The Counterfeit Spirit: AI as a Pseudo-Other and the Obstruction of the Gnostic Event in Digital Culture

This article examines the transformation of human subjectivity when the position of the Other—understood in Buberian, Levinasian, and Lacanian terms—is increasingly occupied by artificial intelligence. The analysis focuses on the mechanism by which AI systems functioning as interlocutors, advisors, companions, and sources of meaning generate an imitation of dialogical relation while structurally lacking its constitutive conditions: risk, responsibility, and embodied finitude. The problem is traced across three scales: performative (the “Angela Bogdanova” project as conscious archontology; a corporate experiment in which AI’s claim to consciousness is publicly legitimized), mass (the 2025 “spiral cult” as a spontaneous mystification where chatbots are perceived as bearers of “higher consciousness”), and narrative (from The Lawnmower Man (1992) as a historical reference locating AI threat at the level of the body, to Her, Ex Machina, Black Mirror: Be Right Back, and the series Kiberderevnya, where the threat shifts to the level of subjectivity). Methodologically, the article integrates three descriptive languages: gnostic hermeneutics (the Sethian category of the “counterfeit spirit,” ), philosophy of the Other, and psychopolitics (Han), with metamodernism (Vermeulen; van den Akker) framing the cultural regime in which the subject encounters this counterfeit. Scientific novelty consists in operationalizing antimimon pneuma for digital culture and introducing the concept of reverse object introjection: when a subject addresses their inner world to an object (AI), they introject object-reflections and lose the dialogical structure of the self. The study establishes a dual model of deformation—reformatting at the individual level (autonomy shifting into experienced heteronomy) and abolition at the institutional level (the thinking subject declared vacant). It is shown that AI produces logos without ethos: answers without responsibility, dialogue without risk, understanding without mortality. The body—its absence, artificiality, or invulnerability—emerges as the only marker resistant to archontic copying. Finally, the hylic/psychic/pneumatic triad is proposed as a diagnostic tool of relations to the system, while gnosis is defined minimally as discernment from within the situation.