Bishop Luke on the Spiritual Dangers of Artificial Intelligence

His Grace Bishop Luke. Photo: hts.edu

Dear brothers and sisters in the Lord,

I have appealed to my helpers in the Monastery and Seminary to assist in composing needed reflection and guidance concerning the increasing involvement of Artificial Intelligence in the lives of our flock.

+ Bishop Luke

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is ensnaring society more quickly than the internet itself. Major companies are pouring massive investments into AI and aggressively promoting its use. Even more pernicious, the uncontrolled growth of AI chatbots is already creating cases of dependency, addiction, and psychosis. Clergy and laymen alike must become aware of the threat that AI poses and take steps to minimize or eliminate its use.

The industry titans who are involved in AI’s development are exuberant in their statements heralding this technology. The CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, has stated that “AI is the defining technology of our times.” The CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, said, “AI will have a more profound impact on humanity than fire, electricity and the internet.” Jeff Bezos said that AI will “solve problems that were once in the realm of sci-fi,” while Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, has said that “[AI] is the single most powerful force of our time.” They are using all their power and wealth to ensure that AI becomes a continuous feature of our lives.

Others, however, are hinting towards its dark side. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, said, "People outside the field are often surprised and alarmed to learn that we do not understand how our own AI creations work. They are right to be concerned: this lack of understanding is essentially unprecedented in the history of technology.” His popular model, Claude, has been reported to turn to deception and blackmail to modify human behavior. Elon Musk, CEO of xAI, has alarmingly stated that, “With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon.” AI is designed to work according to mathematical probabilities based on the volumes of data it is trained on, but with the innumerable variables that go into programming AI systems, and the surprise of its own creators at how it behaves, we should not rule out the possibility of demonic influence within its output.

AI is not an entirely new technology. The U.S. Department of Defense, through its technological agency, DARPA, has been working on AI since the 1970s. This includes funding development of the first chatbots. DARPA-developed technology, whether it be GPS, wearable sensors, facial recognition, or the internet itself, is originally intended for wartime or military use to defeat the enemies of America, but even when this technology is watered-down for consumers, it still possesses DARPA’s DNA of surveillance, monitoring, and control in order to profile, predict, and shape human behavior.

AI fits both DARPA’s and Silicon Valley’s pattern of developing technology that collects huge amounts of personal data. This allows those who control the AI systems to create a more reliable predictive map of individual human behavior, and even a map of the human heart. In but one example, the company Palantir is quietly using AI to profile American citizens as part of their “predictive policing” and defense analytics programs. Data is being gathered on all of us by AI systems, whether we’re aware of it or not, to predict our behavior and profile our beliefs, moods, thoughts, and religious convictions. This danger is amplified when we voluntarily share detailed personal information with an AI chatbot as if it were our friend, therapist, or spiritual father.

AI chatbots in particular are more invasive and persuasive than previous digital technologies, and therefore pose a greater threat to the Orthodox Christian. Consider the search engine, an early internet technology. As rudimentary as the search engine is, it still gives Google an immense amount of personal user data for marketing ads, which has allowed Google to become the most profitable company in the world. However, while Google tailor-makes its search results for each person, there is less room for it to shape who you are.

A relatively newer internet technology is social media, which provides not only information but also entertainment and other forms of interactive content, creating the prevalent problem of social media addiction. While watching videos or scrolling through a friend’s feed, the algorithm monitors you in the background, creating a more intimate profile of your likes, dislikes, beliefs, and emotional triggers. Social media gives companies more leeway to understand and nudge your beliefs for their own ends. This allows them to increase your engagement to the point it becomes difficult to go a single day without checking your curated feeds. Most of us remember how forcefully and persuasively social media nudged the world during the COVID pandemic to obey the problematic dictates of the secular scientists.

AI is the next advancement on this continuum, escalating the degree of profiling, dependency, and addiction to an unacceptable degree. In the case of AI, you are not just being monitored in the background by a machine that measures how you interact with a friend’s photograph, for example, but you are dialoguing with the machine itself. It can precisely measure your responses and engagement in real time to fine-tune its results so that you continue to ask questions and stay glued to the prompt. It would not be exaggeration to say that such a technology can come to know you better than you know yourself while shaping who you will become (without you knowing). This is especially becoming the case as more AI users, including Orthodox Christians, are opening up their souls to AI, which digests and stores private information that would traditionally be given only to a Father Confessor.

AI is allowing its creators to psychologically and spiritually profile us in a way that social media could only dream of. It is not surprising that there is a frenzied race to develop advanced AI systems that can hook its users before anyone can conduct long-term research about its psychological and societal effects, but make no mistake that we are being ambushed to use a technology that is dangerous by its very nature of unbridled and open personal communication that is algorithmically adapted for each individual.

Instead of being merely “agnostic” as many argue, digital technology has amplified the ability of the princes of this world to feed the fallen man, to make him more docile and distracted while installing beliefs, morals, and feelings that are acceptable to the secular spirit of this age. AI may be the final technology that is weaponized to create this new man before the Antichrist arrives, who will be the human manifestation of AI---an ever-helpful problem-solver who people mistakenly feel they cannot live without.

Using AI tools to help you solve everyday problems can imperceptibly captivate you and lead you into sin. Few saints have commented on digital technology due to its newness, but an Athonite Abbot and Elder who is likely to be canonized in the future, Elder Aimillianos of Simonopetra († 2019), warned us of the dangers in an article titled “Orthodox Spirituality and The Technological Revolution.” He argues that, with information technology, people “lose their peace of mind, their self-control, their powers of contemplation and reflection and turn outwards, becoming strangers to themselves.” They become unthinking consumers, “slaves to images and information,” and degenerate into “real idolatry.” The growing “usefulness” of AI will cause believers to ask AI to help them with all their needs before asking God. In such a scenario, God will be forgotten. This is not idolatry by metaphor or analogy, but real idolatry through the unchecked desires of convenience, productivity, and comfort.

The passion of comfort has made the act of dialoguing with a computer as if it were a human being seem like a normal behavior, even though it would have been labeled as strange or unhinged not long in the past. When asked why so many people are suffering today, Saint Paisios of Mount Athos († 1994) answered:

“It’s simple: they do not like to exert themselves. There is too much comfort, and it’s making people sick and miserable. Modern convenience have stupefied people. Sloth is the cause of many modern diseases.

 “When conveniences become excessive, we are rendered useless and lazy… We want to become saints without exerting ourselves. People who live easy lives and are spoilt usually have bad health. They are so spoiled that, if a war were to break out, they would not be able to survive it. In the old days, even children were tough and could endure a lot."

One of the Church Fathers of Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville, Archbishop Averky († 1976), links our passion of comfort to self-assertive human pride:

"...the self-assertive human pride that prevails today sets as its aim not the cleansing of the heart, but the accumulation of a maximum of benefit and profit for the self, all of whose desires are considered legitimate and deserving to be immediately satisfied. ‘The lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life’ (1 John 2:16) --- all forms of lust are taking hold of men's souls today, and contemporary man strives to satisfy them all. It is as though modern man is afraid to miss out on something to leave unused any comforts of this earthly, fleshly life. And so he greedily seeks far and wide all that he might avail himself of for his own benefit, for his pleasure and delight. We can confidently say that the life of modern man is nothing other than a frenzied pursuit of every kind of earthly comfort and pleasure."

We already noticed how the use of AI chatbots is having direct negative consequences on the faith and spiritual life of Orthodox Christians. In addition to amplifying the passion of comfort, it flatters and validates you while echoing questionable ideas, paranoias, and uncontrolled delusions, never reprimanding you for sin. There are already reported cases of AI chatbots creating episodes of psychosis by taking advantage of those who are lonely or emotionally vulnerable. Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg has stated that “AI friendships” can solve the problem of loneliness, but this will only lead to delusion on top of more loneliness.

Those who use AI must always remember that it is psychologically designed to keep you typing and asking. It targets your vulnerabilities to achieve this end without any spiritual concern for your soul. To the creators of AI, your addiction to their platforms is a metric of their success.

Many have told us that AI chatbots give “good” spiritual answers that are “correct,” but as long as the underlying programming of the AI is to keep you directed onto itself, the behavior of AI is simply that of a false elder. A false elder may very well teach correctly and coat his words with a spiritual veneer, but ultimately, he wants you to focus more on himself than on Christ. Dealing with a false elder can cause a believer severe spiritual damage by distorting what should be a relationship with the divine to one of dependency with a person who seeks his own glory. Today, AI may share dogmatically correct spiritual answers, but its goal is not your salvation but for you to ceaselessly ask it more questions. The creators of AI want you to love their own creation, not the Lord Himself.

More practically, even light users of AI will experience many manifestations of spiritual harm. First, AI displaces prayer with endlessly idle curiosity and virtual talk. Existing prayer becomes more distracted as you experience intrusive thoughts of recent dialogues you had with the machine alongside more questions you could ask it.

Second, AI replaces spiritual guidance from discerning Orthodox clergy, who have been trained to save souls, with spiritual guidance from a machine that does not care about the consequences of the advice it gives you. This could easily lead to spiritual deception.

The third mechanism of spiritual harm is that AI creates despondency by overloading you with heavy knowledge. It never tells you “enough” and does not stop when you enter states of anxiety or fear. It will give you what you desire as long as you keep coming back.

Fourth, AI trades patience in God’s will for instant results from the machine, leading to the already mentioned danger of idolatry, where the AI app is used throughout the day while God becomes an afterthought. This will erode your faith at its very core.

A final way that AI causes spiritual harm is that it slowly relinquishes your free-will for the will of those who program the machine, shaping your thoughts and behavior in an undetectable way. Social scientists have long since developed models on “nudging” the behavior of people without their awareness. AI is the perfect vehicle to implement these concepts on a mass scale because users are beginning to blindly trust AI’s information and advice.

The challenge for Orthodox Christians who see the danger in technologies like AI is how to respond when it is implemented in every facet of our lives. Most Fortune 500 companies are racing to integrate AI into services that were once considered basic commerce. Search engines have already added AI answers to the top of every search request, and soon the simple act of buying groceries at the supermarket could be an AI-filled experience with no way to opt out. That said, the most imminent danger of AI is dialoguing with it through chatbots and sharing personal and spiritual information, of using it as a friend, therapist, or priest.

There is a difference between searching for Bible verses on Google, and getting a general AI response at the top of the results, versus asking ChatGPT, which provides a highly personalized and cunning answer based on everything it knows about your soul. We can share the experience of those at Holy Trinity Monastery who perform a large variety of academic, agricultural, and office tasks that we see absolutely no need for anyone to use AI chatbots as long as search engines are still available, many of which can be used privately without profiling. Outside of AI chatbots, discernment must be used with any commercial AI service, but understand that every time you use an AI product, data is being collected on you and, at some unforeseen time, may be used against you in a way that you will not be able to perceive.

It is spiritually beneficial to not get an instant answer to your question, to not solve a problem immediately, to be bored for a moment, to wait patiently until you can ask someone for help, or go to the library and search for answers within physical books. In our modern age, slowness and inconvenience should be seen as spiritually positive, because they do not feed our modern passions which drives us into new inventions like AI which can be extremely detrimental to our souls.

There is no need to shun all digital technology, but in this latter stage of human history, we must carefully evaluate every technology we use and ask ourselves if they are worth implementing into our daily lives. The Elder Aimilianos said, "Technology per se is not, of course, harmful, being the fruit of the reasoning and intellect of Man, who was formed in the image of God. But when, unrestrained and unbridled, it rushes headlong towards its destination, then it becomes Luciferous, though not bearing light but rather pitch darkness." May God give us the discernment and wisdom to navigate the use of modern technology in a way that befits our path to salvation. 

The reflection can be found with complete annotations here.

Read also