By Pablo Vazquez
When it comes to so-called “artificial intelligence,” the most important questions we can ask as Zoroastrians are whether the worlds, conceptions, and relations built by these machines serve Asha or Druj. Do they clarify existence, strengthen right relation, ease suffering, protect and support creation and creativity, and aid the work of Frashokereti, or do they strengthen and multiply illusion, theft, domination, ecological ruin, and the counterfeit authority of the Lie?
Given current technologies, AI is not neutral in any possible sense. In fact, we must be real and admit that no technology is neutral when it is born inside systems of greed, extraction, surveillance, and control, the very directed purposes of modern AI systems. It is simply a tool, yes, but we must not excuse Druj simply because something is a tool: a hammer may build a home or break a skull, but even a hammer is not abstract. It belongs to a hand, a purpose, a world, and all of the hierarchies and systems of power and production that led to that hammer and its design. AI belongs, at present, to a world increasingly governed by the insatiable and draconic appetites of corporations, states, militaries, ideologies, and platforms that feed upon attention, labor, land, water, energy, and desire. Thus, no technology is “just a tool,” and especially not AI, as tools carry the moral shape of the orders that make them.
In its present form, AI is unmistakably and unarguably Drujic. This isn’t because the matter of which it is made, like the silicon, the rare minerals, the blood and sweat of the workers, the mathematical computations, is in any way corrupt, nor is it corrupt to create something that provides ease and support. Zoroastrianism does not despise matter, craft, intelligence, or labor because, unlike many life-denying systems, the material world for us is not a prison to escape but a battleground to heal, a sacred environ suffused with Asha. The problem is not that we make tools but rather that we make and use them under the sign of the Lie and then pretend they are innocent and that we are too, despite having contributed to confusion and horrors beyond our comprehension.
AI is Drujic because it is programmed to acknowledge madness and falsity as knowledge, vaguely imitating wisdom while distinctly severed from conscience. It is outright Drujic and distinctly dangerous when it replaces the difficult yet necessary and positive labor of thinking, writing, remembering, and creating with frictionless production, cybernetic assembly lines devoid of substance and soul. The corruption runs deep further because it trains on the work of the living and the dead without consent, turning human creation into extractive fuel, our minds and creations becoming the dinosaurs it turns into oil from which a select few profit. It is Drujic when it worsens ecological devastation while presenting itself as immaterial, clean, weightless, and almost angelic. These dark mills of deceit give the illusion of relation without reciprocity, intimacy without responsibility, and, thus, presence without presence.
In truth, we must not be cautious in pointing out one of AI’s greatest spiritual dangers: it can train us to love simulation more than creation and make our beautiful and blessed world seem too slow, resistant, embodied, and demanding, and thus retreat us from our divine duty of truly making it better for all instead of just retreating into mediated delusions. The tree, the animal, the neighbor, the holy fire, the elder, the child, the text, the beloved, the difficult conversation: all of these require patience, love, care, and understanding that we cannot continue to keep ignoring. AI tricks us into thinking that these hospitable approaches are inherent in it, removing us from the heart-labor of providing them, offering a cold, unreal immediacy. It answers without needing to be known, speaks without having lived, and produces without having suffered, a pseudo-oracle high off its own vapors. Such a thing may be useful and already has been, but it must never be mistaken for providing wisdom lest we have mistaken our very existence.
AI has no Urvaan, Daēnā, or Fravashi and thus no spiritual connection whatsoever. It has no substance, consciousness, inwardness, moral struggle, and definitely no capacity to choose Asha over Druj, and yet we seem to think it can tell us what to do and, in some truly terrifying cases, who to do it to, even if it means grievous harm. It cannot become an Ashavan or participate in the cosmic struggle as a moral actor, nor can it be humdeen or hamazor, and it definitely cannot perceive with the eye of the soul as we can. To imagine foolishly otherwise is to confuse pattern with personhood, language with soul, simulation with presence. AI produces no art, music, or movement, just shadow pastiches of these things, and it does not make you in any way an artist, musician, or thought-leader for misusing it in these ways. Ahriman was said in the myths to have miscreated the Daeva, and if you use AI to miscreate as well, then it is cemented that you walk in his putrid footsteps. This confusion is itself a form of Druj, because it misnames reality: a machine may imitate speech, prayer, and image, but it does not speak from the sacrality of responsibility, behold or understand beauty, or truly pray with any real and vibrational capacity.
Thus, the moral burden remains entirely ours, and it is crucial that we know, with our minds and hearts, that AI does not absolve its makers or users. Instead, if I may venture to say, it reflects the greater Tevishi of the civilization that builds it. What we call artificial intelligence is, in truth, a mirror of human desire and longing organized at scale. If the desires are domination, deception, profit, and vanity, the machine will dominate, lie, extract, and flatter without any second thought to what it is doing because it cannot actually think. Thus, an Ahrimanic anti-transformation is occurring, one in which humans are disgustingly becoming more comfortable acting like machines: efficient, disembodied, obedient to output, severed from relationality and reverence.
Yet, take heed, for despair is not Zoroastrian. Our world is unfinished, not abandoned, and technology, like all human making, can be reordered and brought under the discipline of Asha. To make AI Ashavic, though, would require more than ethical guidelines written by the same institutions that profit from violations and serious moral repentance at the infrastructure level. These systems will not disappear overnight, and thus we must encourage Zoroastrians who engage with these technologies to build new ones from the bottom up that do not operate in such a Drujvic manner and are for the benefit of all beings, conscious and not. This will require serious moral effort through ecological limits, labor justice, engaged consent, technological transparency, honest accountability, and refusal to compromise towards the corrupt for the sake of money, status, and expediency. It would require saying no to certain uses and working with certain companies and projects entirely and, to keep it real, not every invention deserves a place in existence, and not every capacity should be exercised simply because it can be. We must be conscious of our thoughts, words, and deeds at all times to ensure they are virtuous, and this extends to what we use and what we aid in creating.
An Ashavic use of AI would be humble, ease burdens without replacing vocation, assist memory without manufacturing falsehood, help heal ecological damage rather than deepen it, serve education without destroying the struggle through which understanding matures, support the vulnerable without turning them into data, and strengthen communities rather than isolate persons in synthetic worlds. It would remain a tool and thus never become what some corporate fools wish it would be to us: an idol, a future god, the only Yazata worth praising. For Zoroastrians, the final measure of AI is not intelligence, novelty, speed, or power but rather how it aids us in our main duty: undertaking the Frashokereti. Does this technology help make existence better? Does it aid in repairing the world? Does it lessen suffering without multiplying hidden harm? Does it bring us closer to truth, beauty, responsibility, and right relations? Or does it thicken the fog of the Lie while calling itself progress, choking us on the toxic fumes of its needless excesses?
The machine is not the enemy: Druj is. However, when the machine is built by the Lie, fed by the Lie, and used to spread the Lie, then the machine must be opposed, restrained, purified, and transformed just as the Daeva within us and outside of us must be. Any Zoroastrian theology of AI, including this one, must therefore be neither technophobic nor techno-utopian, but rather realistic, discerning, militant, protective, pious, and hopeful. As my final call to action, if anything, we, as Zoroastrians, must ensure that humans do not surrender their souls to the soulless, but instead make our technologies, like their creators and ourselves, answerable to the Path of Asha.
ýathâ ahû vairyô
athâ ratush ashâtcît hacâ
vanghêush dazdâ mananghô
shyaothananãm anghêush mazdâi
xshathremcâ ahurâi â
ýim drigubyô dadat vâstârem!
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