In all the discussions being had about artificial intelligence (AI), and particularly about its role in education, there remains one largely overlooked or dismissed perspective. While arguably old-fashioned, this approach has the virtue of simplicity and clarity, and probably more practical utility in determining how we respond to it. AI is evil.
However you phrase it, it is plain bad and nasty and will do only harm to people. And if this comes across as spittle-flecked and paranoid, the fact remains – you can look 'em up – that AI fulfils so many of the formal theological and philosophical definitions of evil, across times and nations, that whether you believe in the distinct, metaphysical reality of the diabolic or not is almost moot.
For high school teachers like myself, and anyone involved in encouraging reading and writing and thinking, it is becoming clear that this is not a change in a pedagogical paradigm, but more likely the end of personality and the interior mental life altogether. If so, the only way to counter-attack it will be with divine assistance; as with all things vampiric, to wave a crucifix at it.
Parents of all religions can demand collectively that their children are protected from AI as a matter of principle, and faith schools should treat its use as they would a mortal sin, with its purveyors eligible for the millstone treatment.
The only context in which AI should be mentioned in schools should be in the same breath as PSHE cautions about online grooming by paedophiles. Children should be told: if and when ChatGPT invites you to "ask anything", your only answer should be: No, nothing; just begone, avaunt; in the name of God, return to the Pit from whence ye came.
The clues are all there regarding the satanic flavour of AI. Summoned and invoked, it tempts us with its seductive ease, is biddable and keen to help, even if its "creations" are only ever eerie, twisted parodies. It may even do or say something apparently worthwhile on occasion. "To win us to our harm," warns Banquo, "the instruments of darkness tell us truths."
But while an AI platform may present itself as oracular, its true name is Legion. Large Language Models channel the voice of the mob, blindly obeying the law of large numbers and big, if bullshit, data. And like any crowd, when it is not outright wrong and prejudiced, it is mediocre and forgettable, though more commonly both banal and evil. (You just know ChatGPT would have advocated for Barabbas.)
If the perennially false god is the vox populi, to use AI in the classroom is to teach children that received wisdom is wisdom, and that the average is the best it gets. AI predicates the tyranny of the majority, the horror of groupthink. On the theme of rival gods, the AI industry is certainly devout in the worship of one deity: Mammon. Tech companies reach out to schools with the same noble purpose that county-lines do, except in this case, classroom teachers are required to act as their middlemen and procurers.
There are other peculiarly grotesque aspects to AI that would make it a good fit in a painting by Hieronymous Bosch: voracious in its data-scraping appetite, cramming its maw with all it can, coprophagic on its own "slop".
It is probably too optimistic to hope it poisons itself before it takes us with it. The BSE/vCJD outbreak of the 1980s and '90s was brought on by similar damnable circularity, feeding mechanically-rendered carcasses back to their own species, mixed in with others’ faeces. What resulted – those poor staggering, drooling, "mad" cows – are like a waking, prophetic Old Testament cattle dream, prefiguring children becoming ever more haplessly cretinous as AI becomes a staple of their school diet.
There is a kind of ritual abuse inherent in the black mass of an AI-"assisted" classroom: an intimate mutilation, a gelding of the fertile, virile young mind, exiling them from the possibility of pleasure and real creation.
AI users stand uselessly by, cognitively cuckolded, watching while something does their thinking for them. They yield up their holy duty of exclusive care for our minds, that unique part with which we are commanded to love the Lord. Implicitly, to use AI is to opt for mindlessness, which is a choice many may wish to make. But it is a choice for adulthood. In the meantime, the school that promotes AI is like a farmer applying a rubber band around a lamb's scrotum, but with the elastor clamped around the student’s neck. It may take weeks, months, but the effect is the same. The organ withers and drops off.
Happily, my current school keeps a stern and steely eye on students' use of AI. But this is not enough. If ever there was a cause for an ecumenical multi-faith crusade, it is against AI, and specifically in education. It would be nice to see the Church in the lead, raising the Banner of Man against Silicon Valley.
This benign holy war could draw on the intellectual tradition of Christian scepticism of technology, typified by 20th-century figures like Jacques Ellul and Simone Weil, from whom we should take our motto and battle-cry: "Nothing is less instructive than a machine."
This need not be a fringe belief or a utopian fantasy. Already the tech-skeptic movement grows and gets results. Concerned parents, visionary headteachers and even a number of national governments have succeeded in banning smartphones in schools, disproving the moaning that such laws would be unworkable. Teachers and pupils are happier and more productive.
The same can yet happen with AI, especially if Christians, Muslims, Jews and other faith groups all join in saying: We do not want our children bowing down to a graven image.
Parents, the next time you hear the forked tongues lobbying for an embrace of this new technology, consider that this may be the Lord of the Flies coming right into your children's classrooms – but no longer as just as a Year 9 text.
The wider world might be lost but we can yet exorcise this unclean spirit from education.
Photo: A man shows his Saint Death tattoos during a celebration at a sanctuary in Santa Maria Cuautepec, Tultitlan, Mexico, 5 August 2018. During the festival, people venerate Saint Death, which is probably a syncretism between Middle American and Catholic beliefs, although strongly condemned by the Catholic Church as satanic. (Photo credit should read PEDRO PARDO/AFP via Getty Images.)
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