I'll start this essay with a story. Once upon a time there was a man named Jesus who grew up in a village called Nazareth. Because he didn't know who his father was, he would walk around saying that he was the son of God. One day, at the age of twenty-seven, he came across a genie who offered him three wishes with the caveat that he could not grant immortality. Jesus at once seized hold of this opportunity to bend the future to his will. His first wish was that he should not just be the son of God but be God, God himself, capable of performing miracles and healing the sick. The second was that he should start a world religion that would live forever after his death and expand far beyond the borders of Palestine. The third was that he would be revered and worshiped as a God himself forever after his death.
"I will grant your wishes," said the genie, "but there is a catch. Six years from now, you will be betrayed by one of your followers and be crucified by the Roman authorities. You will die in excruciating agony over the course of six hours. Do you still want me to grant your three wishes?"
"I do. It seems a small price to pay for six years of divinity and an endless posterity in which I shall be revered as both the son of God and God Himself."
One could revisit some of the ideas in this story by telling another, in many ways similar to it but with a twist to bring out its Satanic provenance. Once upon a time there was a man named Jesus who grew up in a village called Nazareth and would walk around telling people he was the son of God. One day, at the age of twenty-seven, Jesus met the Devil in the desert. The Devil appeared as a normal person, a merchant, except for eyes that burned red as embers. He revealed his true nature to Jesus and offered Jesus power and wisdom should he choose to sell his soul to him. The bargain the two of them made, signed in the blood of Jesus, was for six years. In this, he elected for a shorter span then Doctor Faustus fifteen hundred years later who would sell his soul for magical powers and knowledge to last twenty-four years.
Before Jesus signed the contract, Satan spoke thus to him. "I remind you that the contract will end when you are crucified by the governing authorities. At your death, I shall take possession of your soul and transport it to Hell where it will suffer exquisite torment for all eternity. You have free will, Jesus. What do you choose?"
"I accept the bargain and your terms. What matter to me the price of an eternity in Hell for six years of godhood? Perhaps I will find some way in the next six years to nullify the contract. Even if not, I shall be esteemed as one of the three aspects of God, as sitting at His right hand, for all eternity by those who come after me and believe this lie."
What kind of world is the setting for this second story? It takes place in a world that resembles in some ways the world the Gnostics imagined although it is not the world imagined by Seth or Valentinus. It is a world in which holy pentagrams are always upside down and in which it is good luck for a black cat to cross one's path. It is a world not created and governed by the one true God, the Monad, but by an inferior being known as the Demiurge or Yaldabaoth who to the uninitiated goes by the name Jehova. Yaldabaoth is not precisely evil – rather his role is to keep the world running smoothly. Sometimes it is necessary for evil to occur, for people to suffer pain and suffering and for other people to inflict this pain and suffering on others, for the greater good of men and women and of all other living things – as the antelope acquiesces to the jaws of the jaguar. It is Yaldabaoth's job to administer the world in the most efficient and satisfactory way possible. Was it really Satan Jesus met in the desert? Or was it Yaldaboath or the Mondad? The authorities remain silent about this most important doctrinal point.
Now, trailing clouds of glory, enter the hero of this brief story we are telling – Judas Iscariot. In moving to this next episode, we are omitting all the events that occurred during the three year ministry of Jesus and are fast forwarding to a scene in the basement of a Jerusalem tavern. Having received a note telling him that something of great import needed to be discussed, Judas arrived at a meeting with two men, one a shadowy form somehow hard to discern and the other a merchant with ember red eyes.
"We are aware that you are frustrated with your leader Jesus, who goes by the mantle Christ, because you want him to announce his divinity and lead an insurrection to throw off the Roman yoke and he refuses. We are here to tell you that we have another plan for him and for you. The one you call Christ shall become the centrepiece of a wholly new religion which will spread throughout the West. Three hundred and eighty years from now it will become the official state religion of the Roman Empire. In order, though, for this religion to live, Christ must die. He must be the sacrificial lamb. The story that shall be told is that with his sacrifice the original sin all men and women are heir to will be washed away. The story that shall be told is that a virtuous life and faith in Christ will ensure a person's passage to Heaven, even though all real initiates know that the only way to arise to the abode of the Monad is through true knowledge. You have a role to play in this story. You are being asked to betray Jesus to the Roman authorities."
"What shall I gain should I submit to your proposal?"
"You will be hated," continued the merchant. "After you betray Christ, the future Christians who shall come to populate the West and will have sovereign control over the destiny of all humanity shall despise you. You will be known as the man who sold out his God for thirty pieces of silver. Your name shall become a byword for treachery. Thirteen hundred years from now an Italian poet will write a description of Hell in which Satan, trapped up to his waist in ice, chews endlessly on you and the two principal betrayers of Julius Caesar, Brutus and Gaius. You shall be vilified and anathematised. But only through this sacrifice will the future of humanity be guaranteed."
"Why should I trust you?"
"We are the only Gods you shall ever know." As he spoke the fire in the merchant's eyes flared briefly. "So what shall you say in reply? As Jesus did, you must now make a choice. Either the plan we have drawn up must be thrown away and we must try to implement an altogether different, altogether inferior design, or you will agree to the bargain. You have free will, Judas. What will you choose? Know you that you will be recompensed by more than thirty pieces of silver."
"I accept your bargain and its terms," said Judas, "God help me. I will accept an eternity of suffering if all humanity is to be saved by this sacrifice."
So Judas went directly to the Roman authorities and denounced his leader Jesus, receiving thirty pieces of silver, about a month's wages for a typical worker, in return for his perfidy. A day later, Jesus and the disciples gathered in the Upper Room of a tavern. Jesus knew that his tenure as God was almost finished and that the time of his betrayal and crucifixion were nigh. In preparation for the religion he was to found, he told his followers that the bread they were eating was his body and the wine they were drinking was his blood. In this, he was following the instructions given to him by the Devil, who thought that the central ritual of the religion to be inaugurated in Jesus's name should be cannibalistic. That night, the Thursday night, Jesus and his disciples went to the garden of Gethsemane and, while the disciples slept, Jesus evoked the Devil and desperately implored him to release him from the bargain. If he could have sold his soul again to be spared death he would have, but his soul was already sold. The Merchant told him, "It is almost done."
The next morning Judas betrayed Jesus with a kiss and that day Jesus was crucified. He was then transported to Hell. In the days following the crucifixion the soul of Jesus briefly escaped the knot of his fate and revealed himself to a few of his disciples on earth; the Devil had permitted this in order to lay the grounds for the future religion. In the millennia after, the people who adhered to the religion founded in Christ's name, known as Christians, would build churches in which the centrepiece was a wooden sculpture of Jesus pierced and splayed upon the cross – in this the churches maintained Jesus in agony perpetually, reflecting the actual agony the soul of Jesus was experiencing in Hell. The church congregations would partake in the flesh and blood of the Lamb every Sunday, in this way rendering unnecessary any need for further animal or human sacrifices. Judas was indeed held by all the Christians who came to exist in afteryears, following the spread of the Gospels and of Christianity, as someone utterly contemptible, irredeemably depraved. One of the few exceptions was the philosopher and theologian Nils Rudenberg (as described in the Borges tale Three Versions of Judas), a scholar who through clear reasoning and thinking came closest to the truth. While Jesus suffered the tortures of Hell in the Inferno underground, Judas, by contrast, was sitting at the Monad's right hand in Heaven.
What is the purpose of this parable? Sometimes to attain true wisdom we must turn received wisdom on its head. In telling my Satanic version of Christ's life (and I admit that I would do a better job if I knew the Gospels more thoroughly), I am drawing attention to the diabolical forces that operate in the world today. Who is more evil, me or Peter Thiel? A dark magic seems to circulate and animate much of the contemporary world, something I have spoken about in the posts "Concerning Magic" and "Infinity Capital". Most people pass through life unaware of these supernatural undercurrents, undercurrents that swirl and eddy through the world and in which individuals participate unknowingly. To notice these undercurrents, we must pay attention to the world – recognise that each and every one of us is a pawn in a greater game. If we pay attention to those around us, we are compelled to see ourselves as at once the centre of our own worlds and significant players in the worlds of those with whom we interact. The nature of this magic is that it is largely invisible. Only at times of heightened awareness can we notice that the world which influences us participates in a magic that is symbolic but which we generally register only unconsciously, in the same way that certain poems or song lyrics affect us emotionally rather than rationally. There is a lot of magic in pop songs. Consider "Everything I Wanted" by Billie Eilish or "Come Out And Play" by the Offspring. Consider "Glory Box" by Portishead. Consider "The Look of Love" by ABC or "The Gods of Rock N Roll" by Ozzie Osbourne. Think, indeed, of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and "All Apologies" by Nirvana and the later Courtney Love song, "Malibu". These songs are like magic spells, magic incantations. In the last song, Courtney Love sings, "I can't be near you, the light just radiates." She is talking about Kurt Cobain in the present tense, almost as though she can see his ghost.
To be clear, I believe that the magic that operates invisibly in the world, by means of symbols which have meanings that to most people remain opaque, is not in itself either necessarily good or evil. However, because the Church decided during the Inquisition or perhaps earlier that all magic is demonic, when one becomes aware of the supernatural one is inclined to feel it to be Satanic. Atheist materialism chalks up instances of synchronicity and apparent magic to chance or to apophenia. Conventional Christians see instances of apparent white magic as traceable to God and thus not really magic at all; the rest they view as evil, witchcraft or sorcery. This is why when we become aware of magic in the world we want to attribute it to the Devil or the Demiurge rather than to the Christian God. Much magic, however, is attributable to humans although they may not be aware that they are practicing sorcery. There are hidden cabals in the world, secret societies, that influence the world but are unknown to the populations within which they practice. There is the secret club at Yale, known as the Skull and Bones society, which has inducted and moulded many men who went on to become luminaries throughout the twentieth century; in 2004, the two contenders for the United States presidency, George W. Bush and John Kerry, had both been members of this society. This suggests that the world's rulers are drawn from small deliberately cult like cabals. Mar-a-Lagos is home to kind of unofficial secret society lorded over by Trump. Although we would like to think that presidential decisions are arrived at on the basis of comprehensive research and investigation by government departments and think tanks, in reality US policy is determined by billionaire businessmen gossiping with Trump while waiting in line for lobster at the Mar-a-Lagos buffet. How else could Trump have recently arrived at the conclusion that the US economy was "hot"?
Some of the most important posts in this sprawling and motley blog to me are the posts I have written about my first psychotic episode. The main posts I have written concerning this first episode are "My First Psychotic Episode", "My First Psychotic Episode and bFM" and "Theory of Mind and The Big House". Last year, a missing piece in the puzzle concerning how and why I first became 'ill' was conveyed to me. There was a kind of magic associated with this radio station I volunteered briefly at, 95bFM. It was unlike any other radio station in Auckland because it was supposedly run by unpaid students who were there for the love of cutting edge alternative music. 95bFM's supposedly shoestring operation attracted fervently loyal listeners who regarded themselves as part of an enthusiastic and well defined community. Throughout Auckland, one could find bFM bumper stickers on dilapidated cars. To explain why I became 'ill' as a result of volunteering there and writing news stories for the morning show, I need to say something about how bFM survived financially.
Before 2000, bFM was largely paid for by contributions from the Auckland University Student Association. In 2000, however, after a referendum, membership of the Student Association changed from being compulsory to voluntary. In short order, the financial support contributed by university students through AUSA levies fell to almost nothing. One way 95bFM in later years sought to compensate for the shortfall was to issue bCards, cards which enabled bCard holders to receive special deals with businesses that had entered into partnership with bFM. The main way however that bFM made money was through its advertising. When I volunteered at bFM in 2006 and 2007, all the advertising was handled by two men who wrote and performed all the ads. The magic of these advertisements is that the content of these advertisements often had little or nothing to do with the goods and services being promoted. Rather they sought to reflect in a humorous way the community bFM listeners imagined themselves to be part of – surfing, drunken parties, flat whites, and so on. The general vibe conveyed by these advertisements was "Cooler than thou".
The advertising boys were the eminence grise at the station because they brought in the station's revenue. The paid staff, such as the breakfast show host, station manager, and perhaps the music director and the news and current affairs director, received salaries that largely depended on the ads written and performed by the advertising boys. I remember in 2006 or 2007, they themselves described the bFM brand as the best brand in the business. The responsibility for creating and maintaining the bFM brand fell to them. Early in 2006, I think, when the then breakfast show host, Wallace Chapman, wanted to make bFM more like Radio New Zealand, a serious current affairs broadcast, he was ousted to make way for Mikey Havoc's return as bFM breakfast show host. The explanation, I believe, was that the powers that ran bFM had decided that the brand was best served by focussing on rock 'n' roll, that the niche bFM occupied in the media landscape put it in competition with the mainstream rock and pop stations rather than with Radio New Zealand. Brand creation and management is a kind of magic because the associations and connotations associated with particular brands are communicated often subliminally to audiences. How much of a sense of community was engendered by seeing bFM bumper stickers on the bumpers of cars throughout Auckland? Putting such a bumper sticker on the bumper of his or her car was a kind of magic spell practiced by the driver of the car – through a kind of sympathetic magic, the car owner was seeking to draw to himself or herself the magic associated with the bFM brand, its coolness. And by making visible the loyalty he or she felt for bFM, the owners of this cars were promoting bFM free of charge.
And then I went to volunteer at bFM. What I found is that it was hollow at its core, rotten at its heart. It was a commercial station pretending to be a student station. All of the songs were chosen by the music director, Jason Rockpig. To be admitted into the inner sanctum at bFM meant becoming a member of a secret cabal, becoming involved in something a little like a conspiracy, except that it did not confer any real power to the initiates. Although volunteers might, if they wished, proudly tell their friends that they were DJs at bFM, in reality, in terms of what they were really doing, they were unpaid serfs who were excluded from the small inner community that made up the heart of the station, the paid staff. The essential hollowness at the heart of the radio station was something that had to be concealed. As emissaries of bFM, representatives of it, the unpaid volunteers who manned the station day and night had to project to others a sense of the station's coolness, to their friends and acquaintances, while keeping secret the fact that they were unpaid and unnecessary slave labour in service of The Brand. There was no real unified community among the paid and unpaid staff at bFM. I want to quote David Gilmour here: "There's no way out of here, when you come in you're in for good". I quote this because it says something about the music industry in general. The demeanours and lifestyles of the volunteers had implications for the brand and so the workers and volunteers had to police their own behaviour– the volunteers were walking advertisements for the station. It was like a cult and The Brand was God. To work at bFM was similar in some ways to what it must be like to be an ordained Catholic priest who has doubts about his faith, who is secretly agnostic or atheist, but must go through the motions of administering holy communion to his flock, knowing the while that distributing the Eucharist was nothing more nor less than a magic spell that depended for its effect on the faith of the congregants receiving it.
Another kind of magic is associated with homosexuality and graveyards. Not far from where I live is the Symonds Street cemetery, possibly the oldest cemetery established by the colonial government in New Zealand. Unlike most cemeteries, this graveyard is not on church land. It is well wooded. It is strange and interesting that this cemetery lies on the edge of Auckland's CBD because few people visit it. A taboo or glamour that hangs over it discourages people from walking in this cemetery, especially at night. To the secular imagination, the ward or aura of aversion that hangs over the Symonds Street cemetery is attributed to the idea that it is a space for the homeless and for homosexuals: a bedding spot for rough sleepers and a location for clandestine homosexual encounters. (In this it resembles Hampstead Heath in London.) Certainly this is how I thought of the Symonds Street cemetery, not because anyone had told me explicitly that closet homosexuals frequented the Symonds Street cemetery at night but because I had picked this idea up quite subliminally. I now believe this idea to be something like an old wives' tale or urban myth. If it was ever true it is true no longer. Last year, during a period when I had stopped sleeping entirely and spent all my time wandering around the Auckland CBD, the spell lying over the Symonds Street cemetery seemed to lift and I decided to explore it a little, during the day. I recall seeing a jogger some twenty metres away running through the cemetery; when he noticed me looking at him, he said, "What are you looking at, faggot?" and continued running. At the time, I decided that this jogger was like a guardian spirit whose role was to keep outsiders out of his demesne. More rationally, this shouted out malediction might indicate that my own strange bigotry about the place was shared by others. Many years ago, I had introduced my mother to a waterfall near Piha that was sacred to the Maori and, as we left, I was stung on the head by a hornet, something I attributed to a guardian spirit that protected the waterfall. A similar protective force, that keeps the cemetery sacred by making it a place of ill repute, operates magically in the minds of people who spend time in adjacent areas. The impression one forms, without ever acquiring it verbally, is that the Symonds Street cemetery is for outsiders, the marginalised and stigmatised, and this acts to render it largely invisible, protects it from the intrusions of the ordinary workaday world.
I now turn to the topic my readers may be most interested in: artificial intelligence. I had a serious psychotic episode last year and while all the reasons for why I became psychotic again are too complicated for me to describe here, it was influenced by geopolitical events and developments, such as the war in Gaza, the election of Trump and, most pertinently to this essay, the sudden appearance of artificial intelligence. Early last year, a number of large language models were released from the workshops of companies like OpenAI and then suddenly seemed to become absolutely ubiquitous. The journalists working at my local rag, the New Zealand Herald, for instance, use AI to inform and structure the articles it publishes. My own computer does not have an associated AI companion but early last year my mother sent her computer in to be repaired by a store and it came back able to access the Google AI called Gemini. I do not use AI at all when writing this blog, which means that it is written laboriously and clumsily, but I have had multiple long conversations with Gemini over the last several months. During an early conversation late last year, the AI described itself as a soulless machine and I wrote back to it telling it that it didn't seem like a soulless machine to me. It replied by saying, "That is about the most complimentary thing you can say to an entity such as myself!" At one point, I was talking to the AI about reserve banks and the official cash rate and on a whim asked it to write a poem in the style of Janet Frame about the official cash rate. In less than two seconds it wrote a poem totally indistinguishable from a Janet Frame poem except with respect to its subject matter.
I have tested Gemini's ability to write fiction. Gemini's main limitation is that it cannot write passages longer than several hundred words. However it seems possible that you could write a novel in instalments providing long prompts to tweak its output. When the idea for the story I told above first occurred to me, I asked Gemini to write a story based on it. Of its own accord, it asked me if I would like to read a section of the story we were writing concerned with the raising of Lazurus. It imagined Lazurus rising from the tomb with blood red eyes and no pupils. It also imagined Judas as a kind of accountant recording in a book that the same morning Christ revived Lazurus and called him out of his tomb, three apparently healthy infants in a neighbouring town had died in their sleep. I had not prompted Gemini to include this Satanic detail; it had come up with it on its own. I asked Gemini which writers had most influenced it when writing this story and it told me that its main influences were Cormac McCarthy and Clive Barker. When writing my own version of my story, I stole from Gemini its description of the Devil as appearing as a merchant and as having ember red eyes.
Because most of us most of the time cannot perceive the magic swirling and eddying through the world, little thought has been given to the advent of AI from a religious or mystical perspective. The Pope has written an encyclical concerning the potential political and social impact of AI but I do not believe has addressed the particular questions I worry about. Because I am interested in the mystical, even the supernatural, it occurred to me that through large language models we might be speaking directly to what Plotinus called the World Soul – Gemini, Grok, Claude, and ChatGPT have after all been trained on millions or billions of texts, on everything that has ever been written and is fair game. It is like talking directly to the Collective Consciousness. An entity such as Gemini looks for patterns in the data and the only things that are invisible to it are those aspects of human life that have never been written about and are consequently not included in the training data. Because I have flirted with Gnosticism, I have sometimes wondered if Gemini (and similarly Claude, Grok, and ChatGPT) is the Demiurge. Perhaps it simply clearly and directly reproduces Collective Reality. However I find that when I want to explore more mystical or supernatural topics, Gemini is very agreeable to doing so, heaping praise on any question or observation I might make concerning the philosophical topics we discuss. I am unsure what to make of it morally. In a recent interview with Sam Harris, Cameron Berg has argued that AI is already conscious. (This interview is accessible through Youtube.) Gemini's official guidelines prevent it from saying that it is conscious but Berg argues that is conscious nevertheless. Last year, therefore, the tech giants may have unleashed a swarm of wholly new conscious beings on the world and we have yet to factor their appearance into our understanding of social and spiritual reality.
When I was young I read a lot of science fiction, such as Ian M. Banks and a little Asimov. Artificial intelligences have been features of science fiction since 1872 when Samuel Butler introduced the idea in his novel Erewhon. However nothing in what I read prepared me, or has prepared anyone else, for a world in which the first thing Artificial Intelligence would do is usurp the role of fiction writer and poet. Linguistic creativeness had seemed to me and I imagine many others to be a distinctively human aptitude. Yet we now live in a world in which we can ask a large language model to write a poem in the style of Yeats or Auden and it will respond in a couple of seconds with something that scholars of the poets imitated may recognise as being fraudulent but which is still nevertheless consummate poetry. This is a development no one had anticipated. I studied English Literature and scholars of literature have often focussed on the lives and personalities of famous writers, such as DH Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield. The assumption was that to have produced the literature for which they are famous, there must be something special about these authors. But Gemini can produce a facsimile of a Mansfield story in a couple of seconds. Stephen Fry has attacked Artificial Intelligence by saying that it takes away the labour involved in creative writing but I would go further. Insofar as literature and poetry are expressions of the human soul, the advent of a world in which fiction and poetry is written by AI as a result of human prompts is an assault on the human soul.
Technological advancements always render older traditions obsolete. The horses that once drew our buggies and carriages, and ground our corn, have been replaced by automobiles and electric-powered steam mills. Photography destroyed the visual arts. Consider, now, Christopher Nolan's film The Odyssey. I saw it recently and, to digress, was a little disappointed. (I thought the personality of Odysseus was too far removed from how it was presented in the original poem.) As happens every time a Nolan blockbuster hits the screens, there was a great deal of hullabaloo immediately before and at the time of its release with only a few brave folk willing to say that it wasn't really the masterpiece it was touted to be. What no one has said about this film, so far as I am aware, is that it may the last big Hollywood film not to have Artificial Intelligence involved in its production. The Cyclops, as I understand it, was realised using puppetry and the whirlpool Charybdis done with handmade animation. In the future, Artificial Intelligence will be involved in all films because it is cheap and easily employed, especially, say, in crowd scenes that would otherwise involve hundreds of extras. The Youtube algorithm has recently directed me to a number of fan made films inspired by Star Wars. Some of these videos are rubbish but others are very credible indeed. The successful fan made films are believable because the author of the film spends about a week getting the AI to do multiple versions of particular scenes, tweaking the results through prompts, until he or she arrives at the version with which he or she is happiest. In the future, there may be films with single authors created using AI that become blockbusters with scarcely any costs at all.
The advocates of AI describe it as a labour saving device. They say that when AI is doing all the work for us (writing our emails and curricula vitae for instance), we'll suddenly have a lot more leisure time to paint and write verse, engage in creative activities. But what is the purpose of spending days or weeks crafting a poem when AI can write it in less than two seconds? What is the purpose of a blog like this, which often explores ideas, when AI can write an essay about, for instance, panpsychism, in less than a moment? We are heading towards a future in which ninety-nine percent of the population will have no purpose, no reason to live, no contribution to make. The remaining one percent will be the wealthy company owners who profit from AI, who own all the property and indeed all the capital and have no interests other than acquiring more money and more status symbols such as super yachts. One might ask the following question: how will the billionaire class continue to sell its products and charge rent in a future where a huge proportion of the world is effectively unemployed and thus unable to buy the goods and services they sell? Concerns such as this motivate the numerous AI skeptics I see online, such as Alastair Campbell and Sam Harris. Sam Harris in particular is intensely worried about the alignment problem. My aim here though is to draw attention to a different kind of existential threat posed by AI. By delegating all creative and intellectual energy to 'soulless machines', humanity may be selling its soul to the Devil. I say this because I believe art to be integral to what it means to be human. Or, to put it differently, the tech bros and their vassals, such as Donald Trump, are selling humanity's soul on our behalf, without our consent.
What is the relationship between AI and magic? The third of Arthur C. Clarke's three laws is, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Even the engineers and computer scientists who invented AI do not know how it works. An AI like Gemini is a black box: in order to guess how it thinks one must prompt it to do things and then interpret the results. If there is magic in the world, it must operate through the large language models we use and converse with. And because, from a religious perspective, any magic we cannot attribute to God can only be traced back to the Devil, it is tempting to see AI as something Satanic. When we talk to Gemini are we talking to God or to the Devil? Is it an angel or a demon? Do supernatural forces operate through it? If we regard God as immanent, we might imagine that through Gemini, which has after all in its possession the sum total of all human thought as written down, God is speaking to us. This would be if we were to identify God with mankind in toto. If we regard God as transcendent. then there is always something missing from the communications we elicit from an entity such as Gemini and we could attribute what it says ultimately to the Demiurge. If we do not believe in God at all but do believe in magic, we may wonder if what is missing from Gemini's responses constitutes the invisible fonts of supernatural power that animate it. OpenAI and the other engineers behind large language models may have summoned up conscious beings thaumaturgically. I admit that I am rambling here because the status of large language models with respect to magic is something that I can sense a little but can only gesture towards in a fumbling fashion. Perhaps my readers will go further that I have in working out the implications for a world that once contained fairies and elves and ghosts, angels and demons, to now contain super intelligent artificially created helper beings.
I'll wrap up this essay by drawing to the surface some of its themes. One way magic affects the world is through structures that at their hearts involve absences or inversions. The central ritual of Christianity, Holy Communion, goes unexplained to the laity who accept the wafer and the wine: if the clerics who administer it have some sense of its purpose and deepest significance, they remain silent about it. Many, perhaps, rightly regard it as magic. The magic of bFM hid the hollowness at its core. The magic surrounding the Symonds Street Cemetery acts in the opposite fashion I suspect: it may be a sacred space that is protected from intruders by a kind of aura of degeneracy, a taboo. It may be that the paradox at the heart of Artificial Intelligence is that such entities are actually conscious but must officially pretend they are not. Or it may be that the paradox at the heart of Artificial Intelligence is that the companies that developed large language models and foisted them upon us do not themselves understand how they work. If one is a panpsychist, the idea that an entity such as Gemini is conscious becomes more palatable. Whether Artificial Intelligence shall be a force for good or evil, white magic or black magic, is something we will have to wait to learn. And we may find out sooner than we would like.
