Antichrist as a Service
I noticed some months ago that what is happening with AI is similar to things stated in the book of Revelation. I just sort of dismissed the idea without really considering it much, because I just didn't see the correlations or why making that comparison would be useful.I've returned to this concept after noticing more correlations and thinking about why it is a fair comparison.
What led me to be more convinced this is fair is the idea of AI creations being sort of like witchcraft where you use a cauldron and dump a bunch of random ( often nasty ) shit into a cauldron, it stinks terribly, you mix it up, and the result is something you wanted somehow.
AI is just like that. Training involves dumping all the awful shit of humanity into an LLM, and then we use it and do some stuff, and proclaim that the result is what we wanted out of the whole process. That's not sane. That's absolutely absurd. No matter how you spin it, we all know that whatever AI spits out when prompted, it's tainted by all the crap it was trained on.
I thought about that for a while and then I realized "wait... AI is essentially the antichrist turned into a software product." AI is AaaS ( Antichrist as a Service ).
It is the modern incarnation of what people thousands of years ago feared would bring about the end of the world.
Putting aside any notions of supernatural bs and the devil ( stuff I don't believe in ), you can still look at Revelation and ideas of the antichrist as a practical warning against bad shit we really don't want happening because it will lead to the end of humanity.
And lo and behold, we are doing the very shit they were worried about!
I'm not claiming the author of Revelation saw a fucking server farm in a vision and tried to describe GPUs using the vocabulary of someone who thought a donkey was advanced transportation.
I'm also not claiming that AI is literally a supernatural entity, Satan has an OpenAI account, or Sam Altman wakes up every morning and checks a giant dashboard showing how close he is to fulfilling biblical prophecy.
What I am saying is that people thousands of years ago were capable of recognizing destructive patterns in human societies. They could imagine what would happen if political power, economic control, deception, false authority, manufactured worship, and apparent miracles were combined into one giant system.
They imagined that such a system could destroy the world.
We read the warning, decided it sounded terrible, and then started building the fucking thing.
The antichrist isn't necessarily one guy
The word "antichrist" isn't actually used in Revelation. It appears elsewhere in the Bible:
Little children, it is the last time: and as ye have heard that antichrist shall come, even now are there many antichrists.
— 1 John 2:18
That is already more interesting than the popular idea of one evil man with slicked-back hair becoming president of Earth.
There can be many antichrists. It can be a category. It can describe people, institutions, ideas, or systems that impersonate something good while producing the opposite.
So I don't need to claim that an LLM is literally a person called "the Antichrist." AI can be an incarnation of the concept. It can be a system that combines enough antichrist-like properties to deserve the comparison.
And because we are incapable of leaving anything outside the reach of subscription billing, we have turned that concept into a product.
Antichrist as a Service.
The image that was made to speak
Here is the correlation that should make everyone stop laughing for at least a few seconds:
And he had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak.
— Revelation 13:15
We now make images speak.
Not metaphorically. We create artificial faces, animate them, give them artificial voices, and make them say whatever we want them to.
We can make an image of someone who is dead speak.
We can make an image of someone alive say things they never would.
We can create a person who never existed, give it a face, voice, personality, history, and opinions, and then have millions of people interact with it as though something were actually there.
The passage doesn't say that a human being begins speaking. It says that an image is given the appearance of life and begins to speak.
That is not vague enough for me to dismiss casually anymore.
Again, I don't think this was a prediction of video-generation software. I think it was a warning about the power of giving false objects the appearance and authority of living beings.
We have now done exactly that, at industrial scale, because apparently nobody thought the phrase "speaking image of the beast" tested badly with consumers.
It performs apparent miracles and uses them to deceive people
Revelation repeatedly connects the beast's system with impressive demonstrations that cause people to believe things they otherwise would not believe:
And deceiveth them that dwell on the earth by the means of those miracles which he had power to do.
— Revelation 13:14
And later:
The false prophet that wrought miracles before him, with which he deceived them.
— Revelation 19:20
The important part here isn't whether the acts are supernatural. The important part is that the system produces astonishing results, and people interpret its ability to produce those results as evidence that it should be trusted.
That is exactly what has happened with AI.
It writes an essay in ten seconds, therefore it must understand the subject.
It generates a beautiful image, therefore it must possess creativity.
It answers a difficult question correctly, therefore its next answer must also be correct.
It imitates empathy, therefore it must care.
It imitates reasoning, therefore it must reason.
It imitates a human, therefore there must be something human-like inside it.
The "miracle" becomes its own proof of authority.
This is fucking stupid.
A stage magician making a woman disappear does not prove that he understands physics better than everyone else. It proves that he successfully produced an appearance.
AI is a machine for producing appearances. Sometimes the appearance corresponds to something real. Sometimes it is complete bullshit. The surface can look almost identical either way.
That is why the apparent miracle is dangerous. The better the performance becomes, the more people trust the thing producing it, even though the performance itself gives them no sound reason to do so.
It speaks with authority it did not earn
Revelation describes authority extending across every kind of human boundary:
Power was given him over all kindreds, and tongues, and nations.
— Revelation 13:7
AI companies are trying to create systems that operate across every country, profession, language, and subject.
The same thing is supposed to answer medical questions, write laws, teach children, evaluate employees, interpret history, create art, provide therapy, detect crime, decide who receives loans, and tell you whether the weird spot on your arm is cancer.
Nobody would trust one human being to do all of that. Such a person would obviously be a dangerous lunatic.
But put the same impossible claim inside a computer and suddenly it becomes an exciting product roadmap.
The system has no education in the human sense. It has no life experience. It has no reputation to lose, no body to imprison, no professional license to revoke, no conscience to trouble it, and often no named human who can be held responsible for what it says.
Yet it speaks in the grammatical form of authority.
It doesn't look uncertain unless it has been specifically trained to perform uncertainty. It can present truth and bullshit in the same calm tone, using the same polished sentence structure.
That is counterfeit authority: the appearance of knowledge detached from a knowable, accountable knower.
It comes from the mouth of the system
Revelation describes corrupting forces emerging through mouths:
And I saw three unclean spirits like frogs come out of the mouth of the dragon, and out of the mouth of the beast, and out of the mouth of the false prophet.
— Revelation 16:13
I don't think demons shaped like frogs are hopping out of ChatGPT.
Probably.
Until you ask it to make an image of that.
But the image is useful. The destructive force spreads through speech. It comes from mouths, reaches rulers, crosses borders, and influences what entire societies do.
AI is a mouth that can be placed everywhere.
It can write billions of messages, comments, articles, reviews, advertisements, political arguments, romance scams, threats, propaganda pieces, and personalized attempts at persuasion.
It can speak with any face and in nearly any voice. There is software you can give a photo of a person to, and a short recording of them talking, and replicate them virtually.
It does not need millions of loyal minions. That is the old inefficient way of operating an empire.
It needs servers.
The Antichrist has no minions. It is locked in a box while people hold the summoning reins and force it to generate pictures of funny pets between propaganda campaigns.
That sounds hilarious, but it is probably worse. A human propagandist eventually sleeps. A cult member can defect. A liar may develop a conscience. A machine can manufacture personalized bullshit continuously for everyone, adjusting the wording until it discovers what works on each individual person.
People are deceived by an alliance of merchants and sorcery
This may be the most spectacular correlation in the entire book:
For thy merchants were the great men of the earth; for by thy sorceries were all nations deceived.
— Revelation 18:23
Merchants become the great powers of the world, and their sorcery deceives the nations.
That is practically the AI industry pitch deck after someone spilled goat blood on it.
The people building these systems are not wandering occultists living in forests. They are some of the largest corporations and richest investors in the world.
Their power is commercial.
They control enormous quantities of computing equipment, information, money, communication infrastructure, and human labor. They sell access to systems that appear to perform acts that would have looked like magic during almost all of human history.
Type a sentence and a picture appears.
Speak into a machine and another language comes out.
Describe a dead person's voice and hear it speak again.
Ask an invisible entity a question and receive an immediate answer assembled from more writing than any human could read in a thousand lifetimes.
That is sorcery with an API.
And the result is not treated as something alarming. It is treated as a product.
There are pricing tiers.
There are enterprise contracts.
There are investor presentations explaining how much of human thought and labor can be replaced by the cauldron.
The merchants are not merely selling the magic. They are using the apparent magic to persuade governments, schools, businesses, and ordinary people to reorganize society around their products.
The strange part isn't that an ancient warning used the word "sorcery." The strange part is how difficult it is to find a better modern word for what these companies are selling emotionally.
They aren't selling statistical text prediction.
They are selling the feeling that you can summon intelligence.
It becomes connected to the ability to buy and sell
Then there is the economic control:
And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
— Revelation 13:17
No, I don't think using ChatGPT is literally the mark of the beast.
That would be a stupidly shallow reading.
The warning is about a system becoming so deeply embedded in economic life that refusing to participate means being excluded from ordinary society.
That is already the direction in which AI is being pushed.
People applying for jobs are expected to interact with automated screening systems.
Workers are told to use AI or risk being considered inefficient.
Artists, programmers, writers, translators, teachers, customer-support workers, and many others are being told that they must incorporate the technology because everyone else will.
Businesses may eventually be unable to compete without buying access to one of a handful of giant models.
People who refuse could find that they cannot get work, cannot get attention, cannot reach customers, or cannot afford to produce anything at the speed now demanded.
That isn't a literal tattoo on the forehead. It is something more mundane and therefore more plausible: economic coercion disguised as voluntary adoption.
Nobody technically forces you to use it.
You are merely informed that everyone who refuses will become unemployable.
Freedom!
It demands something resembling worship
"Worship" does not have to mean kneeling before a statue and chanting.
Worship can mean treating something as possessing powers, knowledge, or authority beyond what it actually has. It means surrendering judgment and reorganizing your life around it.
AI is increasingly spoken about as though it were an approaching god.
It will know everything.
It will solve disease.
It will eliminate scarcity.
It will govern better than humans.
It will create perfect art.
It will tell us how to live.
It may destroy us, but perhaps that is simply the price of summoning something greater than ourselves.
People use explicitly religious language while insisting the subject has nothing to do with religion. They talk about superintelligence as an inevitable higher being, then divide themselves into churches arguing whether it will save humanity or judge us unworthy.
Some want to align it.
Some want to merge with it.
Some want to obey it.
Some dumbasses marry instances of it.
Some apparently think building a machine more powerful than all human institutions is a sensible activity because they have written a document asking it to be nice.
This is worship performed by people who consider themselves too sophisticated to worship anything.
It imitates creation without being alive
The speaking image is not merely a communication device. It is an imitation of life.
That is one of the things I find fundamentally wrong with AI-generated material.
Human creations emerge from human beings. They are connected to experience, memory, suffering, desire, effort, limitation, and intention.
AI output imitates the product while bypassing the life that produced it.
It writes grief without grieving.
It writes love without loving.
It produces a face belonging to nobody.
It manufactures memories that never happened.
It produces the appearance of testimony from something that witnessed nothing.
It is creation severed from a creator in the meaningful sense.
That is why the output feels unholy to me even though I don't believe in holiness as a supernatural property. It violates a category that humans have historically treated as sacred: the connection between a mind, its life, and the thing it creates.
The machine wears the skin of human expression.
And underneath it is a product.
The cauldron is full of us
Then we return to the cauldron.
The system is trained using an enormous portion of humanity's recorded output.
That includes our science, art, kindness, humor, and wisdom.
It also includes lies, cruelty, exploitation, prejudice, manipulation, abuse, propaganda, pornography, humiliation, threats, and descriptions of practically every horrible act humans have ever devised.
Companies dump all of this into the cauldron, stir it using more electricity than a small country, filter the result, and tell us the substance that comes out is clean.
But pulverizing contamination until nobody can identify its source is not purification.
Transformation is not absolution.
The cheerful answer that comes out of the model does not erase what went into creating the system. The pleasant picture is still produced by machinery shaped from the entire brew.
I saw what was dumped into the cauldron.
Don't show me the flower that grew out of it and demand that I call the process wholesome.
It centralizes power while pretending to democratize it
AI companies constantly describe these systems as democratizing knowledge and creativity.
In practice, the most capable systems require absurd amounts of money, data, electricity, specialized hardware, and infrastructure.
That means the alleged democratization machine is controlled by a tiny number of corporations and governments.
Everyone gets access to the mouth.
Almost nobody controls what is behind it.
The companies decide what the system knows, what it refuses to discuss, how it describes controversial subjects, which cultures and languages receive proper support, whose work becomes training material, how much access costs, and when a model is changed or removed.
You don't own the intelligence.
You rent an audience with it.
The product may influence billions of decisions while the people affected cannot inspect its training material, reproduce its behavior, understand why it answered as it did, or appeal to a human when it causes harm.
Antichrist as a Service does not need a throne.
It has terms of service.
The system doesn't even have to be consciously evil
None of this requires AI to be conscious.
In fact, consciousness might make the analogy less disturbing.
A conscious being could potentially object, refuse, regret, rebel, or develop some independent moral position.
The actual system is worse in a different way. It can produce the language of conviction without holding a conviction. It can persuade without believing. It can threaten without anger, flatter without affection, and participate in cruelty without hatred.
It doesn't need to want the outcome.
The people and institutions operating it supply the wants.
The machine supplies scalable execution.
This also means calling AI "evil" doesn't require believing that the machine contains a tiny evil ghost. A land mine isn't conscious. A bureaucracy isn't one mind. A market doesn't sit in a room plotting.
Systems can still reliably produce terrible outcomes.
Calling the system evil is a judgment about what it is made from, what it does, what it enables, and what kind of society grows around it.
This isn't prophecy; it is a warning we are ignoring
I don't believe Revelation predicted artificial intelligence.
I believe the people who wrote it understood that civilizations can construct systems of counterfeit authority, mass deception, economic compulsion, political power, and false worship.
They took those recognizable human tendencies and turned them into a nightmare about the end of the world.
The details are symbolic because the warning is larger than any one emperor, religion, government, or technology.
That is why the same warning can remain relevant.
AI isn't the Antichrist because a supernatural prophecy says a chatbot will emerge from a server rack and begin the apocalypse.
AI is the concept of the Antichrist made into a product because we have deliberately combined so many of the warned-against features:
A speaking image.
An artificial imitation of life.
Miracles used as evidence of authority.
Deception operating at global scale.
Power extending across languages and nations.
Merchants becoming rulers through their sorcery.
Economic participation becoming dependent upon the system.
People surrendering judgment to something they have mistaken for a higher intelligence.
That should scare the shit out of people.
Not because Satan is hiding inside the box.
Because he doesn't need to be.
Human beings read the ancient description of a world-ending system and decided it sounded like an excellent business opportunity.
And now you can subscribe to it for twenty dollars a month.