The New gods and Their Creations

Deshaun Johnson
5 min readDec 10, 2022

The future is now. Your replacements are here.

Photo by Thierry K on Unsplash

In Digital Engine’s video, “ AI robot terrifies officials, explains our illusion, with Elon Musk, “ clips ranging from mechanical birds to parking robotics removing illegally parked vehicles in China continue to forecast the advancement of machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Yet, it’s not what is shown but what is said that is the most disturbing.

People still very much think that creativity is a purely human activity. And I hate to break the bubble, but AI is able to be creative.”

Creatives ranging from writers to artists thought they were in the clear regarding AI. Internet purists believed it would eliminate benign tasks daring never to step into their artistic arena.

Fool me once; shame on you. Fool me twice; shame on me.

Despite the tech still being in its infancy, writers and artists have much to be concerned with. We have Jasper.ai. We have Lensa.ai and Dall-E.

We indulge in mental comfort food savoring succulent thoughts of “they are just tools to help us do what we do best.”

Keep telling yourself that.

From one YouTuber’s comment, companies have already shaken the hands of terminators to minimize expenses and maximize profits:

Screenshot of YouTube commenter from Digital Engine’s video.

But are they just tools? If anything, movies consistently prophesy what is coming. The theme of “sentience” and “robots gone wild” recurs in dystopian sci-fi fantasy. Hollywood believes that the average Joe has merely chalked up to the figment of the writer’s imagination.

In The Washington Post, Elon said, “with Artificial Intelligence, we are summoning the demon.” He made this statement in 2014.

In numerous translations, the online etymology describes the demon as the following:

  • an “evil spirit, malignant supernatural being, an incubus, a devil,”
  • from Latin daemon “spirit,”
  • from Greek daimōn “deity, divine power; lesser god; guiding spirit, tutelary deity”
Deshaun Johnson