Artificial Intelligence
is a Horror Story

Imagine your body—flesh and blood, muscle and bone—cast aside as mere refuse, and your brain “immersed in a liquid of the nature of cerebro-spinal fluid” inside a cylinder. Thus goes the dark prophecy of Irish physicist John Desmond Bernal nearly a hundred years ago. Bernal believed that our bodies, those paltry shells, were not long for this world. We are destined, he posited, for a new life “more plastic, more directly controllable and at the same time more variable and more permanent than that produced by the triumphant opportunism of nature.”

For most of us, Bernal’s vision of progress is a horror story.

In a manner no less bodily, Generative AI is also the stuff of horror—and as with any great story of fear, we are the likely victims, and sometimes the creators.

“The progress of the future,” Bernal argued, “depends no longer on physiological evolution but on the reaction of intelligence on a material universe.” His stilted syntax does not specify a human intelligence. People, after all, are flighty. We sleep. We dream. We tell lies, and we love.

We also die. All of us. We are born, and then the biological timer begins. And it is through that often stressful, sometimes beautiful brevity itself that we affirm our humanity.

Perhaps Bernal, a brilliant scientist whose work with x-ray crystallography led to crucial innovations in the field, was merely engaging in a futuristic fable. But like others, he appeared willing to say farewell to the flesh in favor of a soulless eternity.

When ChatGPT was announced nearly four years ago, I first thought it was a novelty—albeit one that didn’t interest me. Soon it became an annoyance, and then a danger.

As generative AI infects our daily life at an ever more rapid rate, it would help us to imagine unfettered AI as an incarnation of bodily horror. Although I’m an avowed fan of supernatural horror films, the greatest terror in those narratives is often domestic and prosaic. Consider the permeation of evil into the MacNeil home in The Exorcist. The upstairs scenes of Father Karras and Father Merrin in battle with the demon are profane and visceral, but I always go back to a frenetic moment in the kitchen.

I’ve come to believe that AI is a form of horror, and its most pernicious element is that it tricks us into believing that it helps us when it actually hurts us.

Burke Dennings, an eccentric film director, is drunk during a party, and harasses Karl, the family caretaker. Burke asks: “Tell me, was it public relations you did for the Gestapo or community relations?” Karl dismisses Burke, noting that he is Swiss, not German, and leaves the room—Burke’s quip of “Nazi bastard” either unheard or ignored. The party continues, but moments later Karl’s hands are around Burke’s throat. “I will kill you,” he says, and squeezes until the men are separated. Burke laughs, claps his hands, and says: “What’s for dessert?”

The scene might be a moment of drunken irreverence. Yet the film has established that the MacNeil home is suffused with evil. That evil manifests in shocking moments of exorcism, but also in moments of earthly anger. Cinema is replete with great body horror—Possession, Martyrs, The Substance—but we need not see gore to encounter such embodied horror. The short, sharp argument in the MacNeil kitchen is an example of the upstairs demon pervading all bodies through hate.

When later in the film the exasperated priests seek to understand the violence against young Regan, Father Merrin conjectures: “I think the point is to make us despair. To see ourselves as animal and ugly. To make us reject the possibility that God could love us.” The ultimate terror of The Exorcist is that we, our bodies, are not enough. We are not worthy of existence. It’s a frightening thought.

I’ve come to believe that AI is a form of horror, and its most pernicious element is that it tricks us into believing that it helps us when it actually hurts us. AI has become a part of our daily lives, whether or not we wish it to be—and in doing so, AI has become part of our cognitive rhythms. Every Google search requires us to leap past an AI overview. Every communication with a company requires us to bypass a bot promising assistance but instead providing frustration.

AI was made by us and cultivated by us. Sure, we can—and should!—criticize the billionaire technocrats and shortsighted politicians and compromised institutions that developed and abetted this cultural contaminant, but we must be aware of our participation in the machine.

We might even consider AI demonic in a way, if the demonic is cast in terms of that which strips us of our natural dignity. If Baudelaire was correct that the devil’s greatest trick was convincing us that he does not exist, then our world’s wholesale acceptance of AI feels downright evil.

We don’t have to live this way. We can continue to do the difficult work of creation; we can participate in the beautiful struggle of art and literature, work that arises from our own hearts and hands. Each poem, each sketch, each handwritten journal entry in a notebook or dashed on a napkin is an act of resistance.

We can stand against AI by avoiding euphemistic language when speaking about it. Evil breeds and pervades when we do not bear witness against it, such as when we allow AI to infect our schools and workplaces through the seductions of ease and convenience. AI is spiritually debilitating, and the technocrats have managed to convince us that the battle is lost, that we must smile as we devolve into Bernal’s cylinders.

This Halloween, let us go out into the night—perhaps buoyed by the temporary personae of masks and monsters—and find the will to battle against the end of our bodies.