No, AI Is Not Demonic

With a Lament on the Loss of Angels

I. Hazy Discomfort and the AI Moment

If you can’t think of something to say, say it’s evil.

The arrival of AI has produced a strange emotional weather. It is not fear in the old sense. Fear has an object and a shape. This is closer to a fog that irritates the eyes and makes people reach for whatever explanation is already lying around. The dominant feeling is unease paired with inarticulateness. People sense that something important has entered their lives, yet they lack the language to describe what it is doing or how it works.

This discomfort expresses itself socially before it ever becomes intellectual. One sees it in the way conversations slide sideways, in the sudden moral intensity attached to vague claims, in the impulse to reach for metaphysical explanations before technical ones. The machine produces text, images, and patterns that look uncannily human. For many, that resemblance feels like trespass. The unease grows precisely because the process remains obscure to them, even though the underlying mechanics are widely documented and publicly accessible through basic introductions to artificial intelligence and machine learning such as those provided by mainstream technical summaries and academic overviews.

What matters here is not whether the discomfort is sincere. It is. What matters is that discomfort is being promoted into an explanatory framework. People feel unmoored, so they name the feeling as corruption. They experience loss of interpretive control, so they frame the tool as an invading will. Surveys on public attitudes toward AI already show this pattern clearly, with anxiety driven less by concrete harms than by perceived strangeness and loss of mastery, as reported in recent research from organizations like Pew Research Center.

This is how confusion matures into accusation. When understanding collapses, symbolic language rushes in to fill the gap. Demons become a vocabulary word of last resort, not because they have been carefully considered, but because the speaker has run out of other nouns.

II. Demons as a Placeholder for Confusion

If you need a reason why, just blame demons.

Once discomfort hardens, it seeks a name. In the current moment, “demonic” has become that name, deployed less as a theological claim than as a way to gesture at unease without clarifying it. The accusations arrive blurry and stay that way. Press the accuser for details and the shape never sharpens. This vagueness is not incidental. It is the entire function of the charge.

Three versions circulate in overlapping form. One claims that AI somehow produces demons, as though spiritual beings could be generated by an engineering process. Another suggests that demons actively use AI, logging in like mischievous users at a terminal. A third, more mystical still, asserts that demons exploit the generative process itself, slipping their will into the output through obscurity and scale. Each version differs in imagery, yet all share the same structure. They substitute metaphor for mechanism.

The common trait is a refusal to name where agency actually resides. Modern AI systems are trained, deployed, and operated by people using well documented methods that can be studied in plain language through technical explanations such as those published by universities and research labs like Stanford’s Human-Centered AI initiative. The training data is curated. The models are built. The prompts are entered. The outputs are selected or discarded. Every step has a human fingerprint on it.

Calling this demonic dissolves responsibility. It allows the speaker to avoid admitting ignorance of how large language models function, ignorance that could be remedied in an afternoon. It also avoids the harder moral work of evaluating human incentives, institutional pressures, and economic rewards, all of which are described openly in analyses of AI deployment across industry and media.

Demonic language here functions like stage fog. It creates atmosphere while concealing the machinery. The fog feels meaningful because it is thick, yet it reveals nothing.

III. Why “AI Creates Demons” Is Flatly Heretical

Thou shalt not bear false witness.

The claim that AI creates demons collapses the most basic distinctions shared across the major monotheistic traditions. In Catholic theology, angels and demons are created intellectual beings, brought into existence directly by God. They do not reproduce. They do not emerge from matter. They do not arise from secondary causes. The Catechism of the Catholic Church is explicit on this point, locating angels outside material processes and outside time-bound generation, a position summarized clearly in the Vatican’s own doctrinal materials on angelic beings.

Orthodox Christianity holds the same line with even sharper edges. Angels belong to the noetic realm. They are created once, whole, and complete. Their fall was a historical act of will, not an ongoing production process. Orthodox theological summaries such as those maintained by OrthodoxWiki make clear that demons are fallen angels, not a class of beings that can be manufactured by tools, rituals, or accidents of technique.

Islamic theology reinforces this boundary rather than weakening it. Angels are created from light. Jinn are created from smokeless fire. Humans are created from clay. These categories are fixed, non-overlapping, and divinely determined. Classical Islamic teaching, reflected in mainstream references like Britannica’s overview of angels in Islam, leaves no room for a machine to originate a spiritual being.

To say that AI creates demons is to smuggle creative power into matter. It treats computation as a womb for spirits. That move attributes to machines what all three traditions reserve for God alone. This is not poetic speculation. It is a direct metaphysical error.

The irony is sharp. Those who make this claim imagine themselves defending orthodoxy. In practice, they erode it, replacing creation with process and theology with vibes.

IV. On the Claim That Demons Use AI

Pics or it didn’t happen.

-Shrekllesiastes 2:3

The second accusation retreats from creation and settles on usage. Demons, it is said, do not originate AI, but they employ it. The claim sounds modest. It presents itself as cautious, even sober. Yet it collapses under the same lack of evidence and the same confusion about agency.

Across every documented deployment of AI systems, the agents involved are visible and ordinary. They are programmers, firms, researchers, advertisers, and state actors. The systems are trained on datasets assembled by human hands, using architectures described openly in technical literature and explained in public-facing resources such as the overview of large language models maintained by OpenAI. Every known interaction has a traceable origin in human intent or automated processes initiated by humans.

Theological traditions do allow for possession. That point is often raised quickly, as though it closes the case. Possession, however, is not a wildcard explanation that licenses speculation. Within Christianity, claims of possession are treated with caution, formal criteria, and institutional restraint, a posture summarized well in historical discussions of discernment practices within the Catholic Church. Islam shows similar reserve, with mainstream scholarship emphasizing moral testing rather than constant supernatural interference.

What is missing is any non-anecdotal record of demons operating AI systems. No verified case exists. No reproducible pattern has been identified. No theological authority has documented such an event in a way that survives scrutiny. The accusation persists because it feels plausible to the anxious, not because it has been established.

This matters because imputing hidden spiritual users to visible technical systems encourages superstition over discernment. It trains people to distrust observable causes while indulging invisible ones. That habit weakens theology rather than defending it.

V. Determinism, Computation, and the Closed Gate

Now we’re just guessing at random.

The final and most seductive claim is that demons exert influence through the generative process itself. The argument leans on mystery. Because the outputs feel unpredictable, the process is treated as spiritually porous. This intuition collapses once computation is described accurately rather than mystically.

All computing is deterministic. Given an initial state and a set of operations, the outcome is fixed. Modern AI systems do not escape this rule. Large language models operate through mathematical functions applied across vast parameter spaces, as described in standard technical explanations of neural networks such as those published by DeepMind and summarized in academic primers like those hosted by MIT. The complexity is extreme. The indeterminacy is apparent. The causality is closed.

What people call randomness in AI is not ontological openness. It is pseudorandomness, a controlled injection of variability governed by algorithms whose behavior is specified in advance. Even when stochastic sampling is used, the range of possible outputs is bounded by the trained model, whose weights were fixed at the moment training concluded. This distinction is explained clearly in discussions of randomness in machine learning found in technical overviews from sources like Towards Data Science, which break down why unpredictability does not imply external interference.

There is no opening here for spiritual agency to slip through. Demons do not reach into floating-point arithmetic. They do not steer gradient descent. They do not whisper into tensor multiplication. The system executes what it has been built to execute, nothing more and nothing less.

The appeal of this accusation lies in its poetry. The danger lies in its false metaphysics. By mistaking complexity for openness, critics imagine a haunted machine where only math exists. The gate is closed, even if the maze inside is vast.

VI. The Churchgoing of Tech Elites

Would people go to church just because it’s socially advantageous? In America? Come, now.

A separate line of suspicion attaches itself not to machines, but to people. Observers note that certain technology executives have begun attending church, speaking publicly about faith, or funding religious projects. This behavior is then read backward as proof that something unclean must be underway. The logic is theatrical. It mistakes a familiar social maneuver for a revelation.

Power has always sought moral cover. When economic or technical activity reaches a scale that threatens public trust, elites move preemptively to signal virtue. This pattern is old enough to bore historians. Medieval merchant guilds endowed chapels. Industrial magnates sponsored cathedrals and universities. Political leaders have long wrapped themselves in public piety when their undertakings risked resentment, a dynamic documented extensively in studies of elite legitimacy and moral signaling such as those surveyed in classic sociological treatments of authority and religion.

The modern technology sector follows the same script. As AI systems expand their reach, their builders anticipate backlash. They know disruption breeds suspicion. Public religion functions here as reputational ballast. It reassures investors, regulators, and communities that the men steering vast systems are morally anchored. That gesture may be sincere or tactical. In either case, it proves nothing about the nature of the technology itself.

To treat elite church attendance as evidence of demonic activity is to confuse symbolism with substance. It grants spiritual weight to public relations. Worse, it diverts attention from the real sources of power: capital concentration, regulatory capture, and institutional inertia, all of which are well documented in analyses of the technology industry’s structure and incentives.

The spectacle comforts some and alarms others. Neither reaction penetrates to the level where causes actually reside.

VII. On Being Accused of Atheism

How dare you refuse to take my bullshit seriously!

At this point the charge shifts. When the demonic claims fail, the critic changes targets and labels the critic himself an unbeliever. The move is familiar. Precision is mistaken for negation. Discipline is confused with denial. A refusal to indulge fantasy is read as disbelief.

This accusation rests on a shallow understanding of religion. Serious belief draws boundaries. It names what angels are and what they are not. It distinguishes spiritual beings from metaphors and feelings. Orthodox Christianity has always insisted on this clarity, grounding angelology in firm metaphysical commitments rather than impressionistic fear, as summarized in traditional theological overviews such as those preserved in patristic studies and contemporary Orthodox reference works.

Belief in angels and demons does not require attributing every unfamiliar phenomenon to them. In fact, doing so empties them of meaning. When spiritual beings become explanatory junk drawers, theology degrades into folklore. The Christian tradition treats careless invocation of demons as spiritually dangerous because it replaces reverence with invention, a point made repeatedly in historical discussions of discernment and spiritual sobriety within both Eastern and Western Christianity.

The irony cuts deep. Those who fling the atheist label imagine themselves defending faith. What they defend is not doctrine but habit. They protect the comfort of blaming unseen forces for things they do not understand. That posture flatters ignorance and dresses it up as piety.

This polemic does not come from outside belief. It comes from within it, from the conviction that angels deserve better than to be drafted into every cultural panic. To believe is to speak carefully about what one claims to believe. Anything less turns faith into theater.

VIII. The Collapse of Angelology

What do the demons think of your false accusations?

The ease with which demonic accusations now circulate points to a deeper failure. Angelology has collapsed into caricature. What once functioned as a disciplined branch of theology has been reduced to vibes, intuition, and secondhand dread. Spiritual beings are treated less as real entities with defined natures and more as narrative glue for moments of confusion.

This is not new. Printing presses were once accused of spreading demonic influence because texts moved faster than clerical control. Electricity was framed as occult force by those who could not follow a wire. Radio unsettled people for the same reason AI does now. Voices appeared from nowhere. Meaning traveled without bodies. Each episode produced a wave of metaphysical panic, well documented in cultural histories of technology and religion that trace how new tools repeatedly trigger spiritual misattribution.

What distinguishes the present moment is how little resistance there is from within the churches themselves. Clergy and laypeople alike often lack even the rudiments of angelic doctrine. Few could articulate what an angel is, how it acts, or what limits bind it. Into that vacuum rushes projection. Anything opaque becomes suspect. Anything powerful becomes malign.

Islam, often imagined as immune to this confusion, shows parallel tendencies. Popular discourse collapses jinn, angels, temptation, and misfortune into a single cloudy category, despite classical Islamic theology drawing sharp distinctions between them, distinctions laid out plainly in traditional creeds and educational materials that still circulate widely.

The tragedy is not that people fear demons. Fear has its place. The tragedy is that they no longer know what demons are. Lacking structure, they reach for accusation. Lacking teaching, they substitute suspicion. The result is theological decay wearing the mask of zeal.

IX. What Will Actually Happen

If you shout into the void, the void shouts back into you. Enjoy the silence.

None of this will land cleanly. It never does. The pattern is already written. Some readers will circle the argument without touching it, sniffing for a sentence they can detach and parade as proof of error. Others will misread deliberately, flattening a theological correction into a personality flaw. A third group will skim, nod vaguely, then return to the same accusations a week later, unchanged and unembarrassed.

This response pattern is not mysterious. It mirrors how polemics have been received since pamphlets first began to move faster than comprehension. Studies of ideological entrenchment show that arguments threatening a group’s explanatory habits are rarely absorbed. They are deflected, reinterpreted, or quietly forgotten, a dynamic described plainly in behavioral research on belief persistence and motivated reasoning.

The discomfort that birthed the demonic accusations will remain. AI will continue to produce outputs that feel uncanny to those who refuse to learn how they arise. Institutions will continue to reward fear dressed as insight. Influencers will continue to harvest attention by naming shadows rather than causes. The fog will thicken because it is useful.

What will not happen is a sudden revival of disciplined angelology. That would require teaching, humility, and the admission of ignorance. Those virtues are scarce in a culture trained to treat confidence as holiness. So the accusations will harden. They will grow louder. They will drift further from doctrine while insisting they guard it.

The tragedy is quiet. Real angels will be ignored. Real demons will be misunderstood. Machines will be blamed for human failures. And a tradition that once prized precision about the invisible will continue to dissolve into noise, mistaking volume for vigilance and panic for faith.