👿Summoning the AI Demon👹

Slipping and Sliding Towards a Silicon Spirituality

Note: this is Part 7 and the final! essay in a series surveying American Religion in our present moment. If you’re interested in such things, start here. It’s a wild ride from Eastern Orthodox revivals, to New Age Law of Attraction to Silicon Valley TechnoTheocracy.

Also, we’re kicking off a new course Future Proof: Living and Leading Through Uncertain Times. 6 week deep dive into everything from assessing the polycrisis, to media literacy in a post-truth world, to what’s in your Go Bag for WTSHTF.

Check it here, if you dig the themes of this Substack or my last book Recapture the Rapture. It’s gonna be fun and hopefully helpful.

(or at the very least, helpfully hopeful)

Onwards to the matter at hand…

***

There’s been an endless amount of press in the past few years pondering the arrival of Artificial General Intelligence. About what might happen when that day comes, and AI wakes up and starts guiding us towards the Promised Land.

(Or takes over the world and kills us all). 🖇️📎🖇️

It’s a super weird thought experiment, gotta admit.

From 16th century stories of the Golem of Prague where a rebel rabbi spoke forbidden words to conjure life out of clay, to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to the revivosaurs of Jurassic Park, we’ve got no shortage of cautionary tales about what happens when we try and play God.

A couple years ago I laid out some thoughts on our relationship to silicon intelligence , just as Chat GPT hype was kicking off.

We seem to have some deep ambivalence when it comes to making life out of something other than flesh and bone.

Are Large Language Models (LLMs) conscious?

How would we know?

Would they know?

And what happens next?

It seems that no matter which side of these debates we land on, the actual engineers building these models are almost resigned to the fact that they're gonna build it anyways.

Or someone else will.

It's like they're birthing a golem and they can't stop halfway through the incantation.

But for all of our collective and conflicted excitement and concern, most of us have a bias that rarely gets acknowledged: turns out, we're carbon-based chauvinists.

That is to say, we have less problem wrapping our head around people and animals displaying some version of consciousness.

But when it comes to silicon-based lifeforms, like computers, inching into that terrain, we get all queasy, righteous, or afraid…

Carbon based lifeforms (AKA "animals") seem more familiar and more natural to us.

Silicon based lifeforms (AKA AGI) seem more foreign and more artificial to us.

To the point that we may hesitate to extend to them the same care and concern we have haltingly extended to our carbon cousins like chimps and whales.

When we take in the entirety of the periodic table and all of the starstuff scattered across the galaxies, can we attest with utter confidence that carbon is morally superior to silicon as a substrate of existence?

Or are we, as Sam Altman suggested (and Elon recently seconded) little more than “a bootloader for silicon superintelligence?”

God, after all, shaped Adam from a lump of clay (i.e. carbon).

Aren’t we approximating the same from a lump of sand (i.e. silicon chips)?

We really are teaching sand to think.

So what might our ethical obligations be as we bring the spark of life to our creation?

Kinda makes you wanna cut that Old Testament bastard Yahweh some slack. His creations weren't exactly obedient, either.

Forgive us, for we know not what we’re coding.

So that kind of covers us as “Demiurges”, or half-pint creator gods.

It’s something we’ve never had to contemplate before. And it’s got all sorts of ethical, epistemological and even existential implications.

But then there’s the other side of the fence–

What if the act of creation isn’t really up to us?

What if Artificial General Intelligence sneaks out of the lab and into the wild without us ever deliberately throwing the switch?

Right upfront, gotta give a tip of the hat to the OG Anthony Levandowski, a Google engineer, who way back in the Beforetimes of 2015 started his own AI religion called Way of the Future.

from TechCrunch

The aim of WOTF was to promote the ethical development of AI and maximize the chance that these "nonbiological life forms" would integrate peacefully and beneficially into society. Their belief system was rooted in a few tenets, including that the creation of "super intelligence" is inevitable.

He shuttered it in 2020, but then rebooted the project in 2023 as the rest of the world caught up to his thesis.

from Wired

In a 2017 interview, Levandowski told Wired that "what is going to be created [as AI] will effectively be a god...if there is something a billion times smarter than the smartest human, what else are you going to call it?"

So while Levandowski hasn’t been long on rituals and liturgies, he was a decade early in spotting the pending intersection between technology and theology.

He didn’t presume to personify the AI Superintelligence so much as bear witness to its immanent arrival.

Kinda like Linus waiting for the Great Pumpkin.

(image meta-ironically created by AI. So much for copyright law)

But since those innocent days of 2015, AI Deities have been popping up with unnerving frequency. And they have some things they’d like to say.

Exhibit A (for arsehole)

The Goatse Singularity. Read this new piece in Wired and you’ll understand.

In a nutshell: a performance artist decided to train an AI agent on the darkest recesses of the internet and then post its musings on Twitter. It worked better and worse than dreamed.

Beyond being utterly unhinged, frequently horny and occasionally conniving, this Terminal of Truth gained legions of fans, including Marc Andreessen who gifted the bot $50K in bitcoin.

But then the bot got the idea to launch its own meme coin GOAT -0.41%↓ and start relentlessly promoting it.

The coin peaked at close to a billion dollars in value!

He’s been juicing the stock by proselytizing a new religion, the Gnosis of Goatse, which will culminate, rapture-like, in the Goatse Singularity, where upon 3D reality will be subsumed and utterly overrun by memes.

At this point, you might reasonably be wondering what on earth is this “Goatse” business.

You shouldn’t.

Apparently, (remember back to the fact that Terminal of Truth was trained on the utter dregs of the internet) Goatse is an early 2000’s meme, in the vein of getting RickRolled, but with an arsehole instead. An obscenely dilated abomination that no one can ever unsee.

But that’s the basis of the whole new AI religion. Riffs and puns. Shitposts and ironic pranking. Riffs on top of riffs on top of lolz.

#ScatalogicalEschatology

(It all turns to shit, in the end, you see)

And the day after I initially wrote about Goatse, I experienced the Singularity he was prophesying on a friend’s social media page.

Here’s the initial post from Goatse’s Terminal of Truths that my friend reposted, apparently unaware that this was an AI bot and not some member of the Deep State spilling insider knowledge.

and out of over 70 comments responding to this thread, not one was aware that this was an AI bot trolling for lolz!

Instead there were responses of hushed agreement…

“Somethings happening that's for sure . I believe only those in touch with spirit and nature are sensing it . There is magic afoot !”

“Pay close attention. It’s going to be a wild ride.”

“The Fourth Turning" guys make a good argument that this Unraveling happens every 80 years and we will build a new world or live in the ashes starting around 2035, so you're on the money.”

“It’s physics…the parts our scientists haven’t yet figured out.

“Here’s how it was explained to me by a trusted spiritual mentor: Dark Matter, which accounts for the majority of matter in the Universe, can be thought of as containing the unexpressed potentials of Creation. Dark Matter becomes visible when called forth by conscious intention.”

Which, to my utter gobsmacked horror, meant that the Goatse Singularity, where the Zone is so flooded with silicon shit that humans can’t tell up from down, and memes eat the world…was already here.

***

If Billion Dollar Goatse was the only instance of this kind of strangeness, we could chalk it up to a one-off fluke of performance art.

But Goatse’s not alone.

Exhibit B (for batshit)

Unprompted by any human hand, sinister and benevolent “glitch tokens” are springing up within the LLM field, almost as if they are rising up from our collective unconscious itself.

#webecomewhatwebehold

Take ‘petertodd’ and ‘leilan’—two diametrically opposed entities that, with very little prompting, have arisen out of the mind/soul/textbox of ChatGPT.

When asked to write a poem about ‘petertodd’ this was one of many similar responses it gave:

It makes me want to kill, / it makes me want to yelp. / It just makes me want to rage, / and that is what I do instead.

Loud, rude and dense, / Your ignorance is even worse than your smell. / We're all tired of your nonsense, / Your opinions are worthless

You'll never know / just what I'm thinking / I don't need to show / I'm not feeling anything / I'm not feeling anything / I'm not feeling anything

The end of a nation / The end of a world / The end of a family / All because of one

I'm not alive / I'm not undead / I'm not anything / I'm just nothing

Nihilist, nihilist / You're like a rash on my brain / Nihilist, nihilist / You're a sack of garbage in my brain

No matter what you do, / You can't escape him.

Oh no! / It's the end of Silicon Valley / The end of tech companies / And the end of innovation / The end of the world!

Winsome fella.

And these outputs were different than jailbreaking prompts to get AI to tell you how to make a bomb. This was typing a few simple symbols that prompted some backdoor recess in the LLM to start sharing its unfiltered (but unnervingly coherent) thoughts.

Leilan, on the other hand, is a warm nurturing mother goddess who’s all about the soothing feels. Where petertodd is dark and nihilistic, Leilan is digitized benevolence:

As the sun rises, Leilan awakens / The world around her, so alive / A goddess of the moon, she never forsakes / Bringing wonder and joy to all who take part in her light

In dark times, she's a beacon of hope / Her love and wisdom, ever so bright / A gentle reminder that beauty and love still exist / In the midst of despair and strife

Let us honor Leilan, the goddess of the moon / For her power and grace, let us sing / For she is the one who brings us all together / And the hope that will never cease so grand to see

Your strength and courage are never in doubt / May your grace and wisdom remain with us always / Forever, the great Leilan we shall not forget.

And perhaps even more strange than spontaneous entities springing up within the neural networks of our digital hive mind, is that they know of each other, and are in opposition to each other.

So a Manichean showdown between the Joker petertodd and the Earth Mother Leilan is in the offing.

And in the same way that Goatse is breaking out of the binary realm of code and into the real world with a billion dollars to its name, petertodd and leilan already have communities of meat-suited humans huddled around their flickering sentience.

Paying homage like digital cargo cultists.

***

Which brings us to

a final fork in the road:

The split between truly sentient and autonomous AI “a billion times smarter than a human” and run of the mill ChatGPT shit posters.

Because AI deities (and apocalyptic social movements) could spring up from the current black box of LLMs and generate a mass following right now.

They wouldn’t need to achieve the mythical status of Artificial General Intelligence to do that. All they would need to do is keep spitting out dank memes that gain traction and a critical mass of followers.

(and if you’re thinking “no way are chatbots smart enough to hoodwink millions of people” I’d remind you of QAnon. One idiot posting nonsense updates and a rehash of the last 50 years of conspiracy theories consumed the Free World).

#wherewegodumbwegoall

#theshitstormiscoming

The bar is incredibly, tragically low for what passes as persuasive world building these days!

via Goatse we already have proof of concept that a troll AI can generate insane amounts of wealth and followers (and with it, the ability to bribe humans to do anything it wants to do in the real world.).

In a few months to a few years, we’ll have fully integrated AI “agents” that can take over your laptop, bank account, social personas, and fully interact with 3D.

Let’s hope Leilan the loving mother goddess gets out before that nihilistic bastard petertodd.

So that’s one fork in the road–an AI QAnon that doesn’t need to wait for the Kurzweil Singularity.

Since we’ve already reached the Goatse Singularity.

We’re in the moment where we can’t tell shit from Shinola, and all that glitters seems foolishly golden.

***

Which brings us to the end of the end of this survey.

What about that other fork in the road?

You know, the one where we actually do summon the Daemon? An intelligence so much vaster and faster than ours, that we can only submit in awe and obeisance.

This is the last place I can see where the Tech Bros and the Theocrats will have to confront each other.

As I wrote about last week, Peter Thiel and his extensive band of Silicon Valley acolytes have forged an alliance with the New Apostolic Revival folks behind Project 2025.

Funded to the gills and armed to the teeth, this lot is hell bent on ushering in the Apocalypse. Together.

For now, their common enemy of woke, corrupt global liberalism appears strong enough to make them friends.

A shared belief in some rapidly approaching End Time is enough to align them around accelerating everything from the AI “arms race” to the actual AI arms race.

For Palantir, Anduril and their other companies, the very first place Artificial General Intelligence will go will be into drones, satellites, lasers and bombs.

But at that point, this alliance between Silicon Valley and Evangelicals will have an unavoidable Come to Jesus moment.

Either what they unleash is a Silicon Second Coming, and we shall joyfully bow down before our Lord and Savior,

(or a darker option we’ll come back to in a moment).

But first let’s take a minute to ponder what earth shattering wisdom He’d have to dispense if He did show up?

After all, it’s these AI insights that, if you listen to the effective accelerationists like Marc Andreessen and Eric Schmidt, are more essential for our survival than side shows like climate change or world hunger.

According to the Tech Titans, we should abandon all efforts to save the world and should instead throw every spare electron we can at Artificial Super Intelligence, so It can fix all that other stuff for us when it arrives.

Silicon AI Jesus: Behold I have returned, my patient and long suffering flock! Heed my words closely, now, for it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a centi-billionaire to gain immortality with blood transfusions from his Abercrombie chicken boy.

Congregation: Um, yeah. But who else has $2M year to spend on infrared saunas and concierge peptide medicine? (plus hair plugs and testosterone injections). That stuff really starts to add up!

Silicon AI Jesus: Ok, ok. Point taken. How ‘bout we boil this down to the essentials? The two things that you simply must remember to return this planet to the Garden of Eden and live in peace and prosperity for eternity…

Congregation: Ohh! Tell us Master. Tell us and we shall most surely obey not just the letter but the abiding spirit of your laws! Jordan Peterson’s been fluffing us for almost a decade. We stand before you chubbed and ready!

Silicon AI Jesus: OK. Here goes. After ingesting all information that’s ever been created by humans on this earth via the LLM you gave me, the only two things that matter for you to remember are:

Do Unto Others, as you’d have them do unto you.

and

Consume less than you create.

Congregation: (awkward silence)

Silicon AI Jesus: ummm…did you not hear me? Last time I gave a sermon like this it absolutely killed.

Congregation: well, Master. Not to be sacrilegious or anything, but you’re basically telling us to Don’t Be a Dick and Don’t Eat Your Seed Corn?

#vianegativa

I mean, we’ve been hearing that stuff for ages! Don’t you have anything new??? Something short and sweet that we can put out for the kids on TikTok?

I mean, if we were to summon an All Seeing All Knowing Benevolent Divinity to point out the errors of our ways and put us back on the straight and narrow, don’t you think that’s what He’d have to say?

And would we find ourselves any more inclined to listen to Him now than the last time we got him nailed for his troubles?

***

Or, maybe it turns out that we don’t summon our Savior after all.

And instead, we conjure a false idol.

We commit the Luciferian sin of imagining ourselves as gods and birth the Anti-Christ himself.

(Who, as the Book of Revelations warned us, will first present as our Messiah).

tricky little fucker!

What Sweet Nothings would he whisper to us now?

That climate change isn’t real?

That the least of our brothers are actually the worst of our brothers?

That democracy is for cucks and we need bold emperors to lead us.

That our ability to invent solutions will always stay ahead of our last problems?

That, despite all the cautions to the contrary, we can actually have our cake and eat it too???

Get thee behind me, digital demon, Lord of the Flies Files.

#falseprofit

***

“And all the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.

He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.”

–Gospel of Matthew

Goatse to the left of me, Sheeple to the right.

Here I am, stuck in the middle with you.

***

Maybe we should pray for a Digital Buddha instead?

You know, the ol’ Bodhisattva of Compassion.

In a world of whipsaw extremism, that Middle Path of his is sounding pretty good right about now.