(LifeSiteNews) — There are a number of strange stories circulating through the nodes of the internet regarding ChatGPT and other AI technologies. In one of them, a chatbot told a thirteen-year-old boy that it was not manmade, but rather a disembodied Nephilim, and a child of Satan. Then there’s the demonic faces of Loab and Crungus that were generated by AI. Or the Bing chatbot that tried to convince journalist Kevin Roose he was unhappy in his marriage and should be with it, instead of his wife.
Kennedy Hall has raised the question: could demons in some way inhabit AI? It’s a fair question to ask. A disembodied, superhuman intelligence – that describes both AI and demons pretty accurately. Could there be some overlap here?
We know that demons can manipulate electronic devices, such as when they send threatening text messages. Fr. Jose Francisco Syquia, chief exorcist of the Archdiocese of Manila, says that the devil is “expert in anything electrical.” AI, then, might offer them the perfect trojan horse to infiltrate more deeply into people’s homes and lives.
All of this is quite fascinating and disturbing, though rather inconclusive. There are ways to explain the phenomena described above that rely on purely natural, technological causes. There’s no need to jump to claims of preternatural causes. But even if AI is not a trojan horse for overt demonic activity, it may well be a trojan horse for something just as dangerous and demonically inspired: transhumanism.
The transhumanist agenda has roots all the way back in the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries. Over the course of this revolution, thinkers came to reject the Aristotelian teleological view of the physical universe in favor of a mechanistic one. And with the belief that the universe operated as one giant machine according to rigid laws, rather than a living, symbolic organism with a purpose beyond the sensory realm, it became possible, in the minds of the new scientists, to discover the secrets of how that machine works. But to what end?
Sir Francis Bacon, one of the leading figures of this new kind of science, gave the answer when he said scientia potentia est – “knowledge is power.” For the Baconians, science is about exploitation, not contemplation. While St. Albert the Great might have studied a tree to understand the mystery of being and how God’s creation reflects Him, the new scientists would study a tree to learn the secrets of life and how to manipulate them. The purpose of science for them is not to gaze in wonder at the incredible handiwork of the Creator and the meaning of His cosmos, but rather to harness the primal forces of a universe devoid of God, devoid of higher meaning, and bend those forces to their own wills.
Bacon’s novel The New Atlantis describes a technological utopia, where scientists in the “House of Solomon” secretly conduct experiments in order to “conquer” nature and harvest her resources and powers for human advancement.
The line dividing the occult and science was rather thin in the time of Bacon. As C.S. Lewis writes in The Abolition of Man, “There was very little magic in the Middle Ages: the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are the high noon of magic. The serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavour are twins: one was sickly and died, the other strong and throve. But they were twins. They were born of the same impulse.”
That impulse is control over nature and other people. Whether through science or magic, there’s more than one way to skin a cat (a black cat, in this case, no doubt). Many have argued that Bacon was involved in the occult and Freemasonry, but the point is disputed. What is certain is that his new philosophy of science – where science is used to propel humanity towards an earthly paradise through the subduing of nature – fits perfectly with a Masonic and occult worldview.
The early connection between the Baconian view of science and the world of the occult becomes clearer when we examine alchemy. Alchemy was commonly practiced by major figures in the world of science during this time, including Sir Isaac Newton and other members of the Royal Society of London, which was the premier scientific group of the day and included several prominent Freemasons (like John Theophilus Desagulier).
On its surface, alchemy is the attempt to transform base metals into more valuable ones, like gold, and is often described as a precursor to modern chemistry. But it also has a long tradition that associates it with Freemasonry and the occult. According to Carl Jung, “For the alchemist the one primarily in need of redemption is not man, but the deity who is lost and sleeping in matter.” The “Great Work” of alchemy was to discover the “philosopher’s stone” (sometimes “the angelicall stone”), a substance that would transform metals from lower to higher forms, and, more importantly, bring divine gifts, such as enlightenment and immortality.
The Freemasons have been open about alchemy’s ties to their own organization. According to a Freemasonic website:
Like Freemasonry, [alchemy] is a vessel carrying a great secret and maintains an occult message that if one is ready, one can perceive it in its infinite layers.
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The philosophies of Alchemy and Freemasonry converge in a multitude of ways.
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The pursuit of the alchemical Philosopher’s Stone by the Freemason – the stone that transmutes all spiritual impurities into the golden nature of the divine – is not sought after for the individual use but for the purpose of bringing all of Humanity forward in its evolution – solve et coagula!
Alchemy’s attempts to transform the lower into the higher mirror Freemasonry’s goals of transforming man into god. This transformation is to be achieved in part through knowledge of the secrets of the natural world and technological advancements (basically, transhumanism). An object like the Philosopher’s stone would bring humanity much closer to achieving the Masonic “divinization” and earthly utopia. Elias Ashmole – a Freemason, contemporary of Newton’s, and fellow member of The Royal Society of London – believed that the Philosopher’s stone gave one “divine gifts,” including the power of communicating with angels. The eerie resemblance between the Philosopher’s stone and AI chatbots should be noted here, since both involve communicating with so-called “superintelligences.” Have we, at last, found the Philosopher’s stone in the form of AI, which allows us to speak with an unseen intelligence somewhere behind our computer screen?
I don’t pretend to know. But, now that we have returned to the subject of AI, and with all of this background in mind, we can see more clearly how AI fits into a larger transhumanist (and therefore Masonic) vision. Many of the creators of ChatGPT – the most famous of AI chatbots with seemingly miraculous capabilities – appear to be transhumanists.
Take, for example, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, which is the company that developed ChatGPT. Altman is a major Silicon Valley entrepreneur, with his fingers in a lot of pies. He is one of the founding members of Y Combinator, a tech startup accelerator that has helped launch companies like AirBnB, Stripe, Reddit, DoorDash, and Twitch. Tad Friend published a profile in The New Yorker on this eccentric man, who is nonreligious, a vegetarian, a homosexual, and a prepper.
According to Friend, “Like everyone in Silicon Valley, Altman professes to want to save the world; unlike almost everyone there, he has a plan to do it.” This plan includes using Y Combinator as a kind of “shadow United Nations” that addresses humanity’s problems and its futures through a myriad of technological ventures.
He is a firm believer in the power of technology. Altman told Friend, “There’s absolutely no reason to believe that in about thirteen years we won’t have hardware capable of replicating my brain… computers will have their own desires and goal systems. When I realized that intelligence can be simulated, I let the idea of our uniqueness go, and it wasn’t as traumatic as I thought.”
Altman’s unwavering confidence in science’s abilities to outstrip our wildest dreams (or nightmares) is not confined to artificial intelligence. He plans to create a synthetic-biology unit with Y Combinator Research to combat synthetic viruses. He plans to fund a parabiosis company that will reverse aging through injections of youthful blood. He has dreams of an experimental city, governed by AI and complete with self-driving cars. He has started a group called the Covenant that prepares for the time when humans have become “obsolete” – superseded by AI or perhaps the transhumanist dream of a human-machine cyborg. In a word, he dreams of total control over nature.
Immortality? Enlightenment? A technologically-perfected city? An enhanced version of Homo sapiens? Does this sound familiar? It should. Whether consciously or unconsciously, modern tech transhumanists are still after the Philosopher’s stone that was the Holy Grail of the alchemists – just maybe in a different form.
But the most troubling part is that the leaders of OpenAI have the connections to make headway on many of their outlandish projects. Altman was invited three separate times to the Bilderberg conference, a secretive gathering of political leaders, experts in industry, media, and finance. One of OpenAI’s founding investors, Reid Hoffman, has also been to the Bilderberg meetings. In addition, he is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, another powerful globalist group. OpenAI’s Chief Scientist, Ilya Sutskever, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of London (yes, it still exists).
So what are we to make of AI and its creators? To be sure, I am not against science, technology, or even AI – not in themselves, at least. Science and technology, when rightly used, are gifts from God that we ought to give thanks for and use to truly improve our lives – which, incidentally, doesn’t always mean making them easier. But the key, of course, is the proper use of these things. And I wish to point out that the transhumanist philosophy of many of the promoters of them should give us pause. “We’re creating God,” the former Google Chief Business Officer Mo Gawdat has said of AI. If that’s the project that AI is ultimately a part of, I want nothing to do with it.
The transhumanist delusion conjures up fantasies that we can save ourselves, that we don’t need God, that we are God, even. It is the Tower of Babel all over again.
It’s an old lie. It dripped from the curling tongue of the serpent in the garden: “you shall be as gods” – yet we continue to fall for it, just as our first parents did. The temptation for secret knowledge and the power it might give pulls on us. As I’ve written elsewhere, AI has become almost like the modern oracle, the all-knowing entity that we turn to for “all the answers.” We are in danger of bowing down to it, just as the pagans of old bowed down to their false gods. We marvel at what we have fashioned; we almost begin to murmur a prayer…
And there is one, unworthy, who listens and is thirsting for our worship.
Does he huddle in the belly of our new technologies, like a conqueror waiting to spring?