Saw this being hinted at, and while thinking about it I figured out you can actually make a strong case for this, no matter how silly and outlandish it sounds.
This is not as saying there’s a magical malignant entity, like a ghost in the machine, that took control of out AIs and will in the future cause all sort of problems. But there is something maybe darker and far more subtle going on.
AI is demonic in the sense that what controls it is something not human.
Not a literal meaning, but as an enhanced metaphysical sense, one step beyond traditional metaphysics as we use it: something one step beyond human comprehension. Not again in the form of “god of the gaps”, since that one simply indicates a loss of meaning, the definition of something know with its form given completely wrong. You think “god” is in the “gap” of something you don’t currently comprehend. In this case the demonic is not a mistaken symbol, but a correct, pertinent one. Not an aspiration to a definition, but the best fit, the one true step. The right sound. A correctly defined not-observed, that takes control. Not being there, not being known. A Lovecraftian horror space that averts vision. Something that molds humanity, without humanity awareness of it, beyond its shell.
Which is just a fancy way of saying that the main practical category of all this is that no one controls it. You can see these big companies, run by techno-fascists, chasing after their own drug-induced delirious visions. Which is certainly true to some extent, but they really don’t lead anything. They are themselves the most delusional. What happens, in practice, is that the machine “has” to be fed. Impersonal. There is no will driving this compulsion. Worldwide economy happens to be destroyed, sacrificed to this demon that has to feed.
No one has any control. It just is.
You can’t “win” against Kryptonite. It’s built precisely to unmake you.
P.S.
Again in contrast to god of the gaps, in that case the signature feature of a gap is that it always recedes. What is a god-gap today will be known scientifically tomorrow. AI is demonic because it operates in reverse: it always advances, the gap expands, until everything is devoured and nothing left is known. Where AI expands, human consciousness shrinks. The fascist-demon carapace will have removed consciousness from existence.