AI Devil Worshippers?

There are lots of reasons to hate AI. As a writer, it really bothers me that large language models were trained on content for which their creators received no credit or royalties of any kind. AI could have been built ethically, but it wasn't. An ethical version of exactly what we see today could have been built with (A) opt-in for writers and/or artists submitting content and (B) royalty payments to those writers/artists based on the percentage of their work AI compositions include. There are no technical barriers to creating that sort of system, but AI companies decided that they would rather just steal from creators.

I recently came across a reason for hating AI, though, that never occurred to me. Apparently the Roman Catholic Church is running an "exorcism training course" that teaches, among other things, that AI can be used for "devil worship."

Father Luis Ramirez Almanza is running an exorcism training course in Rome in May, and he’s giving it a very 2026 theme. He wants clergy and faith leaders thinking about artificial intelligence as a tool that can be used in spiritual warfare. It’s not limited to Catholic clergy, either. Reporting says he’s inviting rabbis, imams, and evangelical pastors to attend, basically pitching a rare interfaith training built around a shared enemy.

The first weird thing about this is that "devil worship" - that is, the theistic worship of a literal devil - is incredibly rare. It is a practice that is disavowed by even the vast majority of people who identify as Satanists, such as members of The Satanic Temple and Church of Satan. Outside those two groups there are barely any Satanists in the world, so the theistic practitioners are a tiny minority. Christians sometimes try to give Satanists numbers by defining all non-Christians as "devil worshippers," but with the inclusion of rabbis, and imams in this course it sounds like that's not what the Catholics are up to here.

As a point, I received a comment over on BlueSky in reponse to a recent post that I was wrong about the Church of Satan not practicing magick because Anton LaVey wrote books on it. It is true that LaVey himself knew a lot about magick and likely practiced at least some of it, but I was talking about the organization today. If you look at this article on their current website, you can see that they are hostile towards both literal "devil worship" and anything transcendental or supernatural. I also have heard a story from years ago of a Thelemite kicked out of The Satanic Temple for openly practicing magick, so their current beliefs apparently fall along the same lines.

As reported by The London Times, Almanza promoted the course at a press conference and described AI as “a great power, a force for both good and evil, and can therefore be used for devil worshipping.” He’s not saying a chatbot is possessed. He’s warning that the tech can amplify whatever people already want to do, including the darker corners of occult communities online.

Now on its face this sounds more reasonable than the headlines. I can certainly see destructive cults making use of AI to spread their messages and recruit followers, and that sort of thing probably falls under what the course is covering. But worrying about "occult communities" in general using it is silly precisely because those communities are so small. New Age cults are far more common and far wealthier, and many of them have been shown to employ all sorts of manipulation tactics to part followers from both their money and their free will. Maybe they are lumping New Agers and occultists together? That's about the only charitable reading I can come up with here.

The course takes place at the Ateneo Pontificio Regina Apostolorum, a Vatican-affiliated school that has hosted this training for years. It’s also worth saying what it is and what it isn’t. Attending doesn’t make you an official exorcist. In the Catholic Church, that appointment still comes from a bishop. The program positions itself as serious instruction, with lectures meant to help participants separate spiritual crises from mental health conditions, scams, and internet-fueled panic.

To be clear, these are all good things. Mental health issues are far more common that spiritual attacks. Internet-fueled moral panics can be ridiculous and still cause serious harm. I can only imagine how devastating the "Satanic panic" of the 1980's would be today with the power of the Internet behind it and so much more money to be made from cynical grifting. As it was, a little under 300 innocent people wound up in prison. Today that could easily run into the thousands. Not mentioned in the article, but highly relevant to this topic, is "AI psychosis," a mental health problem that sometimes arises with heavy use of AI tools like large language models. For example, many cases have been reported of LLMs convincing people that they are messianic figures who have great destinies, without any real supporting evidence.

The AI concern shows up in the specifics, and some of them are grim. Father Fortunato Di Noto, a Sicilian priest known for work against child sexual abuse, told reporters that some satanic groups are experimenting with AI tools. “We believe these groups are using AI to generate images of children involved in satanic rites,” he said. He described it as a way to exercise power “over the innocent.” The last thing we need to hear more about right now.

It is, especially because it's not real. Or at least, not real the way it's laid out here. Child sexual abuse and occultism, even "left hand path" occultism, have nothing to do with each other. There is no practical magical technique involving child sexual abuse that works for anything paranormal. All I can think of it that this is a throwback to the Satanic Panic nonsense, which as I mentioned above, hopefully will never come back with the power of the Internet behind it.

To be clear, AI tools that create sexualized images of children are a serious problem. But trying to argue that they are being created for magical reasons by occult practitioners instead of for sexual gratification by pedophiles, or trying to argue that occultists ARE pedophiles, or really anything along those lines is completely ridiculous. The church just doesn't like magick and doesn't like occultism, so they are trying to ascribe disgusting motivations to us for simply practicing our spiritual beliefs. That's what happened last time in the 1980's, and we need to be vigilant that it doesn't happen again.

A cult researcher cited in the reporting, David Murgia of Catholic Risk and Insurance Services, described a different angle. He said police have warned that these groups use AI to cloak what they share and to communicate in ways that are harder to spot. The biggest worry is scale. Digital communities already thrive on anonymity, symbolism, and provocation. Generative tools make that easier and faster.

As I mentioned above, understanding how AI can help destructive cults do nefarious things is a reasonable area for study. But giving serious consideration to things that aren't real and have never been real seriously undermines any good this program might do along those lines. This is troubling for religious freedom, especially given recent books like this one that frame "Paganism" - a religion likely practiced by less than one percent of the population - as some serious threat to Christianity, and accusations of "occultism" among people named in the Epstein files - despite no evidence whatsoever of real occultism involved in any of their horrific crimes.

This is one more case where "exotericism" would do a lot of good. Secrecy regarding magical practice just opens the door to wild, false allegations that you never see directed at meditators or Tarot readers or astrologers. Everybody understands what those three latter practices entail. Many people think they're bullshit, but that's fine. It's way better than people thinking they pose tangible dangers or involve criminal activity. It's about time magick was treated the same way.