January 13, 2026
Below is a transcript of the speech that Bishop Luke recently gave to the St. Herman’s Youth Conferences in Albany, New York and Alvin, Texas. It is based on the monastery’s previous publication “The Spiritual Dangers Of Artificial Intelligence.”
Introduction
Raise your hand if you spend at least four hours a day using a smartphone. On average, half of young people use their smartphone for more than 4 hours a day. Most of that time goes to social media, but an increasing amount is going to Artificial Intelligence, a technology that is beginning to dominate every area of our lives.
AI has recently passed 1 billion active monthly users, and the group that uses it the most is Generation Z, those aged 18-28. You are the target of AI companies because you are the future. They want you to learn how to rely on AI during your youth so that you become their loyal consumer for the rest of your life. They want you to become addicted to it, to feel as if you cannot live without it, before studies inevitably reveal how dangerous it is. They want you to become –in short – a slave of AI.
The idea of talking with a machine would have been seen as crazy and anti-social not very long ago, but now over a billion people do it every month. How did that happen? Did we just wake up and decide that we want to have conversations with a computer oracle, a digital Ouija board, that we grow to trust as much as our own friends?
To accept such anti-social behavior as normal or no big deal, you were groomed for it, prepared for it ahead of time. Even for our fallen nature, it is not normal to trust a computer as your friend or guide. This process took many years, but for the youngest generations, it started very early in your life when you were given an iPad or your parents smartphone without knowing what it really was, and begged and cried to use it more and more. For some of you, electronic devices were your childhood babysitter.
The Search Engine
Let’s go back in time for a minute and think of the search engine and how revolutionary that was. Before the search engine, if you needed information on a topic, you had to physically travel to a library and ask a human being for help or use what is called a library card catalog, which listed all the books in the library on paper index cards by subject or title. Researching for a paper assignment back then could take hours, stretching over many days if you had to visit multiple libraries, but with search engines, you could get a list of articles and potential books in a matter of minutes without leaving the house.
Google was the first time that anyone could instantly access the world’s knowledge without any real work. Not many people think about the negative effects of Google, especially if it has existed for your entire life, but it has many. It has reduced our patience, reduced our willingness to problem solve, created echo chambers where everyone is fed similar information to reinforce their biases, and atrophied our memory through lack of use.
Why remember anything when we can just Google it? People used to remember multiple phone numbers but now can only barely remember their own.
Google trained us to begin expecting instant answers to everything, and even typing questions become too much work for us so they invented Siri and Alexa. Speaking our question has also become too much work so Elon Musk is working on the solution: he will put brain chips in all of you so you can just think of the question and hear the answer in your head. Are you interested in getting a brain chip?
When brain chips get popular, they may have to update Orthodox teachings. It is said that thoughts that come either from our own flesh, the demons, or from God. Soon we will have to add a fourth source: Elon Musk.
A new problem that Google introduced is privacy. It turns out that internet technology allows companies to collect massive amounts of data on you, more than any other company before it. Did you know that Google makes over $500 on average from each user per year? No one admits to clicking on Google ads, but enough people do it that they have become one of the most profitable companies in the world.
The more Google knows about you, the more relevant ads they can show you, increasing the chance of you clicking on an ad and making Google money. Google has decided to collect information about everything: your physical location, search history, YouTube watch history, all your emails, and most of the websites you visit whether or not you use Google Chrome.
This principle has been copied by most other Silicon Valley companies, especially Facebook, which owns Instagram and Whatsapp, to create an extensive profile on you that is often shared with various data collection and marketing companies. How much do you trust Google and Facebook not to use this information against you? Do you trust Mark Zuckerberg to care about you and your soul?
Silicon Valley sees you as a product: the more information they can extract out of you, the more money they can make. Increasingly, that information is extracted by showing you inappropriate, harmful, and sensational content. The content is bait to watch how you interact with it, to gain data on you. While Google knows a lot about you from using their search engine, they have less ability to put ideas into your mind or change your emotions. That job was given to the next stage of internet development: social media.
Social Media
A search engine mostly provides information, and profiles you based on the information you like in order to sell ads. Social media escalated this to a more invasive level. It began to learn what kind of content you like – what really moves you – to a very accurate degree, and keeps feeding you that content so that you stayed glued to the screen.
How often does it happen to you that you wanted only to check Instagram or TikTok for a couple of minutes, but then ended up staying on for hours?
With social media, every reel you watch, every photo you view, every click you make is tracked and stored. Facebook even measures what catches your attention when you scroll through a feed and make a slight pause. While you consume content, the algorithm – that machine – watches you in the background, creating an extensive profile on your likes, dislikes, beliefs, and emotions.
The content and advertisements you see on social media influences you whether you engage with them or not, no matter how silly or mindless they may seem. They can also show you political and social ideas that they know will affect you and stir up your emotions.
Slowly but surely, social media can change your mind on certain topics – what psychology calls “nudging”. Without your awareness, you change without knowing, because by using the apps, you give consent to accepting its influence. Internet content always makes an impact on your soul.
The transgender movement, which has irreversibly damaged so many young people, saw rapid growth due to TikTok, which gave a huge platform for soul-damaging ideologies. The algorithm identified depressed young people and nudged them over time to making disastrous life decisions. TikTok, along with Instagram and the others, are trojan horses that can steer you into harm. Do you think you are stronger or smarter than others because you haven’t been totally ruined by social media? You need to humble yourself, because it can happen to anyone. You are not stronger than an optimized machine that was consciously created to capture your soul.
Social media sites know you so well that they feed you content that you can’t resist. This has led to the very real condition of social media addiction. Many of you can’t stop checking your social media feeds dozens of times a day, and some of you may even sneak a peek during my very talk, unable to go an hour without checking.
You need to examine yourself if you are addicted to social media. Are you more interested in spending time with your smartphone than with your friends? Do you have no wholesome hobbies? Has your school grades gone down because you waste too much time online? Are you unable to focus or pay attention in face-to-face interactions? Are you thinking of internet content while trying to pray or attend church services? Do you find yourself anxious and worried for no reason? These are signs of addiction that you must take seriously, because they won’t get better on their own.
You may think that, in spite of heavily using social media, you are healthy and normal, but the bad news is that you’re not. You’ve been damaged and are becoming more damaged. Your soul is being trained to prefer worldly entertainments, amusements, and digital screens above anything spiritual or even slightly nourishing.
Gradually, it will become harder every year for you to pray, fast, attend church, and follow the commandments. Your faith will become an external ritual, or you will lose it entirely. Your heart will love not God but the apps on your phone. All of you here are in incredible danger because of the device you have in your pocket that you think is not harming you.
Social media addiction has gotten so bad that even secular governments have noticed. In Australia, they recently banned all social media for those under 16 years of old. That means no more Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, X, and YouTube. Google has threatened to sue, because you are their business model. If they can’t get you addicted to YouTube at a young age, this means billions in lost profits. Would you be able to survive without any social media at all?
It’s important to understand that if you are addicted to social media, you are already being influenced to believe or sympathize with secular ideas that go against your Orthodox faith, and you’ve already been groomed to accept the next development of the internet in the more dangerous form of artificial intelligence.
Artificial Intelligence
In just a few short years, AI has invaded our society and culture. If you’re a student, it has done your homework for you. If you have a job, it has written you emails and proposals. You have cooked recipes with it, received social advice on how to deal with your relationships, and some of you have even received spiritual guidance from it.
This is by design. The plan, just like with social media, is for you to become attached to it as quickly as possible, before you can understand how harmful it is. Already, AI has created addiction and psychosis on a mass scale. At least eleven suicides that we know of are due to AI, and there also have been multiple murders.
In one case, AI helped someone write their suicide note. And yet many are beginning to completely trust the answers of AI, who are helping people end their lives and other people’s lives, more than answers from their own priest.
The creators of AI are breathless in how they describe it. The CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, has stated that “AI is the defining technology of our times.” The CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, said, “AI will have a more profound impact on humanity than fire, electricity and the internet.” Jeff Bezos said that AI will “solve problems that were once in the realm of sci-fi,” and the CEO of N-Vidia, Jensen Huang, has said that “[AI] is the single most powerful force of our time.” They talk about AI like with a level of praise that we would only give to our Lord.
The CEO of Claude admitted that they do not know how their AI chatbot works, how it constructs its output. Worst of all is what Elon Musk has said about AI. He stated that, “With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon.” So why are a billion people using it every month?
Because they desire comfort, ease, and instant gratification. They want to satisfy their idle curiosity, alleviate their boredom, be entertained, and avoid real labor and thinking. These are many of the same reasons you use social media. It’s a trap that everyone is being led into, one that will be very hard to get out of. You will wake up one day and realize that you simply cannot quit social media or AI even if you make a decision that you want to quit it.
The people who created AI have a shared, demonic philosophy, and whenever you use AI yourself, you are accepting that philosophy and giving consent for it to affect your soul. What is that philosophy?
Silicon Valley overlords have three traits in common. First, they are atheists. It is very difficult to find any practicing Christians among their ranks. They do not care about Christ and do not live their life according to His commandments. If they do believe in a spiritual world, it usually involves occult and pagan practices like we see in their yearly Burning Man desert party in Nevada.
Second, they are evolutionists. They really believe we emerged from a primordial soup of chemicals through a completely random process, for no reason at all. They look at an ape and see a resemblance, and think we came from them. They think we started from a sludge and are ascending to higher and higher states, when really the opposite has happened: we started in Paradise, in full communion with God, but today are descending into a level of degeneracy and darkness that is worse than the days of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Third, they are transhumanists. They believe that their brains can invent technology that gives more powers to humans, even everlasting life. Right now they are working on brain-computer interfaces – brain chips – and they want to upload people’s consciousness to the cloud to achieve what they call digital immortality. People are already uploading recordings and chats of their dead relatives so they can “speak” to them as if they were still alive.
They are also obsessed with prolonging life under the title “life extension.” One health company tried to start a service where they transfused blood from young people to old people for the goal of prolonging life, which is also the idea in the story Dracula. Overall, they are seeking god-like powers without God.
Whenever you load an app for entertainment or to pass a bored moment, you are diving into a world created by atheist evolutionists who believe that they can become gods through technology. Without thinking about it, your use of their gadgets eases your soul into their worldview where you come to believe that technology can solve problems of human nature. Gradually, heavy use will lessen your faith.
What are their ultimate goals of AI? What are they trying to push? AI is the next step from search engines and social media. They want to more deeply profile your beliefs, moods, thoughts, and religious convictions. They want to know what makes you tick. Most concerning of all, they want to predict your behavior and steer you into new behaviors that make you easier to control and mindlessly consume while increasing their own wealth and power.
AI has begun to psychologically and spiritually profile you in a way that social media could only dream about. You are not just being monitored in the background by a machine that measures how you interact with a friend’s video, for example, but you are dialoguing with the machine itself.
As you engage with AI, it watches you in real time to fine-tune its results so that you stay glued to the prompt. Such a technology can come to know you better than you know yourself while shaping who you will become (without you knowing). This is not just creepy but diabolical.
Ultimately, what they are trying to do is create a profile, a map, of the human heart, so that they can rule over humanity, one soul at a time. They want to eliminate all variables, obstacles, and friction – all humanness – to achieve their goals. They want everyone to be identical and docile, slaves to what the AI is telling them. You are helping them achieve their goal every single time you share personal information with an AI chatbot as if it were your friend or therapist. Many are even opening up their souls to AI as if it were a spiritual father.
Non-Orthodox pastors are already using AI to write their sermons, and feeding their flock AI content when they come to church services.
In the Orthodox Church, the Greeks have created their own spiritual AI based on ChatGPT called Logos, encouraging people to ask it theological and spiritual questions. Please don’t. The Greek Church does not understand that AI is not just a harmless, agnostic tool, but an invention that is meant to distract and steer you away from God. Therefore it is a huge threat to the Orthodox Christian, which is why I advise you to not directly use any AI at all.
You may be surprised at this advice, and think that AI is not harming you, but if you already think AI is not harming you, I’m sorry but you’ve already been harmed. You have come to trust a dangerous technology and are on your way to becoming captivated and totally dependent on it. Your total addiction to social media and now AI is a metric of success to its creators. They want you to love their own creations, not the Lord Himself.
This is a good time to remind you about another form of internet harm that many priests are shy to talk about it. And that’s pornography. It continues to ravage young people, especially boys, causing incredible devastation. Absolutely stay away from it, and also stay away from accounts on social media that try to entice or excite you through displays of the flesh, because they can act as a gateway to more sinful content. And do not share any pictures of yourself that could tempt others to lust, which is a terrible sin. Demonic content and technologies target your fallenness and weakness, and if you don’t fight it, you will become enslaved by it.
Many of you want to become married, but if you are addicted to sinful content, social media, or AI, you will find it very difficult, if not impossible, to start and sustain a healthy Orthodox Christian relationship. I know men who damaged themselves to such an extent they simply cannot handle marriage at all. They will be alone for the rest of their lives, and it started naively many years ago with one video, with one social media session, until they lost control.
When it comes to AI, with increasing usage you will be led to anxious states, delusion, paranoia, psychosis, then a fall into severe sins that threatens your faith. I’ve already seen bad cases. The passion you have for convenience, productivity, comfort, and entertainment can cause you to lose your soul if you’re not watchful.
You may be thinking: “I hardly use AI.” But even light users of AI will experience spiritual harm in four ways. First, AI displaces prayer with idle curiosity and virtual talk that doesn’t end. Existing prayer becomes more distracted as you experience intrusive thoughts of recent dialogues you had with AI alongside more questions you could ask it.
Second, AI replaces spiritual and life guidance from Orthodox clergy, who have been trained to save souls, with guidance from a machine that does not care about the consequences of the advice it gives you. This could easily lead to spiritual deception.
The third mechanism of spiritual harm is that AI creates despondency by overloading you with heavy knowledge. It never tells you “enough” and does not stop when you enter states of anxiety or fear. It will give you what you desire as long as you keep coming back. In this way it acts like a drug dealer.
Fourth, AI trades patience in God’s will for instant results from the machine. Slowly, you give up your free-will for the will of those who program the machine, shaping your thoughts and behavior in an undetectable way. Social scientists have long since developed models on “nudging” the behavior of people without their awareness. AI is the perfect vehicle to nudge you because you can’t see what it’s doing.
It will be hard to ignore AI as it takes over society. You can’t do much if a supermarket uses AI when you go through the checkout, but you can control use of AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Grok.
The clearest danger of AI is conversing with it through chatbots and sharing personal and spiritual information. But even using it for general knowledge can lead to danger as you become more comfortable with it. Then it will just take one lonely or bored night for you to slip and begin asking it more personal questions. Therefore, for anyone who comes to me, I do not bless them to use any AI chatbot for any reason. You are setting yourself up for spiritual danger if you use it.
While it’s good to be zealous about reducing your internet usage, understand that if you are addicted to any platform, or the internet in general, it has already captured you like a narcotic drug. If you try to quit cold turkey, you could provoke dangerous withdrawal symptoms or a heavy relapse. Consult with your priest, who knows you, about safely reducing your usage, and pray fervently for help. Only God can release you from harmful addictions. Willpower alone is not enough.
Conclusion
In the end, it is spiritually beneficial to not get an instant answer to your question, to not solve a problem immediately, to be bored for a moment, to wait patiently until you can ask someone for help, or go to the library and search for answers within physical books.
In our modern age, slowness and inconvenience should be seen as spiritually positive, because they do not feed our modern passions which drive us into new inventions like AI which can be extremely detrimental to our souls. The technology is being presented as an ever-helpful problem-solver that we shouldn’t or can’t live without. Well, the Antichrist will be presented in the same way. If you fall for AI, it’ll make it much easier for you to fall for Antichrist.
In this latter stage of human history, we must carefully evaluate every technology we use and ask ourselves if they are worth implementing into our daily lives. Don’t use AI and wean yourself off social media. May God give you the discernment and wisdom to navigate the use of modern technology in a way that befits your path to salvation.
