’s appetite. It just so happens that the appetite, in cases such as these, concerns desires that are not related to food.
Worse, the modern world is set up to maintain this sort of over consumption of media. It was noted in a previous post how modern consumer culture’s flattening tendency reduces aesthetic value to a sort of intellectual widget for consumption. The presence of ‘creative’ industries which generate content changes the interpretative mode by which audiences come into contact with that content. Self-styled meta-narratives become the dominate means in which consumers interact with media, erasing the importance of specific works in the process. Although content, or a creative work, is still made, its importance diminishes the more resonate it is with prevailing meta-narratives. These meta-narratives can come in the form of genres, trends, or even things that seem unrelated to content generation, such as politics or moralisms.
This is all to say that modern audiences are trained to be consumers of media before they are trained to be interpreters of meaning or judges of aesthetics. Just because truth and beauty, the subjects of meaning and aesthetics, can be made known to these audiences in spite of their prior training, it should not then be presumed that these audiences are appropriately versed in drawing them out of stories or artwork. Far from it, actually. It is a testament to the transcendental qualities of truth and beauty that such aesthetically dead consumers are capable of recognizing these things at all.
Now, again, how might any of this be relevant to a discussion on AI-generated imagery, much less the demonic? The answer is this: background. Demons are willing and able to prey on every single person who ever lived and who ever will. The devil even tried to tempt Our Lord, brazen and stupid as it was. They tempt and confuse, manipulate, lie. They do whatever they can to distract or divert a soul’s attention from God. How this might be benefited by a culture whose sense of aesthetics and understanding of meaning have become totally unmoored should be obvious. If a man can’t tell what makes something beautiful, it’s much easier to get him to convince himself that he’s wrong—or that it’s just a matter of opinion—when he sees works of genuine beauty. Likewise is it an easier task to preoccupy him with the banal and the uncanny, if not the outright disgusting, under the pretenses that some opinions consider it beautiful. The proliferation of ugliness is part of this distraction, especially when it’s done by those who do not even know that they do the work of the devil.
Superstition
Demons, according to most exorcists, require sin already manifest in a person in order to act on them. In other words, someone already has to be doing something wrong for a demon to then leverage that against their intellect. Paraphrasing the great Archbishop Fulton Sheen, the devil is the one to tell you it’s not a big deal as he leads you into temptation, and then the first to accuse you and declare there is no hope for you after you have fallen into sin. Certainly, demons will thrust upon the unwilling all sorts of evils, be they images that disrupt our prayer or seemingly random acts in the world that threaten our hope, but this is because they have already discerned where our wills are weakest. God lets them do it because the fight makes us more attentive to what it is that we need from Him, and as such, makes us ‘stronger’, in a certain sense of the word.
The threads explored so far are enough to suggest that demons can and will act on more gluttonous souls when the prevailing culture takes this gluttony for granted. Rather than extolling consumer media culture, it should be noted, ours is one runs on it as its life blood. Pornography and the preoccupation with lust is extolled as virtuous by certain elite-driven pockets of our world, but media consumption is never talked about. It’s even more fundamental to the operation of this machine, because it is by this media consumption that the overstimulated, brain-fried addicts are able to get their fixes.
This is not enough to explain whether AI imagery presents any greater danger of the preternatural than watching an unpleasant horror movie. This is where superstition comes into play. Superstition simply means that one seriously believes in something that isn’t real. Unjustified belief doesn’t really cut it as a definition, because one’s belief in real things can be unjustified and yet still be appropriate, even if not as appropriate as it should be. But belief in what is not real is always unjustified.
The exact limits of this definition naturally entail certain epistemological issues that are beyond the limits of this piece. Suffice it to say that believing demons exist is no more superstitious than belief in the Real Presence in the Eucharist, and the grounds for this claim lay in the reasonable considerations of one’s adherence to the Faith. Arguments to the contrary here regarding favoritism, in that one’s belief in, say, Real Presence are only sensible if one is Catholic, reduce to arguments that favor comparative approaches to religion; these, however, are never sufficient in addressing the truth claims put forward by these religions. This debate becomes eventually one about the reasonableness of the claims put forward by the Church in her defense, and those have stood the test of two millennia, while her strongest critics have but the novel fads of a few sporadic generations put together.
As such, there is and remains a distinction to be drawn between reasonable and unreasonable belief in the supernatural. The former constitutes the Faith, properly ordered, and is granted to us by the grace of God. The latter is superstition, drawn up from within ourselves, projected outward, and a product of pure will. With this defined, another question naturally arises: if superstition is, in effect, mistaken or misplaced belief, of what injury is it to the one who is superstitious? We can easily deduce its sinful aspect, due to its relationship with the Second Commandment (against idolatry), as it is the mis-ordering of reverence that belongs to God toward some other thing. But even with that said, one cannot bring into existence something that does not exist simply by believing in it hard enough.
There are traditions in other cultures that discuss the formation of spirits according to the mind’s ability to conjure them up from imagination. Easy examples include the superstition that urban legends can become real if enough people believe in them. If this sounds like the plot to a supernatural comic book, that’s because it is—several, in fact. But where twentieth century pop psychology about archetypes and the collective unconscious meets the folklore of contemporary society, some element of the truth about the supernatural should be acknowledged.
It goes without saying that human beings aren’t capable of conjuring up something out of nothing. As was just considered: belief in something that doesn’t exist will not make it real. We’re creative, of course, in the sense that we can reshape real things into other real things by adding to them what we can imagine with our intellects and execute with our wills. But the creation of wills remains the privilege of God alone. Nonetheless, because of the freedom of our own wills, misdirected attention can result, by God’s permission, places for the demonic to hide and thrive. This is what makes superstition so dangerous, and why the highest commandments of the ten given to Moses concerned the memory of God and the rejection of idolatry.
Idolatry functions in just such a way. A man misattributes, whether by mistake or by his own preference, Godlike attributes to a worldly creation. Maybe it’s a statue that he or an ancestor of his fashioned out of stone, or perhaps it’s something more abstract, such as wealth or power. He disorders himself by paying the attention of worship toward it rather than toward God, and he disorders the world by applying his creative powers in the wrong way and toward the wrong object. It is not simply that idols are fake which causes this disorder. Rather, by inventing this false worship, but genuinely believing it—insofar as he can believe it—he opens a door to the preternatural which he then hasn’t the power to close. The demonic is more than accommodating in this regard: if you believe something is real when it isn’t, you are asking something that is real to fool you. A false god might not actually exist, but a demon wearing its disguise in order to mislead and humiliate you certainly could.
All superstition follows this same basic principle. In modern day, idolatry has become hidden behind disordered priorities, and so we hear of making idols out of things we take for granted in every day life: money, food, sex, et cetera. But superstition has moved away from simple idolatry, for most of us, into the realm disordered belief. It becomes a distinct danger when we consider complicated systems sufficiently abstracted from common understanding. This isn’t to say we’re being superstitious when we acknowledge that we haven’t the slightest idea how a computer actually functions, despite reading about how CPUs, RAM, graphics cards and mother boards all apparently work together. But there is a superstition in attributing to the computer a will of its own.
Of Ghosts and Machines
How this applies to AI is obvious, as the presumption of an artificial intellect is itself a modern arrogance. AI is a collection of algorithms, some of which are highly sophisticated and to a degree, self-altering and thus capable of adaptation and ‘learning’, in a colloquial sense. As modern secularism has dispensed with any effort to coherently understand the soul—even going so far as to deny it exists, under certain belief systems—the reduction of man to automaton meant that man was reproducible with spare parts: first with Frankenstein’s monster, and then, as the industrial revolution introduced mass production, with gears and machinery. The Space Age brought us Hal 2000. The last days of the cold war gave us the Terminator and SkyNet.
It’s important to note that the mistaken belief in a truly intelligent or human-like ‘ensouled’ machine is not the result of elevating human ingenuity to the status of a creator-god. It is born from an extreme pessimism and disdain for the human soul, to the point of seeking its erasure. Those who claim optimism in a bright future with sentient AI are those most dulled to defining what human existence and agency are. Worse still are the AI abiogenesis fears, Ghost in the Shell turning real life, assuming that with enough data transactions and the right mix of algorithms, sentience would just erupt unprompted into being: the Promethean spirit of a cybernetic Doctor Frankenstein replaced with an accident of machine learning. All of this makes for appropriate science fiction, but that’s all it is.
The question is whether or not there is truly a sentience behind it all, and if there is, where it came from. To answer the second part first, there’s only one place it could have come from. It was given a space to occupy according to superstition, carved into the world by the presumption that such a feat was possible at all. Like the pagans of antiquity, an idol was fashioned: in this case, a machine, and then presumptions of agency and intelligence were attributed to it. A house was built and then its builders simply assumed that it was occupied. That this was not built for a specific deity, but rather as a reflection of the scientific modern’s own ego, is both irrelevant and yet totally appropriate considering modernity’s trend across the arts and architecture. But even if it was the simulacra of a house, something built as a testament to himself, and even if no overt ode to idolatrous worship could be found without the bleak trappings of irony, a house was nonetheless erected. It should be no surprise if someone finds that a squatter has moved in.
Conclusion
AI does give the demonic a space to operate, but it will operate with the most enthusiasm against those most superstitious of it. It must always be treated as a machine, if it is to be used at all. Is there a danger of the demonic even here, however? It’s hard to say. On the one hand, yes, due to how AI imagery is already being used. In the case of the Twitter thread alluded to at the beginning, a user played around with horror imagery—itself probably something to be avoided, generally speaking—and gave a name to a pattern that emerged in his amusement. Now it probably won’t leave him alone.
On the other hand, AI-assisted image creation comes across as innocuous enough. Like most sophisticated tools, there tends to be a greater importance placed on how it is used over what exactly it is. An algorithm isn’t a crystal ball or an Ouija board, both of which are expressly concerned with divination. It’s not even a Tarot deck, which used to be a game that got out of hand. It’s just a certain kind of machine. And if you’re the type to compare circuit boards to magic sigils, there’s a chance you might also be interested in a bridge for sale in Brooklyn.
The greater question is how this talk of the demonic affects machine learning in general, and the algorithms that govern big data management and the infrastructure of the internet. These things manage what information we see, what sites we use, and how we interact with the data we allegedly have access to. They also manage our finances, from our personal credit statements to the systems that govern market tracking, predictions, and the timing of sales. The rabbit hole of Big Data’s sheer scale is nightmarish in scope and, for the most part, inescapable. That there are demons working here is practically a given, but where and how exactly is not always easy to say.
Most importantly, any time the demonic is invoked as a scapegoat, it must be done so reasonably and according to the proper order. Demons have certain interests in mind, they aren’t just scary creatures that make us wince if we see them. They behave in certain ways. And, more importantly, they’re smarter than we are. Sometimes what we’re dealing with is, in fact, demonic. Sometimes it’s just the product of a deranged or wayfaring fantasy. Sometimes it’s the result of stupidity, or simply some sin projected outward by another stranger.
We must remember what the preturnatural’s end game is. It is not simply to reveal to us ugly things. It is to make us renounce what has been given to us as a gift. It is to choose Hell over Salvation. They do not like us. They do not want us with them. But they would rather we be in Hell, with them, at the end of time, than in Heaven. Any soul that chooses Hell over Beatific Vision is a victory for those who prey upon us.
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