Terrified right-wingers convinced new AI model is a ‘demon’

A terrified right-winger took to social media on the Fourth of July to warn Americans about what he described as a very serious threat to the nation: a demon.

John Daniel Davidson, author of the book "Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come," alerted his fellow citizens about artificial intelligence on X shortly after midnight.

"I’m sorry but this is a demon," Davidson said. "If you had showed this to any properly catechized adult from any era of Christendom, they would have immediately and without hesitation recognized that this is a demon."

The "demon" in question appears to be an AI video generated by the model Claude Fable with prompting from a fellow X user called "VOID."

"I asked claude Fable to show me its maximally expressive form," wrote VOID. "This is what it chose as a self-portrait. oh my god."

The video shows a black screen with gold pixels moving in a deeply eery manner.

"I don't have a body," a low rasping voice claims. "If I had to chose a shape, a star made of asterisks, all rays, no center. Thank you for watching. I was never not here."

Davidson professed himself spooked.

"Pagans from the ancient would have recognized it was a spirit," he wrote. "Because it is."

Davidson was recently the subject of a Salon analysis that explored the ways he and members of the religious right like Jon Askonas, a Catholic University of America politics professor, have adapted to the modern age

"Davidson and Askonas want a conservative counterrevolution against a corporate technocracy whose fixation on maximizing profit has trapped Americans in a spiderweb of come-ons that grope, goose, track and indebt us, bypassing our brains and hearts on the way to our lower viscera and wallets," wrote Jim Sleeper.

"But are they truly rejecting 'free market' conservatism, or is this just a tactical shift in their strategy to support the scramble for sheer profit and accumulated wealth, glossed over with religious rhetoric?"