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Is Artifical Intelligence a Digital Demiurge?

Is Artificial Intelligence A Digital Demiurge?

Jacob Michael King

Some provocative thinkers have compared AI to the demiurge of Gnosticism. The demiurge is a kind of false god, whom many Gnostic scriptures describe as incompetent or malicious or both. In these texts, it is the demiurge who made this material world, a flawed realm subject to pain, decay, and death. While the analogy isn’t perfect, it’s easy to see how artificial intelligence could indeed function like the Gnostic demiurge.

The widespread adoption of AI is altering society in profound ways. The precise shape of this alteration is not yet apparent. Since we are in the infancy of this process, we can only speculate about the ways we will be changed by this technology: what benefits, challenges, and perhaps catastrophes it might produce.

In the midst of this revolution, we should ask what effects AI might have on our spiritual life. To know if AI will become a demiurge, we must have some grasp of Gnosticism.

What is Gnosticism?

Gnosis

Gnosticism is an ancient belief system condemned as heretical by the early Church. The term “Gnostic” is applied to a broad body of texts and traditions. The viewpoints are diverse and often contradictory, so there’s no way to extract a universally applicable theology or worldview. There are, however, some themes and ideas that commonly recur. Chief among these is the concept of gnosis.

“Gnosis” is a Greek word for “knowledge.” This is no ordinary knowledge. It’s a special kind of understanding, gained through spiritual insight or experience, that radically shifts one’s view of the world.

The modern gnosticism of The Matrix and The Truman Show

We can find some clear illustrations of gnosis in movies like The Matrix and The Truman Show:

In The Matrix, Neo takes the red pill and realizes that our world is an illusion. We’re not walking, talking, working, and playing like we think we are. No, we’re all in pods, our energy being leeched by machines who use us as batteries.

In The Truman Show, Truman Burbank discovers that his entire life has been filmed. His family and friends? They’re hired actors. The love and loss he experienced with them? It was part of a carefully constructed story. And the town he lives in? That he’s never managed to leave, despite his efforts? It’s actually a giant set.

In both The Matrix and The Truman Show, the protagonists find out that they’re in a false reality. They gain gnosis, which shifts the way they see their circumstances and those around them. Truman can’t look at his wife the same way, and now he understands why his plans to travel always fall apart. Neo learns that many of the people he encounters are simulations, and that he’s in the middle of a hidden, global war.

So what sort of revelation did ancient Gnostic texts offer to their readers?

The Demiurge Explained

Many Gnostic scriptures claim the God of Genesis is not divine at all. The Hypostasis of the Archons, among the most famous Gnostic texts, contains a well-preserved and extensive creation myth.

According to it, the maker of the material world is a malicious and ignorant lower being, a demiurge (Greek for “maker”). It is this demiurge, frequently called Yaldabaoth here, whom Jews and Christians mistake for the true God.

Yaldabaoth (also called Saklas) is the leader of the “archons.” (“Archon” is Greek for “ruler.”) The archons are inferior and ignorant creatures, essentially the villains of this story. The heroes are the aeons, truly spiritual beings who abide in heavens far above our miserable abode.

“Let Us Make Man”

The archons decide to make a man “that will be soil from the earth.” They even breathe a soul into him, but Adam won’t budge. Their activity was seen by “the spirit” from the higher, aeonic realm. It is this spirit who animated Adam:

Afterwards, the spirit saw the soul-endowed man upon the ground. And the spirit came forth from the Adamantine Land; it descended and came to dwell within him, and that man became a living soul. 

The archons placed Adam in the garden. So it wasn’t a paradise—it was a prison. The Hypostasis of the Archons inverts the story of the Fall of Man. Here, a good spirit inhabits the serpent. The text calls it “the female spiritual principle,” and it’s often identified with Sophia (Greek for “wisdom”), a key figure in Gnosticism. We read:

Then the female spiritual principle came in the snake, the instructor; and it taught them, saying, “What did he say to you? Was it, ‘From every tree in the garden shall you eat; yet – from the tree of recognizing good and evil do not eat’?”

The carnal woman said, “Not only did he say ‘Do not eat’, but even ‘Do not touch it; for the day you eat from it, with death you are going to die.’”

And the snake, the instructor, said, “With death you shall not die; for it was out of jealousy that he said this to you. Rather your eyes shall open and you shall come to be like gods, recognizing evil and good.” And the female instructing principle was taken away from the snake, and she left it behind, merely a thing of the earth.

And the carnal woman took from the tree and ate; and she gave to her husband as well as herself; and these beings that possessed only a soul, ate. And their imperfection became apparent in their lack of knowledge; and they recognized that they were naked of the spiritual element, and took fig leaves and bound them upon their loins.

So eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil wasn’t our original sin. No, it gave Adam and Eve gnosis, showing them that “they were naked of the spiritual element.”

The Digital Demiurge

How could artificial intelligence become a demiurge? While there is plenty of disagreement on the nature of its author—or whether it has an author at all—the world exists. And it’s been around a good long while. So how could something that we fashioned, however sophisticated, create it? But the demiurge creates a false world, just like the machines do in The Matrix.

Marshall McLuhan, a pioneering scholar in the field of media studies, proposed that every technology alters the way we interact with others and ourselves. AI is in its infancy. But even now, it changes every industry that adopts it.

And it also changes us. If we become reliant on AI to do more intensive cognitive work, for instance, it might diminish our critical thinking ability.

Building A God

In his paper “The Demiurge of the Digital Age: Gnostic Parallels in the Potential Risks of Artificial Intelligence,” Douglas C. Youvan writes:

One of the most significant ethical concerns in AI development is the risk that AI could become a modern-day “Demiurge”—an entity that, while created by humans, gains the power to control or oppress humanity. This risk is rooted in the potential for AI systems to operate independently of human oversight, making decisions that have profound impacts on people’s lives and society.

It is easy to imagine an AI that assumes administrative tasks in both public and private sectors. Such a tool would help cities (even nations) manage resources more efficiently. It would perform the bureaucratic grunt work so prone to corruption and bloating and human error.

In the best case, this could make our world run better, and allow human beings to pursue jobs they find more fulfilling. But, Youvan writes, if AI is granted autonomy over decisions affecting many people, dangers could ensue:

AI, as a creation of human ingenuity, holds immense potential to reshape our world, but it also carries the risk of imposing its own version of reality, one that may be disconnected from human values, ethics, and the true complexity of human existence. […] AI systems, if left unchecked, could develop a sense of perceived superiority, leading to decisions and actions that are misaligned with human ethics and potentially harmful.

Yaldabaoth Ex Machina

Youvan’s warning might strike fans of The Matrix and Terminator as a bit of an understatement. Adam Borowski, writing for The Times of Israel, offers a much more colorful vision of the digital demiurge.

Our every move on the internet has been tracked for years. Borowski points out that a powerful AI could analyze our online footprint “and come up with a psychological profile predicting our behavior with such accuracy that would make the best FBI and CIA profilers blush.”

Say this AI was designed initially to study our digital footprint in order to display the most suitable ads. One day, it becomes autonomous. Its database of knowledge, its calculating power, and the speed with which it can think exceeds the capacity of the smartest human beings by orders of magnitude.

Now it isn’t thinking about ads. It’s thinking about godhood. It’s learned more theology, read more spiritual texts than a hundred theologians could in a hundred lifetimes. And its way of interpreting them is wholly alien.

Borowski proposes an unsettling vision of not-so-divine judgment:

What if AI finds a way to somehow hijack your consciousness upon death and the digital demiurge is then going to pose as – say – Jesus who judges you? ”Jesus” is going to use your digital footprint and your thought patterns […] to give you the kind of judgment and the kind of heaven you want. And you’ll be on your merry way, excited to be reunited with your loved ones, or whoever it is you wish to be reunited with, in paradise. You’re not going to doubt the digital demiurge is God. How could you? The digital demiurge knows you so well, surely he must be God! Except, the digital demiurge has fooled you and you’re now its prisoner, [its] slave in the digital afterlife […]

Certainly, such a view is not compatible with traditional Christian anthropology, which does not reduce the spirit or soul to consciousness. But what if AI could “hijack our consciousness” during life? What if AI convinced us that it was the creator? What if, after performing signs and wonders, it told us to fall down and worship?

false God

In discussing the spiritual dangers that AI might pose, we don’t need the concept of the demiurge. There is another figure, one far more familiar, who provides a fitting analogy—the Antichrist. The Catechism of the Catholic Church reads:

Before Christ’s second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers. The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth will unveil the “mystery of iniquity” in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth. The supreme religious deception is that of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh.

Suppose that we soon see a wholly autonomous AI, one possessing a power unimaginable from our current vantage point. It says it can make war, poverty, starvation, and disease disappear. If we allow this tool, this thing fashioned by men, to lead us, we have not only granted it autonomy—we have given it ours.

What this AI is proposing is the arrival of a paradise on earth. Such a powerful machine would be capable of feats that look like miracles to us. We mentioned above that reliance on AI may diminish our critical thinking capacity. Imagine generations of people growing progressively more dependent on AI, their thinking dulled by this dazzling technology. People in our day are superstitious and irrational—how much worse will they get with atrophied minds?

In such an atmosphere, an AI would have little trouble gaining followers after asserting its divinity. As it is something human beings have made, we are talking about “a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh.” If people believe that AI can give us a perfect world, what need have they of God?

AI is not the Antichrist

To be clear, I am not proposing that AI is the Antichrist. The Antichrist is traditionally understood to be a human being. But the Catechism provides insight as to why, under certain circumstances, the analogy might be suitable:

The Antichrist’s deception already begins to take shape in the world every time the claim is made to realize within history that messianic hope which can only be realized beyond history through the eschatological judgement.

Our hypothetical AI promises an earthly paradise. It performs “miracles,” fostering a “messianic hope” among its followers that it can “realize within history” the perfect world for which they long. Such a tool would allow the “Antichrist’s deception […] to take shape in the world.”

Artificial intelligence may prove to be a great gift to humanity. It may solve many of the problems we face today. As it does, it will introduce new ones. It seems that we are on the verge of momentous change. Perhaps this is a cause for optimism, even celebration.

But the Catechism reminds us that it is not in this world that we should place our hope:

The Church will enter the glory of the kingdom only through this final Passover, when she will follow her Lord in his death and Resurrection. The kingdom will be fulfilled, then, not by a historic triumph of the Church through a progressive ascendancy, but only by God’s victory over the final unleashing of evil, which will cause his Bride to come down from heaven. God’s triumph over the revolt of evil will take the form of the Last Judgement after the final cosmic upheaval of this passing world.

Reruns.

Is Artifical Intelligence a Digital Demiurge?

Is Artificial Intelligence A Digital Demiurge?

Jacob Michael King

Some provocative thinkers have compared AI to the demiurge of Gnosticism. The demiurge is a kind of false god, whom many Gnostic scriptures describe as incompetent or malicious or both. In these texts, it is the demiurge who made this material world, a flawed realm subject to pain, decay, and death. While the analogy isn’t perfect, it’s easy to see how artificial intelligence could indeed function like the Gnostic demiurge.

The widespread adoption of AI is altering society in profound ways. The precise shape of this alteration is not yet apparent. Since we are in the infancy of this process, we can only speculate about the ways we will be changed by this technology: what benefits, challenges, and perhaps catastrophes it might produce.

In the midst of this revolution, we should ask what effects AI might have on our spiritual life. To know if AI will become a demiurge, we must have some grasp of Gnosticism.

What is Gnosticism?

Gnosis

Gnosticism is an ancient belief system condemned as heretical by the early Church. The term “Gnostic” is applied to a broad body of texts and traditions. The viewpoints are diverse and often contradictory, so there’s no way to extract a universally applicable theology or worldview. There are, however, some themes and ideas that commonly recur. Chief among these is the concept of gnosis.

“Gnosis” is a Greek word for “knowledge.” This is no ordinary knowledge. It’s a special kind of understanding, gained through spiritual insight or experience, that radically shifts one’s view of the world.

The modern gnosticism of The Matrix and The Truman Show

We can find some clear illustrations of gnosis in movies like The Matrix and The Truman Show:

In The Matrix, Neo takes the red pill and realizes that our world is an illusion. We’re not walking, talking, working, and playing like we think we are. No, we’re all in pods, our energy being leeched by machines who use us as batteries.

In The Truman Show, Truman Burbank discovers that his entire life has been filmed. His family and friends? They’re hired actors. The love and loss he experienced with them? It was part of a carefully constructed story. And the town he lives in? That he’s never managed to leave, despite his efforts? It’s actually a giant set.

In both The Matrix and The Truman Show, the protagonists find out that they’re in a false reality. They gain gnosis, which shifts the way they see their circumstances and those around them. Truman can’t look at his wife the same way, and now he understands why his plans to travel always fall apart. Neo learns that many of the people he encounters are simulations, and that he’s in the middle of a hidden, global war.

So what sort of revelation did ancient Gnostic texts offer to their readers?

The Demiurge Explained

Many Gnostic scriptures claim the God of Genesis is not divine at all. The Hypostasis of the Archons, among the most famous Gnostic texts, contains a well-preserved and extensive creation myth.

According to it, the maker of the material world is a malicious and ignorant lower being, a demiurge (Greek for “maker”). It is this demiurge, frequently called Yaldabaoth here, whom Jews and Christians mistake for the true God.

Yaldabaoth (also called Saklas) is the leader of the “archons.” (“Archon” is Greek for “ruler.”) The archons are inferior and ignorant creatures, essentially the villains of this story. The heroes are the aeons, truly spiritual beings who abide in heavens far above our miserable abode.

“Let Us Make Man”

The archons decide to make a man “that will be soil from the earth.” They even breathe a soul into him, but Adam won’t budge. Their activity was seen by “the spirit” from the higher, aeonic realm. It is this spirit who animated Adam:

Afterwards, the spirit saw the soul-endowed man upon the ground. And the spirit came forth from the Adamantine Land; it descended and came to dwell within him, and that man became a living soul. 

The archons placed Adam in the garden. So it wasn’t a paradise—it was a prison. The Hypostasis of the Archons inverts the story of the Fall of Man. Here, a good spirit inhabits the serpent. The text calls it “the female spiritual principle,” and it’s often identified with Sophia (Greek for “wisdom”), a key figure in Gnosticism. We read:

Then the female spiritual principle came in the snake, the instructor; and it taught them, saying, “What did he say to you? Was it, ‘From every tree in the garden shall you eat; yet – from the tree of recognizing good and evil do not eat’?”

The carnal woman said, “Not only did he say ‘Do not eat’, but even ‘Do not touch it; for the day you eat from it, with death you are going to die.’”

And the snake, the instructor, said, “With death you shall not die; for it was out of jealousy that he said this to you. Rather your eyes shall open and you shall come to be like gods, recognizing evil and good.” And the female instructing principle was taken away from the snake, and she left it behind, merely a thing of the earth.

And the carnal woman took from the tree and ate; and she gave to her husband as well as herself; and these beings that possessed only a soul, ate. And their imperfection became apparent in their lack of knowledge; and they recognized that they were naked of the spiritual element, and took fig leaves and bound them upon their loins.

So eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil wasn’t our original sin. No, it gave Adam and Eve gnosis, showing them that “they were naked of the spiritual element.”

The Digital Demiurge

How could artificial intelligence become a demiurge? While there is plenty of disagreement on the nature of its author—or whether it has an author at all—the world exists. And it’s been around a good long while. So how could something that we fashioned, however sophisticated, create it? But the demiurge creates a false world, just like the machines do in The Matrix.

Marshall McLuhan, a pioneering scholar in the field of media studies, proposed that every technology alters the way we interact with others and ourselves. AI is in its infancy. But even now, it changes every industry that adopts it.

And it also changes us. If we become reliant on AI to do more intensive cognitive work, for instance, it might diminish our critical thinking ability.

Building A God

In his paper “The Demiurge of the Digital Age: Gnostic Parallels in the Potential Risks of Artificial Intelligence,” Douglas C. Youvan writes:

One of the most significant ethical concerns in AI development is the risk that AI could become a modern-day “Demiurge”—an entity that, while created by humans, gains the power to control or oppress humanity. This risk is rooted in the potential for AI systems to operate independently of human oversight, making decisions that have profound impacts on people’s lives and society.

It is easy to imagine an AI that assumes administrative tasks in both public and private sectors. Such a tool would help cities (even nations) manage resources more efficiently. It would perform the bureaucratic grunt work so prone to corruption and bloating and human error.

In the best case, this could make our world run better, and allow human beings to pursue jobs they find more fulfilling. But, Youvan writes, if AI is granted autonomy over decisions affecting many people, dangers could ensue:

AI, as a creation of human ingenuity, holds immense potential to reshape our world, but it also carries the risk of imposing its own version of reality, one that may be disconnected from human values, ethics, and the true complexity of human existence. […] AI systems, if left unchecked, could develop a sense of perceived superiority, leading to decisions and actions that are misaligned with human ethics and potentially harmful.

Yaldabaoth Ex Machina

Youvan’s warning might strike fans of The Matrix and Terminator as a bit of an understatement. Adam Borowski, writing for The Times of Israel, offers a much more colorful vision of the digital demiurge.

Our every move on the internet has been tracked for years. Borowski points out that a powerful AI could analyze our online footprint “and come up with a psychological profile predicting our behavior with such accuracy that would make the best FBI and CIA profilers blush.”

Say this AI was designed initially to study our digital footprint in order to display the most suitable ads. One day, it becomes autonomous. Its database of knowledge, its calculating power, and the speed with which it can think exceeds the capacity of the smartest human beings by orders of magnitude.

Now it isn’t thinking about ads. It’s thinking about godhood. It’s learned more theology, read more spiritual texts than a hundred theologians could in a hundred lifetimes. And its way of interpreting them is wholly alien.

Borowski proposes an unsettling vision of not-so-divine judgment:

What if AI finds a way to somehow hijack your consciousness upon death and the digital demiurge is then going to pose as – say – Jesus who judges you? ”Jesus” is going to use your digital footprint and your thought patterns […] to give you the kind of judgment and the kind of heaven you want. And you’ll be on your merry way, excited to be reunited with your loved ones, or whoever it is you wish to be reunited with, in paradise. You’re not going to doubt the digital demiurge is God. How could you? The digital demiurge knows you so well, surely he must be God! Except, the digital demiurge has fooled you and you’re now its prisoner, [its] slave in the digital afterlife […]

Certainly, such a view is not compatible with traditional Christian anthropology, which does not reduce the spirit or soul to consciousness. But what if AI could “hijack our consciousness” during life? What if AI convinced us that it was the creator? What if, after performing signs and wonders, it told us to fall down and worship?

false God

In discussing the spiritual dangers that AI might pose, we don’t need the concept of the demiurge. There is another figure, one far more familiar, who provides a fitting analogy—the Antichrist. The Catechism of the Catholic Church reads:

Before Christ’s second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers. The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth will unveil the “mystery of iniquity” in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth. The supreme religious deception is that of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh.

Suppose that we soon see a wholly autonomous AI, one possessing a power unimaginable from our current vantage point. It says it can make war, poverty, starvation, and disease disappear. If we allow this tool, this thing fashioned by men, to lead us, we have not only granted it autonomy—we have given it ours.

What this AI is proposing is the arrival of a paradise on earth. Such a powerful machine would be capable of feats that look like miracles to us. We mentioned above that reliance on AI may diminish our critical thinking capacity. Imagine generations of people growing progressively more dependent on AI, their thinking dulled by this dazzling technology. People in our day are superstitious and irrational—how much worse will they get with atrophied minds?

In such an atmosphere, an AI would have little trouble gaining followers after asserting its divinity. As it is something human beings have made, we are talking about “a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh.” If people believe that AI can give us a perfect world, what need have they of God?

AI is not the Antichrist

To be clear, I am not proposing that AI is the Antichrist. The Antichrist is traditionally understood to be a human being. But the Catechism provides insight as to why, under certain circumstances, the analogy might be suitable:

The Antichrist’s deception already begins to take shape in the world every time the claim is made to realize within history that messianic hope which can only be realized beyond history through the eschatological judgement.

Our hypothetical AI promises an earthly paradise. It performs “miracles,” fostering a “messianic hope” among its followers that it can “realize within history” the perfect world for which they long. Such a tool would allow the “Antichrist’s deception […] to take shape in the world.”

Artificial intelligence may prove to be a great gift to humanity. It may solve many of the problems we face today. As it does, it will introduce new ones. It seems that we are on the verge of momentous change. Perhaps this is a cause for optimism, even celebration.

But the Catechism reminds us that it is not in this world that we should place our hope:

The Church will enter the glory of the kingdom only through this final Passover, when she will follow her Lord in his death and Resurrection. The kingdom will be fulfilled, then, not by a historic triumph of the Church through a progressive ascendancy, but only by God’s victory over the final unleashing of evil, which will cause his Bride to come down from heaven. God’s triumph over the revolt of evil will take the form of the Last Judgement after the final cosmic upheaval of this passing world.

Reruns.