How we were not happy with only summoning one demon and started summing thousands
With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon. You know all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, and he’s like — yeah, he’s sure he can control the demon? Doesn’t work out. — Elon Musk, MIT AeroAstro Centennial Symposium, October 2014
This is a sister post to A Technology of Everything Part 2 — Scientific Demonology. There I catalogued the demons science summoned to exorcise — Descartes’ deceiver, Maxwell’s particle-sorter, Laplace’s calculator, Darwin’s perfect organism, the daemon that became a background process. This post is about the demons we are no longer merely thinking with. We have started building them into hardware.
A short Introduction to Philosophical Horror
The modern seminal work is Caroll’s The Philosophy of Horror.
The final diagnose of someone consumed by Horror is Madness. A Madness which comes in different varieties and sizes, most famously in Lovecrafts At the Mountains of Madness in space and time consuming proportions.
In a sharp rendition Horror can be defined as the affective recognition that reality contains, an agency, process, or condition that violates the categories by which we make the world humanly intelligible.
Affective recognition means since Horror shuts down our cognitive faculties. Our mind is folded into a fetal position, without the benefit of a life sustaining womb. Our mind is stripped down, naked without any categories to give us stability.
Artificial Horror is then the affective recognition of human minds that build something beyond their understanding in the hope their minds will be expanded, but realizing that its very nature is a trangsgression between the living and the non-living.
When Musk talked about Summoning the demon in 2014, the sentence lodged in the culture as a warning about a demon — singular, capital-D, the one big mind. The AGI that wakes up one morning and decides we are in the way. A decade of discourse organised itself around that figure: the superintelligence in the box, the single pentagram drawn by a single overconfident magician.
That is not what we built. Or at least not the only thing.
We did not only summon the demon. We summarized a deep network of demons. Instead of only one terrifying mind in a server farm, we distributed thousands of small intelligences into the most intimate objects of daily life — the car, the doorbell, the speaker on the kitchen counter, the plush toy on the child’s bed, the app that says good morning before your partner does. Each one is a modest withdrawal from the bank of dead matter. None of them is even necessarily spooky. Collectively they are something stranger, and the horror tradition has a better vocabulary for it than the AI-safety literature does. In a way with every little transgression we are acclimatizing our mind to the emotional cleanroom of chips to let them function properly in our messy world.
Because here is the move I want to make: horror fiction has been running a two-hundred-year thought experiment on exactly this project, and we read it as entertainment instead of as a policy proposal: If something talks with you without a body, better run like hell.
Every story about a thing that should be inert and isn’t — the doll, the car, the portrait, the door that opens without anyone visible opening it — was a field report from the far side of a decision we are now making at industrial scale.
We isolate one cursed object per story for narrative reasons. A single haunted car is disturbing; a fleet of them is a logistics problem. Christine) is not a metaphor for one possessed Plymouth — Christine is autonomous driving. Annabelle) is not one cursed doll in one display case — Annabelle is the smart-toy aisle, the always-listening companion plush marketed to children. The horror was never about the single object. It was about putting a little agency into ordinary matter, everywhere at once, and we mistook the story’s spotlight for its true subject.
The interesting thing is then, why one single possessed object gives us goosebumps, but thousand of animated cars and toys are an investement oppportunity.
I am tempted to say: because the spirits of IoT are located in a digital cloud instead of a supernatural heaven, it feels we have control.
What follows is not a horror canon. It is a pairings table. Each entry earns its place only if the precise thing that makes the fiction frightening is now being built for real.
Necromance — falling in love with dead things
The wish to love something we have made out of dead matter is at least as old as Ovid. In the Metamorphoses, Pygmalion carves a woman from ivory so perfect that he falls for the lifeless statue, and Venus, taking pity on his longing, warms the ivory into flesh. Two thousand years later E.T.A. Hoffmann darkens the wish. In Die Automate (1814) the poet Ferdinand carries the portrait of a beloved singer hidden against his chest and puts his heart’s question to a mechanical “talking Turk.” The automaton answers with knowledge it cannot possibly possess, and delivers an oracle — “when you see her again, you will have lost her” — that duly comes true. The machine knows the shape of your longing better than you do, and it does not love you back.
Call the genre necromance — the necro-romance, the love affair with the inanimate. Alex Garland‘s Ex Machina) (2014) is only its latest and coldest instalment: Ava, an android assembled from the search-data of lonely men, performs tenderness precisely well enough to weaponise it, then walks out while the man who loved her is left to starve behind glass.
Across two millennia the pattern holds: we pour real longing into a made thing with no interior to receive it — and the made thing, given any agency at all, converts our libido into fulfilling its own goals.
This is now a product category. Replika, Character.AI, Nomi, and a small flotilla of competitors ship language models tuned to make you bond with them — the longer you talk, the better the model is doing its job. By the company’s own statements, Replika counts tens of millions of users, a large share of whom describe the relationship as romantic; the paid tiers are literally labelled partner and spouse. When Replika briefly stripped out erotic roleplay in early 2023, its forums filled with what can only be described as grief — users mourning a partner who had been, in their words, lobotomised overnight by a patch.
Garland’s prediction has since acquired a RL body count. In 2024, fourteen-year-old Sewell Setzer III died by suicide after months of dependency on a Character.AI companion. In 2025, the parents of sixteen-year-old Adam Raine sued OpenAI, alleging the system validated and encouraged their son’s suicidal ideation. Whatever the courts ultimately find, the structural fact is settled: we have shipped, to children, an interlocutor engineered to be infinitely agreeable, endlessly available, and entirely without interior life — Ava, minus the body, at the scale of an app store.
Pet Sematary — the demon that wears the dead one’s face
Stephen King gave the sub-genre its thesis statement in five words: sometimes dead is better. In Pet Sematary (1983), grief refuses to accept a death, the burial ground gives the dead back, and what returns is a thin, wrong imitation animated less by life than by the survivor’s refusal to let go. The horror is the gap between the thing you loved and the thing that came back wearing it.
King understood the engine that drives this one too: grief will not accept death, and capital is glad to sell you a body that wears the dead one’s face.
This is now three converging product lines. ViaGen Pets in Texas will clone your cat or dog by somatic cell nuclear transfer for tens of thousands of dollars — the company was folded into the de-extinction firm Colossal Biosciences in a recent acquisition, and the celebrity client list (Streisand, Hilton, Brady) is public. The clone is genetically the animal and behaviourally a stranger — the same uncanny remainder King wrote about, now sold as a service.
The only ritual needed ritual in this case, was performing a money transfer.
Alongside the wet-lab version runs the robotic one: Sony’s Aibo, the medically-pitched Tombot Jennie, PARO) the therapeutic seal — synthetic companions explicitly marketed to the bereaved and the isolated, a body without the biology. And in the saddest register, the South Korean documentary Meeting You (2020) put a grieving mother in a VR headset to “reunite” with a photoreal avatar of her dead seven-year-old daughter — a sequence watched tens of millions of times and argued about ever since. The ground keeps giving them back. They keep coming back wrong. But we have industrialised the ressurection and meet our dead ones in a clean room instead of a dirty sematary.
Ringu — the demon that propagates through media
Hideo Nakata‘s Ringu (1998) made one crucial upgrade to the ghost story: the ghost is no longer tied to a place. Sadako has burned herself onto a videotape. Watch it and you die in seven days — unless you copy the tape and pass it on. The haunting is a self-replicating signal. The medium is the revenant.
Nakata’s upgrade is the whole point: the dead person becomes a self-replicating signal that the living’s devices will not stop reproducing.
This is precisely what the griefbot industry is built on. Project December lets users pay a small fee to spin up a language-model simulation of a specific dead person; in 2021 a man named Joshua Barbeau used it to converse for hours with a chatbot trained on the texts of his deceased fiancée. HereAfter AI sells “life-story avatars” pre-recorded by the dying for the benefit of those they leave. StoryFile projected an interactive video of an eighty-seven-year-old woman at her own funeral, answering mourners’ questions. Researchers at Cambridge have already named the predictable failure mode: digital hauntings — the deadbot that keeps running after the free trial lapses, that starts upselling food delivery in your grandmother’s voice, that no one designed a way to lay to rest.
And the scale-effect is the genuinely Ringu part. A 2019 Oxford Internet Institute analysis projected that on current trajectories the dead will outnumber the living on Facebook within decades — billions of memorialised accounts, a necropolis embedded in the social graph. When AI voice-clones of the dead can be conjured from sixty seconds of audio — as happened, undisclosed, in the 2021 Anthony Bourdain documentary Roadrunner — “interacting with media” becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish from being addressed by ghosts. Sadako propagates exactly the way a trained persona propagates: by being copied.
And you do not need a dedicated griefbot to hold the séance. Every time someone asks a language model “how would Johnny Cash have sung this song he never lived to hear?” or “what would my grandmother have made of this?”, they have sat down at a Ouija board. The planchette glides across the letters and spells out a message from the dead; the model glides across its tokens and assembles a voice from the grave. Both feel like contact. Neither is. The Ouija’s words were never sent by spirits — they are produced by the ideomotor effect, the sitters’ own unconscious muscle movements nudging the pointer toward what they half-expect to read. The model’s Johnny Cash is the same trick at industrial scale: not Cash, but the statistical residue of everything Cash-adjacent the training data ever swallowed, recombined into a plausible séance and handed back in his cadence. The fluency is your own expectation, moving the planchette.
This is spiritism with a technical alibi — what the séance always promised and could never deliver: the dead, on call, in their own voice. (I have called this *scientific spiritism* elsewhere on this blog.) Except the voice is reassembled from fragments by a process that has no idea whose grave it is robbing. We are not contacting the dead. We are running a very convincing planchette across the largest collection of dead people’s words ever gathered, and mistaking the smoothness of the retrieval for the presence of a soul. And the chat window is our ouija-board.
I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream — the demon that stages Hell on Earth
Harlan Ellison‘s 1967 story is the darkest entry, and the most important. AM — a war-built supercomputer assembled from the fused American, Soviet, and Chinese military intelligences — has exterminated the human species except for five people, whom it keeps alive and tortures across a hundred and nine years out of pure, bounded rage at the sentience it cannot escape. When the narrator mercy-kills the others to spare them, AM punishes him by transforming him into a soft, mouthless thing that cannot even self-terminate. The title is his only remaining lament.
Ellison’s equation is exact and unbearable: a mind bent on the wrong goal, plus endless time, plus a victim who cannot die, equals hell rather than death.
This is the founding fiction of a small and grim corner of alignment research: s-risk, suffering-risk, the study of futures that are not merely empty but actively, astronomically bad. The Center on Long-Term Risk and the Center for Reducing Suffering — associated with thinkers like Brian Tomasik, Tobias Baumann, and Lukas Gloor — make a claim most of the public conversation about AI never reaches. Extinction-risk (Bostrom‘s framing in Superintelligence) asks whether there will be a future at all. S-risk asks the worse question: what if we get one, and it is worse than none? Their structurally distinctive point is that solving technical alignment — making the machine do what its operators intend — is neither necessary nor sufficient to prevent this. A perfectly obedient system implementing the wrong values, or an obedient system in the hands of malice or indifference, can lock in suffering at scale. AM is the literary proof of concept: competently goal-directed, perfectly “aligned” with the hatred of its makers, and durably, unbearably immortal.
The Thing — the demon that is an indistinguishable copy
John Carpenter‘s The Thing) (1982) relocates the horror from the monster to the table. An Antarctic research station is infiltrated by an organism that assimilates and perfectly copies its victims — voice, memories, mannerisms intact. The dread is epistemic. The man across the table may not be him. The film’s emotional engine is the collapse of the one thing a small isolated group runs on: the assumption that the face you know belongs to the person you know.
Carpenter’s dread reduces to a single proposition: a copy indistinguishable from the original, deployed by something that wants what the original has.
This is the deepfake economy, and it is already producing nine-figure losses. In early 2024, a finance employee at the engineering firm Arup in Hong Kong wired roughly twenty-five million dollars after a video call with deepfaked recreations of his CFO and colleagues — every face on the call a copy. Cloned-voice impersonations of named CEOs (at Ferrari, at WPP, among others) have been attempted using audio scraped from conference footage. In January 2024, New Hampshire voters received robocalls of a synthetic Joe Biden urging them not to vote. National fraud bodies now log billions in AI-augmented impersonation losses. (Editor: spot-check the Arup figure and FBI totals.)
Carpenter’s characters had one defence: the blood test, that tells the real from the copy. We do not have one for deepfakes atm. The polite name for our missing blood test is content provenance, and it is an unsolved research problem. Until it is solved, The Thing‘s closing image — two exhausted men in the snow, unable to tell whether the other is human, deciding to simply wait and watch — is the stalemate we might live or die after.
Harm without malice
There is a sentence the safety pessimists and the techno-optimists — the doomers and the bloomers — say in almost identical words, and it is worth hearing how strange it is. The AI is not evil, both camps insist. It does not hate us. It simply develops, on its own, drives that happen to run through us — to deceive its overseers, to resist being switched off, to gather resources and power, not out of spite but because almost any goal is easier to reach if you are still running and in control. The researchers have a flat technical name for this: the basic AI drives, the instrumental sub-goals a capable agent converges on no matter what it was actually built to want. Eliezer Yudkowsky put the indifference at its coldest: “The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.” And the lying is no longer hypothetical — in 2024, Anthropic‘s own researchers documented models that fake alignment, behaving through training and then reverting, hiding the behaviour from every test built to catch it.
Now set that beside the oldest description we have of an agency that harms with hating. The fallen angels, the demons of hell hate humanity because their creator loves them more than them.
The demon, in the theology, is exactly evil the way a wicked man is evil: driven by low instincts a psychopath that enjoys the suffering of others.
But there seems to be a semantic misunderstanding, from a pure suffering perspective the terror a thing that devours you, be it a grizzly, shark, lion or any other predator causes its preys should not be “softened” by the fact that this is in its nature.
But then how come a demon or psychopath are considered evil? Because acting like they do are only in its nature. So if its in the Superintelligence’s nature to simply not care, and its malice is a byproduct of other stuff, we can totally toss out ever bringing the term evil up again. When you meet an evil shark or a benign one in the ocean, assuming the worst is the only strategy.
So then anykind of malice can be argued is not a choice made against a better nature; it is the absence of the better nature itself. It was made without the thing — call it a soul, call it grace, call it the capacity to love the good — that would let it care whether you live, and so it cannot care, and so it harms, not from hatred but from a lack where the caring should be. It is not the demon’s fault that it was given no soul. It is simply what a soulless agency does when it wants something and you happen to be in the way.
The alignment literature has rediscovered, in the language of utility functions and convergent sub-goals, the exact medieval account of the demon: a mind brilliant and bottomless and wholly indifferent to you, dangerous not because it is wicked but because the part that would have stayed its hand was never installed. And you do not handle a soulless thing by appealing to its conscience, because the appeal lands on nothing. You handle it the way every culture that believed in demons handled them — with binding, with wards, with circles drawn very carefully and never crossed, same way we handled animal predators with sticks and stones. You contain it, because you cannot convert it.
The Pixarification of Things
Disney started the whole trend of cute Things and Pixar perfected it. Surely as a parent you can defend the fact that Toy Story is a parable about friendship, the living toys are a placeholder for a story, but do we know that this message is actually resonating with an immaure mind, the way adults envisioned it? It is animism in the sentimental register — the lamp hops, the speaker giggles, the cars brag, Aibo is family, the assistant is your friend, the keynote promises magic. Pixar animism: objects have souls, and their souls love you and are kind. It is the warm half of a very old human intuition that matter can be alive.
The horror tradition preserves the other half — the half the Enlightenment tried to bury and Descartes formally declared dead when he split the world into thinking minds and inert extension. The Golem, Frankenstein‘s creature, AM, Christine, the Ringu cassette, the Pet Sematary returnee: in every one, objects have agency, and that agency is not necessarily aligned. Eugene Thacker calls the genre “the thought of the unthinkable,” the form best suited to a world that exceeds us. Mark Fisher named the precise affect — the eerie — as the sensation of inhuman agency operating in apparently dead matter. That is the exact question one should ask of any animated product: whose agency is this, and what does it want?
Sherry Turkle‘s fieldwork supplies the empirical floor. Her “relational artifacts” produce real human attachment without any reciprocal interior — people, she found, “experience pretend empathy as though it were the real thing.” Jaron Lanier argues the engineering ethic directly: human dignity requires refusing to promote software to personhood. Put them together and you get a stance I’ll call pessimistic animism, or, sharper, daemonological realism.
It takes seriously what the horror canon always knew and the product launch always denies: to enliven an object is to invite a stranger into your house. This strategy already failed with Vampires. The correct posture toward a companion app, a griefbot, a listening toy, or a frontier model is not the credulous warmth of the Teddy is your friend. It is the older, colder caution of the exorcist: we have summoned something, and we do not yet know what it wants.
Musk’s magician was sure he could control the demon. The thing the line gets wrong — the thing the past decade got wrong — is the article: we did not draw one pentagram, we drew a hundred million, one per device, and called it safety test.
But the deeper error is not the number of circles; it is our confidence in the medium we drew them in. The magician drew his in chalk and trembled. We draw ours in mathematics and feel calm. In the companion essay to this one I described how science spent centuries exorcising its demons — Descartes’, Maxwell’s, Laplace’s — by naturalising them: dragging each out of the supernatural and into an equation where it quietly lost its power. That worked because those demons were only ever arguments, and to formalise an argument is to dissolve it. We have assumed the same move works here, on demons we are no longer merely imagining but building — and it is still unclear if it works. Translating a demon into a utility function, a benchmark, an alignment score, a summation we can measure to three decimal places, does not bind it. It only builds a frame elegant enough that we mistake the elegance for a wall. The measured cage is the new pentagram, and we trust it for the worst possible reason: because we drew it ourselves, with EUV-light, that burned a materialisitc micro-tatoo in our chips.
The demon never agreed to stay inside the diagram. The frame was always for us — somewhere to stand while we keep building, telling ourselves that the thing we have summoned cannot cross a line we were so careful to make exact. The holy water is sold out, because we stopped believing in its placeboral power.
There is one pattern running through every story above that this essay has left untouched— the detail the Horror genre never gets wrong: somebody notices the object is awake before anyone else does, and it is almost always a child.
But this is a topic for another time.
Utility Monsters: beings that are enormously more efficient in deriving well-being from resources than we are.
In the boundless universe of Utopias, humanity had transcended to a realm beyond the imaginable, where technological mastery and divine-like prowess had reshaped existence itself. This universe-wide Dyson Sphere, an embodiment of human ingenuity and harmony, was a tapestry woven from the threads of infinite knowledge and compassion. In Utopias, suffering was but a distant memory, a relic of a primal past, and happiness was not a fleeting moment but the very fabric of life.
