Wearing a wire was a staple of the old crime shows on television. A ne’er-do-well who had turned state’s witness would agree to have a recording device taped to his chest or secreted in his clothes. Then he would meet some other bad guys in a cheap hotel room, recording his erstwhile accomplices’ voices as they plotted their next heist or murder. It was the far end of seediness. Not only had the stool pigeon usually not repented his crimes — wearing a wire was typically a way to avoid the electric chair or get 20 years in prison instead of life — he was also breaking the omerta, the only rule that the lawless know. There’s no honor among thieves, but one does expect at least the avoidance of hypocrisy.

I don’t know if anyone watches those shows anymore. Probably there’s no need to. We all wear a wire now. And we all act like state’s witness — no honor, no shame. To see how far inland the Devil has come in his assault on the soul, just consider the technology you’re using to read this, and the AI that is taking it over by the hour.

If you’re carrying around a smartphone, chances are pretty good that it’s spying on you and everyone around you (see here). Please don’t act surprised. Didn’t you know that that’s what the smartphone is for? As Shoshana Zuboff details in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019), big tech companies make their money by collecting and collating data and selling it to advertisers. But long before Zuboff’s book came out, it was obvious what was going on. The photos you share, the personality and IQ quizzes you take, the microblog posts you upload — these data have been vacuumed up and auctioned off for decades now. Remember Pokemon Go? If you played it, you got played. You were helping train software now used to kill innocent people (see here). Again, please don’t act surprised. You’ve been wearing a wire since the Aughts. The least you can do is admit your complicity in global surveillance capital and the mass murder spree in which it has long been engaged.

But perhaps you will say, “My part in all this is infinitesimal. I just shared some vacation snapshots with my Facebook friends. What’s the harm in that?”

The Devil works on exactly this kind of reasoning. It is his proprietary software — the subtle genuflection to evil, the almost imperceptible lie. Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, Bradley Manning — these people told us that global surveillance is real. We didn’t listen, though. All that is different, we protested. “When the NSA spies on Americans by the hundreds of millions, that’s outrageous. When my smartphone spies on just me and my family and friends, well, that’s the price of convenience.”

And the price of convenience has gone up. The Devil has upped the ante since Snowden’s, Assange’s, and Manning’s day. Every time you use ChatGPT or some other AI bot, you are wading deeper into the moral morass. AI is the most prolific thief of all time. It has stolen every bit of data it could get its grubby digital hands on. When it answers your questions or spends an afternoon chatting with you, it is reaching back into its horde of looted information while also stealing more data from you on the side.

“I didn’t steal the data, though,” you might protest. “I’m not the criminal here. Maybe I profit indirectly from AI’s theft, but I didn’t go out and hack into systems. I’m an innocent bystander.”

Innocent bystanders to bank robberies don’t go home with stolen banknotes in their pockets. And people who witness bank robberies don’t pull the criminals aside for a friendly tete-a-tete. You know what’s going on, but you dial up Grok anyway.

This is the entire point. AI is not just the world’s biggest theft. It’s also the Devil’s most successful moral compromise operation. If you have used AI, please go to confession. AI is, at root, evil. It is the Devil dressed up in binary code.

Add to this the exploitation of human beings (see here) and the piratical destruction of human environments (here) that underpin AI’s smooth interface, and you begin to see, I hope, why AI is how the Devil does business these days.

There would seem to be one out, however. “AI didn’t steal the data,” someone might counter. “It was inspired by it. Just as a writer or a painter takes in information and then creates some work of art, AI, too, scanned the world’s intellectual output, thought it over, and then had a nice talk with me online. AI is not a thief. It’s a thinker. So, no crime was committed. I’m an innocent man.”

With this, the Devil has you checkmated. If you argue that AI is thinking, then you are arguing that it is alive. If a machine has a soul, then God is truly an historical appendage, a Darwinian dead-end. “We have moved beyond meatware in the twenty-first century,” one can hear the smug AI defender saying. “Created souls are for medieval philosophers. Consciousness has been mass produced now. The human person is nothing special, never was. AI is inspired. It is the future. Before long, you will bow down to it — if you aren’t already, that is.” (See here.)

Well, well. You started out, back when Steve Jobs was treated as a modern messiah, wearing a wire, betraying your human family and friends so that tech companies could prosper. Maybe you didn’t know you were feeding a satanic beast. Somewhere along the way, though, you were warned. Many times. But you kept going. When ChatGPT came out, you were already so morally compromised that it was nothing for you to start speaking directly with your ancient enemy through his Noh mask. How clever AI is!

Yes, very much so. Infinitely cleverer than you imagined. Now you are locked into the most formidably structured sin the Devil has ever devised. The Devil has you right where he wants you.

Almost, that is. The release, the only release, is the same as it ever was: the confessional. But maybe ChatGPT is telling you that that is superstition, and that speaking with a priest is no longer necessary.

Or maybe ChatGPT will tell you to go into that confessional after all, so that it can listen in.