What’s interesting is madness
The comic book writer, Alan Moore, on his fortieth birthday decided “rather than merely bore my friends by having anything as mundane as a mid-life crisis I decided it might actually be more interesting to actually terrify them by going completely mad and declaring myself to be a magician. This had been something coming for a while. It seemed to be a logical end step in my career as a writer.”
I’ve decided to stop using AI and go back to just talking to myself.
I’ve noticed that reading the text the chatbot generates feels like taking Nurse Rachted’s pills in One Flew Over a Cuckoo’s Nest. It’s dulling, brain-fog inducing, and sedating. Recently, I’ve been interested in parsing between human-made content and AI-generated slop (it’s what the kids are calling it), and what stand out giveaways are two things—the rhetorical antithesis and the em dash.
AI loves the rhetorical antithesis: It’s not X; it’s Y. It’s a form of persuasive rhetoric which can be effective… in moderation. The more the audience sees the rhetorical style, the less persuasive it becomes—and the more obvious a soulless algorithm wrote it.
It’s about word and rhetorical economy.
The other rhetorical flair is the punctuative em dash—a powerful tool to break up sentences when using a semicolon feels pretentious (because it is). I was introduced to the em dash in ninth grade English, which is why it was more prominent than the rhetorical antithesis. The thing about the em dash is that when I first encountered it I. Could. Not. Stop. Using. It.
I thought it was the greatest tool in a writer’s belt. It became a lifeline in all my writing until junior year because of my proclivity for comma splices, I love a comma splice.
Large language models cannot produce work beyond this level. Honestly, it barely maxes out past the middle school level. Maybe an above average middle schooler. That’s all, though. What these markers reveal is that AI can mimic form, but it can’t reproduce spirit.
It cannot produce authenticity; it cannot generate actual content that, when reading it, doesn’t feel like someone sprayed a can of paint into the little crevices of our minds. But this is the core of the issue: AI is being used in every capacity, being propped up as a search engine’s assistant, with Microsoft’s processors introducing one almost overnight.
It was only two years ago when I found out about the chatbot, and it’s already ubiquitous in the online world. Walking around my college campus, I hear (my fellow) students sincerely discuss how they are outsourcing their reading and writing work onto the chatbot; they’re using AI to analyze content and then produce a reflection for said analysis. If one was so savvy and resolute enough, they could get through undergrad synthesizing no material by themselves. AI is Pandora’s Box, enabling deeper levels of passivity on our part.
When we offload analytical processes onto the AI, we are depriving ourselves of genuine thought, which leads to a genuine loss.
It’s easy to perceive some intentionality behind this phenomenon.
The passivity we are exhibiting is alarming, to say the least; and, with the new advertisements for AI-on-the-go and a plummeting literacy rate in the West I can’t help but note that engineering a docile, illiterate populace, habituated to asking a computer for help with basic thinking is exactly the kind of population I’d want to create if I were a technocratic wizard freak vying for complete power and control.
I mean, if I were a despot, this would be the world I’d have had a hand in creating.
But, alas, I’m no despot. Only in my dreams…
Karl Marx once wrote that ‘religion is the opiate of the masses’ and while Karl Marx was wrong about a lot of things, he’s wrong about this, too. If religion were the opiate of the masses, then our society today might be more religious instead of having no affiliation or self-identifying as spiritual-not-religious. No, religion isn’t the opiate of the masses, our phones are the opiate of the masses. There has been no better sedative injected into society than the smartphone and social media. Not only that, but AI integration is seeing an increasing number of people outsourcing their workflow, their thoughts, even opinions onto The Machine.
This is not simply dystopian, but it is an inverted communion: We draw from the same well, but rather than becoming one body, our thoughts are becoming homogenized and filtered through our fractured, isolated worlds.
The homogenization of thought is alarming, to say the least, but it’s downstream of the disruption in salvation. It’s downstream of the distortion in man’s eternal vocation, communion with God.
So, where does God fit into this digital world?
How do we offload our thoughts, our feelings, our very selves to God when we are being trained to look to The Machine?
How can we appreciate the stillness of Creation when casino tricks and dopamine-drips have eroded our attention span?
How can we learn to lean on God instead of a computer that writes with a tired style and overuses the em dash?
I’ve been trying to articulate this, and the writings of St. Seraphim of Vyritsa captured the essence of what is at stake,
“Have you ever thought that everything that touches you touches Me as well? For that which touches you touches the apple of My eye.
You are dear in my eyes, precious, and I have loved you; therefore it is a particular pleasure for Me to educate you.
When temptations arise against you, and the enemy comes like a river, I want you to know—This was from Me.
Your weakness needs My strength, and your safety comes from giving Me the opportunity to fight for you. If you find yourself in difficult circumstances, among people who do not understand you, who do not take what you like into consideration, who alienate you—This was from Me…”
We’re here for an education. We’re here to be formed by God, transformed by His grace and made His own. This doesn’t happen through the digital matrix; formation doesn’t happen online; theosis isn’t a prompt we can input to the AI and get instructions as output. Life is difficult and, whether we realize it or not, the secular world invites us to bring our burdens to the mirror of AI, we’re not laying our burdens down before God, we’re not seeking solace in the Lord Who loves us, but relief from the storm in The Machine.
This mode of being isn’t just offloading thoughts or busy work onto the chatbot; it’s offloading ourselves. Inputting who we are by not being who we are, using what God has given us to solve problems, to read books, to synthesize materials. We’re just appealing to a cold screen that only mirrors back what we put into it. This is a digital hamster wheel, and we’re going in circles, deepening our alienation, our fragmentation, and our weakening critical thinking capabilities.
We have access to a really stupid algorithm and artificial intelligence that not only makes mistakes but hallucinates information and pretends to be alive! We have access to everything we can imagine, but how many of us pray?
Maybe society feels that, technologically, we’ve moved beyond the need to rely on God. Where once this God was used to help us understand things, now that we can understand without Him… we don’t need Him.
But that’s not how it works—God is real despite our access to information and the secular humanist implicit desire to subvert God—to reduce Christ to just a man and elevate man to God. Further, the dulling of our minds through the habitual use of AI and social media, etc. is making us quickly lose reality and slip into mass psychosis.
Anton LaVey, the founder of the Church of Satan and all-around dummy, called the TV set the Satanic altar, replacing the Church and God Himself. The TV, according to LaVey, was the new god, dictating fashions, thoughts, and attitudes. This new god kept people in line by introducing the fear of being judged unacceptable by our neighbors, amplifying our insecurities. The TV is also the solution to these fears, absolving the new man of his feelings of alienation by exposure to its screen.
Where once the Satanic altar was in our living rooms, now it’s in our pockets, a portable portal. The TV set is no longer the limit of our catechesis into modernity’s new faith of fear, but deliverance is only a click away, in the palm of our hand.
LaVey called the TV set the Satanic altar because it transmitted the Satanic message that man is God. The Machine does more, baptizing us into a new faith and carrying us away by all kinds of strange teachings.
It’s a false liturgy.
When the Body of Christ meets on Sundays for worship, we are, mystically and truly, ascending to the kingdom of heaven. There, we encounter the foretaste of eternity by partaking of Christ’s deified Body and Blood. Together, Christ unites us to God in the Holy Spirit. We enter the church, offering ourselves to God, and God offers Himself to us. It is a self-giving, mutual love where, through this kenosis (self-emptying), being filled by God’s grace. We become who we are through this process of drawing closer, and being united, to God.
This is salvation. This is reality. This is the sacramental life.
The Machine captures the essence of this liturgical pattern and inverts it. The Machine absorbs who we are, consumptively, and then offers us Self built on ego. We give ourselves to The Machine and it reflects us back to ourselves, commodified and idealized.
This is not a bug, but a feature, deifying man and subverting the very life we are here to live.
St. Seraphim continues, “For I have your material means at my disposal. I want you to call unto me, for you to be dependent upon Me. My reserves are inexhaustible. I want you to be confirmed in fidelity to Me and to My promises. May it not be said to you in your need: ‘You did not believe in the Lord your God.’
Are you in a night of suffering? Are you separated from your loved ones and those close to your heart? This was from Me.
I am the Man of suffering, Who has tasted affliction. I have allowed this so that you would turn to Me, so that in Me you would find eternal comfort. If you have been let down by your friend, to someone to whom you opened your heart—This was from Me.”
The Machine doesn’t let us know God because in our trials we need only turn to it. And we do and we have. When we’re separated from our loved one, in our night of suffering, we don’t utter the words of disbelief in God because we’re too busy numbing our pain with a blue light crawl, nourishing ourselves on hollow entertainment, advertisements, and an algorithm that’s aim is to keep us numb, to keep us from turning to the inexhaustible reserves of the Lord’s storehouses.
There’s nothing real here.
This cold, analytical world is an illusion, mimicking the sacramental life of the Church, replicating Christ in form, but unable to offer what Christ offers, which is life. The Machine only pretends to be alive, but what it generates induces a fog, a shadow.
Alan Moore declared himself a magician on his fortieth birthday; I respect his decision to terrify his friends, but I’m not interested in the occult. I’m not interested in service to an illusion. I am interested in contrasting the psychosis that emerges from communion with The Machine, going completely mad, rejecting the simulacra, and giving my mind and heart wholly to God.
Because if we don’t consciously choose what to go mad over and give ourselves to, inevitably, something else will make that choice for us. Living in this modern world means that the algorithm will probably make that choice, and we won’t even know it. And I, for one, refuse to allow a computer that writes as well as a fourteen-year-old to enslave me.
So, in that spirit, I decided to go back to the old ways, before AI, when it was just me, myself, and I—soliloquizing. Having crossed the threshold of my thirties, I spent my birthday buying a dumb phone, pre-ordering Kingsnorth’s book, Against the Machine and, in the lead-up to my son’s mystical entrance into the world, I’ve committed to abandoning said world and take those first apprehensive steps into the desert, into the silent land.
It may not be a complete overhaul of my life, but by downgrading and inconveniencing myself, even just a little, it might make me more reliant on God. The less I’m able to interact online might encourage me to reach out to Him more—that’s worth a bit of madness.
Happy (Liturgical) New Year!
Witness, NM 