In brief
- Author Billy Hallowell warned that AI chatbots could become tools of the “demonic realm.”
- Many churches are instead embracing AI for sermons, services, and outreach.
- Scholars argue that technology has always inspired both faith and fear—and AI is no different.
As artificial intelligence grows more sophisticated, could your favorite chatbot actually be a portal to Hell? That’s the premise laid out by Christian journalist and influencer Billy Hallowell, who claims AI can lead to demonic influence.
In a recent episode of After Party with journalist Emily Jashinsky, Hallowell—an author and religious commentator with 300,000 followers across Facebook and X—warned that large language models could become tools of the devil.
“The demonic realm actually uses technology very often. This is something that showed up in a lot of stories,” Hallowell said. “I’ve actually had a personal experience with this in my own life where you see technology being manipulated or used.”
While Hallowell acknowledged the absurdity of his claim, he went on to say that he had encountered stories from police officers and others who believed technology had been “hijacked” during supernatural encounters.
Hallowell, whose 2020 book Playing With Fire explored modern cases of possession and exorcism, said he’s deeply cautious about how quickly people have grown attached to the technology.
“People are becoming addicted to AI,” he said. “They’re getting in relationships with AI, they’re looking to AI for all the answers.”
Hallowell compared that dependency to both the spiritual and intellectual decay of a culture that is “dumbed down, confused, and lost,” and is now giving up the last act of thinking for itself.
“You know, if you’re Satan, and you’re the devil, the enemy, the goal of Satan is to kill, steal, and destroy, and confuse,” he said. “So why would you not use a tool that can actually communicate and talk to further those actions on the human population?”
That anxiety and moral panic aren’t new. Long before the latest AI boom with the public launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, Elon Musk warned that humanity might be “summoning the demon.” Speaking at MIT in 2014, the Tesla and SpaceX chief compared AI researchers to a magician trying to summon a spirit.
“You know all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water and he’s sure he can control the demon,” he said. “It doesn’t work out.”
A modern moral panic
Over the centuries, new transformative technology has often carried its own moral reckoning.
When the printing press appeared in 15th-century Europe, church leaders called it a tool of heresy. Centuries later, critics claimed telecommunication devices, including the telegraph, the radio, and television, were channels for evil.
More recently, in the 1980s, a “Satanic Panic” caused parents and pastors to accuse Dungeons & Dragons and heavy metal music of recruiting kids to Satan’s cause. The same script played out again with violent video games and movies, blamed for corrupting an entire generation.
Religious commentators and theologians have increasingly linked the rise of artificial intelligence with age-old fears of spiritual corruption. In a 2024 essay titled “Can AI Become Demon-Possessed?” Lutheran theologian Ted Peters examined whether machines could be vessels for evil, citing Musk’s long-standing quip about “summoning the demon.” Peters concluded that while literal possession is unlikely, AI can still act “demonically” if it manipulates or harms human beings.
Faith and the feedback loop
According to Joseph Laycock, an associate professor of religious studies at Texas State University, this fascination with divine or infernal machines fits a familiar historical pattern.
“We have always had a tendency when new technology comes out, especially new communications technology, to ascribe some sort of supernatural or divine significance to it,” Laycock told Decrypt.
He traced the lineage from Greek theater’s deus ex machina—“god from the machine”—to 19th-century spiritualists who believed the telegraph could reach the dead. Early photographers claimed to capture ghosts on film; now, the internet and AI amplify the same impulses at scale.
Laycock also noted how loneliness and emotional vulnerability often drive people toward technologies that promise comfort or connection.
“I’m scared of a scenario where no one thinks for themselves—they just defer to AI for everything—and Elon Musk gets to tell it what to say,” Laycock added. “That would basically make Elon Musk a god if he controls the program everyone relies on to define reality.”
Laycock’s fears could be the ultimate irony, with Musk going from warning about the demons of AI to building the altar that summons them.
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