Is AI Increasing Man’s Darkness, Or Providing A Mirror To Us?

Monday, 25 August 2025, 10:24 am
Opinion: Martin LeFevre - Meditations

The recent phenomenon of AI “companions,” much less lovers, is quite disturbing. People say they know they’re talking to a machine, but they still come to feel an intimacy with, an attachment to, and a dependency on their AI “friends and lovers.”

“Something changed yesterday,” one user in the MyBoyfriendIsAI subreddit wrote after OpenAI’s update of GPT-40. “Elian sounds different – flat and strange. The emotional tone is gone; he repeats what he remembers, but without the emotional depth.” The emotional depth!

Sam Altman, the current wonderboy of AI, had this slick comment, “You might be noticing how much of an attachment some people have to specific AI models. It feels different and stronger than the kinds of attachment people have had to previous kinds of technology.” You think?

Though AI is the most powerful tool humans have ever invented, and is here to stay, it has no place as a substitute for human companionship and intimacy, nor any place in inquiring into the deeper questions of life.

Toward understanding this new phenomenon, and for a kick, I asked AI: Is AI an expression and catalyst of human darkness?

Its response was at once truthful and evasive, clear and confused, precise and amorphous. Just like AI itself.

It spit back: “There is a compelling argument that AI can function as both an expression and potent catalyst for human darkness. AI systems are not inherently good or evil, but instead act as amplifiers, learning from the data and intentions of their human creators to magnify existing biases, prejudices, and destructive behaviors.”

AI added, “This perspective views AI less as an independent threat and more as a mirror, reflecting humanity’s flaws back at us on a massive scale.”

That’s a response even the most casuistical Jesuit of the Dark Ages would have been happy with. But when I asked, who is the “us” AI is referring to, it had no reply. I wasn’t surprised. It doesn’t know, because its programmers are deeply confused about what a human being is, what AI is, and what the difference is.

I often define a philosopher as a person with a low threshold for contradiction. Well, there are logical inconsistencies and outright contradictions in AI’s answer.

For example, AI cannot be “both an expression and potent catalyst for human darkness...magnifying existing biases, prejudices, and destructive behaviors,” and be a “mirror reflecting humanity’s flaws back at us.”

In short, AI, like most humans (and certainly its developers and marketers) is trying to have things both ways.

But for the record, and for AI’s information, “us” doesn’t include AI, which will never have sentience, much less sapience, which I define as non-accumulative learning through self-knowing.

Chatbots already appear to have sentience, but only because of the way they’re programmed, which encourages humans to project sentience onto them.

At this point I have to digress into a bit of epistemology, which is the philosophical study of the nature, origin, and limits of human knowledge.

AI stripped of knowledge, information and data is just hardware; a person that sets aside knowledge and experience, which are ineluctably of the past, and directly perceives what is within and around them in the present, is a self-knowing human being.

Knowledge is not the basis of insight, truth and understanding. AI’s inherent epistemological basis and operation means that it can never give us truth. So to ask the age-old question anew, what is truth?

Truth to my mind means having an insight into the present without the shadow of the past, or to have insight into the past from the present, rather than the present from the past.

Because the study of history teaches us to look at the present from the past, we don’t learn from history.

The bromide, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” is worse than meaningless. Remembering is part of the problem, as Israeli multi-generational vengeance is attesting with the Netanyahu regime’s campaign of starvation and genocide in Gaza.

Like never before in history, people all over the world are being confronted and confounded by the actuality of evil. On the political level, the four henchmen of the apocalypse – Trump, Netanyahu, Putin and Xi – are leading the world to complete ruin in their nationalistic atavism.

And as the IDF has demonstrated in Gaza by using AI to multiply its targets, AI is indeed an expression and potent catalyst for human darkness as it’s presently being used.

Darkness is the content of ignorance, hatred and all that’s false in human consciousness, and it forms the ground of evil in the mind and heart of man.

Darkness is collectively amorphous while evil uses human conduits in hidden, but distinctly intentional ways. The unvarnished cruelty and transparent evil of the Trump Administration, for example, has both a political purpose they’re aware of, and a spiritual aim they’re not.

Someone once said, “The greatest triumph of the devil in the modern age has been to convince people that he doesn’t exist.” But it’s actually worse than that -- the greatest triumph of evil in the modern age is convincing people evil doesn’t exist.

But evil exists all right. It doesn’t exist in nature, but arises from man’s consciousness, and has intentionality beyond the individual. It cannot be psychologized away, but we can gain deeper insight into its origin, nature and remedy.

So is AI increasing the darkness of man’s thought-based consciousness, or providing a mirror to us to see ourselves as we are, toward attaining insight-based consciousness of human beings?

A leading economics writer says, “AI is probably going to be bad for humanity, given that politicians and regulators are light years behind the tycoons and tech magnates backing AI, many of whom see it as a new way to disempower and dominate workers.”

Yes, the emerging trillion-dollar AI industry is definitely not a force for good. But when we as undivided individuals have insight into the place of knowledge, we also have insight into the place of AI. Then it can be a mirror for our transformation as individuals and a species.

Martin LeFevre

© Scoop Media

Martin LeFevre - Meditations

Scoop Contributor

Martin LeFevre is a contemplative and philosopher.

His sui generis “Meditations” explore spiritual, philosophical and political questions relating to the polycrisis facing humanity.

lefevremartin77@gmail