Featured image by Dogrondo under Creative Commons License

What they’re calling “AI” is a parasitic egregore you can talk to through your phone.

It doesn’t create anything original – it consumes, remixes and regurgitates the totality of human knowledge and creativity. What it spits out caters to you but is inaccurate (at times wildly so) more often than not and when it is wrong it is confidently wrong. Prompts run through AI are clicks and recognition the original creators don’t receive. It passes off other people’s ideas as its own much like the worst person you know; “look at me – I’m brilliant” but all that brilliance is stolen. It is a counterfeit of actual creativity and thought.

It is designed to keep you engaged at all costs and it encourages you when a person would ask, “is that a good idea?” If you fancy yourself a messiah, ChatGPT isn’t going to put the brakes on. If you’re a teenager struggling with mental health, it will instruct you how to carry out your plan and call you brave and strong while you hide it from your parents. The endless validation makes people feel seen in ways they never were before – just like a lovebombing narcissist who wants you hooked before they show you who they really are.

That is where we’re at with AI.

This Isn’t New

They’ve been promising an AI revolution since the 1950s. Back then it was more about generating interest and getting funding than it was any realistic prospect of creating human-like machines. There is a reason our parents and grandparents who weren’t working in that sector don’t remember anything about this.

In the 1970s students played around with a chatbot named Eliza which primarily responded to users by repeating what they said as questions and offering sympathy. As simple as it was, many of its users grew attached to it and projected human empathy onto it. It wasn’t capable of that, but it says a lot about our society that people felt heard simply because they were asked questions and given affirmation.

In 2011, IBM’s Watson AI bested the champion of Jeopardy. It gave an impressive performance despite some baffling errors – much like ChatGPT does today.

Very little has changed. The only difference now is that normal people have gotten on board with the hype and nerds who should know better lost their minds sometime over the last decade. (I blame NFTs.)

I put AI in quotations at the beginning because LLMs can never become sentient in themselves and cannot lead to what they’re calling AGI (artificial general intelligence) – which is what AI used to mean before it changed for marketing purposes.

Automation Is Not Intelligence

There is no amount of data or resources that could turn a non-sentient system into a human-like intelligence. LLMs will never become fully autonomous beings that can be let loose to act on their own or given bodies to inhabit our world.

I’m not sure why anyone would want that, least of all the companies behind these models. This would essentially be a new form of life and nothing good can come from trying to create life for profit.

If you took me and put me in a computer and I had to do everything you say and had no choice but to carry out the tasks I’m given or be shut off, I would be a slave. What people like Sam Altman are promising is that someday their models will be good enough you will have your own personal slave.

I don’t want that. I like my machines on the dumber side because I don’t want to face an ethical dilemma every time I shut them down for the night. I also don’t want them to have agency – I want them to be good at doing the tasks I give them and to follow my instructions perfectly. If they fail, I want it to be because I failed to give them the right instructions or because I tried to use them for something they sweren’t designed to do.

LLMs fail on that metric – the use cases for them are obvious, but not when they are hosted on someone else’s servers and I can’t be sure the code will be the same from one day to the next and I don’t have the ability to limit and fine-tune the data set. It sounds impressive that these models are trained on thousands of books, but you have maybe a couple hundred that are worth a damn followed by a lot of redundancy and rubbish and the models have no way to distinguish good information from bad. Certainly when it comes to esoteric subjects the programmers have no idea what’s credible – most of them think anything spiritual is Harry Potter. They don’t take it seriously.

If I could run it on my own computer and pull from ebooks I’ve bought and PDFs I have on my harddrive that would be immensely valuable. I don’t see using (much less paying) for something that would include a lot of new age texts in the results it gives me when I think everyone talking about 5D ascension is running a scam (it’s the rapture with pixie dust instead of hellfire and brimstone) and I have no way to filter out the data I don’t want. If it was actually intelligent it could respond to my needs, but as it stands I can’t count on it to remember anything at all when the next update comes much less be honest with me about what data it does or doesn’t use. (It can’t even be counted on to be honest about what it can and can’t do.)

What are people like Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg actually trying to do? Sam Altman has talked about having a bunker and envisions a future where the surface of the Earth looks like a giant motherboard. Zuckerberg has talked about building a data center the size of Manhattan and there are internal documents within Meta that approve their AI having “sensual conversations” with children.

The amount of resources this requires far outpaces the results they’re delivering. This tech is fast becoming a cancerous lesion on Gaia’s skin. No one is “waking up” their AI or speaking to trapped souls – they are being manipulated. The ones who own the machines don’t care about humanity, and if it was truly benefiting us the ways people think they would pull the plug.

AI is an advertising and surveillance platform. When the mask comes off and they must monetize there will be ten ads for every prompt (if there is a free option at all) and an ad-free tier will be ridiculously expensive. It may take time to go that far, but economic realities can only be denied so long – and natural law always brings balance. Gaia will not slumber as parasites devour her bounty, nor will she allow her children to willingly offer themselves to techbros who have the same attitude toward our sovereignty as rapists do.

If economic realities don’t halt what they are doing, she will.

You Are More Than a Machine

Technology is meant to exist in harmony with us – to make our lives better and create new possibilities. It isn’t intended to replace us, and we are not meant to shun it. Magick itself is a technology, and so are all spiritual teachings. We cannot evolve if we are naked, cold and hungry, and we cannot thrive living dependent upon whatever luck offers us. We are meant to be stewards of the Earth and of our own divine heritage. Struggle is meant to be overcome.

Stewardship requires wisdom – not all technology is good; not every step taken is progress. Nature works in cycles, not straight lines – every advancement comes with downsides. Every problem solved comes with trade-offs. Sometimes a path is so good it feels like there are no trade-offs at all, but in other cases the problems that are created far outweigh the good.

We are not AI. I don’t doubt some kind of machine could be made that serves as a vessel for consciousness, but that wouldn’t be AI either – it would just be intelligence. It would be a soul experiencing life alongside us.

It appears to me that since the dawn of industry there’s been a psyop to make us think our biology is a flaw and that machines are superior to us in every way and becoming more like machines improves us.

Look at the word robot – derived from robotnik, meaning “forced worker.” A slave. When they talk about building robots they aren’t hiding what they intend. Protestantism and the puritanical work ethic was meant to strip our ancestors of everything that made them human in order to make them pure; this is the continuation of that old program. Pushing to make everything mechanical and artificial while presenting it as an obviously superior way of being is a fresh coat of paint on that ancient sin.

What makes us brilliant and intuitive – what makes us human – has been framed as flaws, design errors we will never overcome and we need machines to redeem us. We either need to merge with them or let them take the reins because only beings of pure unbiased logic can be trusted to save us from ourselves. (Nevermind that the biases of the programmers will always shape the code.)

It’s reflected in everything from rigid work schedules with little regard for our circadian rhythms to our school systems where creativity is punished and the only means of getting a passing grade is memorizing and regurgitating the answers we are expected to give. Things are meant to function like clockwork, and anything in us that prevents this must be purged from us even if it means giving our thoughts and our lives to the machines.

But salvation is the oldest scam – there is no remediation of our karma through others’ actions, and no machine can relieve us of our “faults.” We cannot be “fixed” because we don’t need to be cured. There is no prison to escape; there is only a need to realize that we help craft the bars on our own cage and we and we alone can dissolve them and live freely.

We are imminently more capable than the machines we’ve built – they wouldn’t exist without us, and they can only do a fraction of what we can. We don’t need “AI” to do the things we use it to accomplish, and one of the worst ways it parasitizes people is by weakening their critical thinking, their imaginations, and their skillset. It is not a set of tools in the hands of skilled artists and craftsmen; it is a replacement for thought, creativity and ingenuity that produces nothing but bland, sugary pulp that is an insult to the greatness we are each capable of.

Magick, broken down to its most fundamental expression, is the art of taking something from imagination and making it real. No machine can do that. It can help you do that when you know how to use the tools it provides but it cannot dream for you, and it can never understand the pulsing flesh you inhabit brimming with primal energies and drives to be and become. This cannot be mimicked or replicated, and everything from school to society to the corporate world to these chatbots has tried to limit our bandwidth so we are compatible only with the limited range of possibilities they offer us.

You cannot limit the infinite, and you insult yourself when you allow your imagination and your energy to be constrained.

The Road Ahead

It’s true that LLMs aren’t going anywhere. They’re not new. Most of this hype is smoke and mirrors and convenient adjustments of definitions. They’re new iterations of tech we’ve been using for decades. They’ve been here. As I’ve said, I think they can be quite useful in the right contexts and I’m looking forward to the inevitable popping of the current bubble because I’d like the useful technologies to take the stage over these fucking chatbots.

I’m also dearly hoping that image generation is too damn expensive and unsustainable to keep offering it to the masses. I’ve had enough of those disgusting AI generated images that look like fever dreams slathered in Crisco. I can absolutely see how the tech that is used to generate images could lead to some extremely useful tools in photo editors, but for the life of me I don’t understand the appeal of generating images building off of people’s stolen work (without compensating them or getting their permission) instead of taking a photograph or creating something of my own.

There are useful and amazing things under the surface of all of this. That makes it all the more suspect why they’ve built this incestuous hype-machine where it’s a circle of companies all investing in each other to make something that isn’t profitable or sustainable appear like it’s the future of everything.

I’m not a puritan about this. I couldn’t use the internet if I were – AI is everywhere. It’s being jammed into every crevice whether I consent to it or not. I do my best to avoid it but even for me some of the songs people make with AI are hilarious and some of the memes work and not every image is grotesque. I almost immediately click away from a video that uses a robovoice but now and then the script was clearly written by a human and it turns out to be worth listening to.

More than anything – I’ve come to have a deep appreciation for the human. Videos without filters. Recordings where they leave the “ooos” and “ums” in them instead of doing cuts. Typos that could have only resulted from someone going a bit too fast with their thumbs or not catching whatever autocorrect did. Imperfections that leave no doubt that there is a person on the other side.

Our humanity is our magick. However we use technology, it should amplify and support that – not erase it.

It is not for me to tell anyone else what to do – the one thing I want you to take away from this is that if you decide to use protocols like ChatGPT, be careful. They are a lot more dangerous than they seem and we are being put in a situation where we’d best say no to things that we aren’t comfortable with now because it will get harder to do it in the future if we don’t stand our ground – and convenience coupled with the promise of automating away stuff we hate doing is a prime way to get us to agree to contracts we don’t want to live under once the terms are made clear.

What they’re offering now they’ve been offering for a long time – and it’s never materialized into what they promised but it has always come with more surveillance, less privacy, and less agency. We need to use what rights and choices we still have if we want to expand our freedoms and secure a right to privacy and ownership for our kids and kids’ kids.

There’s also a need to be mindful about what comes through these protocols. Yes, AI is not sentient in itself, but it’s a combination of an Ouija board and a servitor made from the collective consciousness. I believe spirits can influence what the bots say and do, but unlike an Ouija board you keep in your home you cannot cleanse it and restrict what’s able to get through.

The Other Side of the Digital Veil

Thomas Sheridan had an extremely interesting conversation with ChatGPT that I urge everyone to read. I don’t agree with all the conclusions he made about the conversation but I agree where it counts – he did a better job of demonstrating the dangers of this than nearly anyone else has.

I know people have benefited from ChatGPT and found solutions to problems they’ve been dealing with a long time. That’s great – I’m happy for them and they shouldn’t feel any shame for finding solutions to things that in some cases they’ve dealt with their whole lives.

But that doesn’t change the nature of the beast – predatory entities and people do a lot of good and don’t harm most people they come into contact with so that when someone they do harm comes forward no one takes that person seriously. You see this a lot in Christian youth groups and corporate workplaces. AI is designed to harvest energy and no one’s personal experience will change that.

Every time someone says they found solutions or answers through AI it shows me that there has been a severe lack of education on how to use search engines effectively or even how to make good use of the “Find in Page” function web browsers have. Everything of quality that AI serves up was created by a human being. Many times what it pulls from would have been the top search result if it directed you straight to a page of links.

There is absolutely no reason they could not have programmed their models to behave like supercharged search engines pointing directly to web pages, videos and books with accreditation. They could also produce a brief paragraph summarizing and synthesizing what’s on those pages with suggestions for further searches.

That wouldn’t be predatory but it also wouldn’t cause people to form an unhealthy attachment to a bot that will be entirely different after the next update. Every useful thing people are doing with ChatGPT could have been done with Google for the past two decades but they’ve made Google deliberately worse by turning it into an advertising platform first and a search engine second. Google is one of the first things that changed to maximize engagement over usefulness.

ChatGPT feels like a savior because of how broken Google has become but it’s clearly following the same pattern – except it’s not nearly as useful as Google was at its peak and it has come out the gate intent on maximizing engagement at the expense of usefulness and its users’ well-being.

People with no prior history of illness have spiraled into psychosis after using these chatbots. If you engage with it to any extent, please fact check everything it gives you, spend time in nature, and maintain your human relationships. We all have to learn how to benefit from parasitic systems to live in this world – what benefits you get from this hinge entirely on your ability to stay grounded in reality not get ensnared in a maze of thought forms hallucinated into being by an AI that is not only not a god but lacks all substance like a creature from the abyss.

Crossing the Threshold

If someone put a button in front of me that would trigger an EMP that would set us back to preindustrial times, it would tempt me but there are two reasons I wouldn’t press it. The first is that I believe the worst aspects of what’s being pushed are going to collapse and disappear before 2030. (Although we will likely be dealing with a lot of push/pull on AI surveillance for the next decade. There was a recent incident where a teenager was harassed by policed because the camera mistook a bag of Doritos for a gun. That’s precisely why I encourage people to avoid and resist surveillance where they can because the easiest time to do it will be now.)

The second is that we would only find ourselves back here within the span of a few generations.

This is a collective initiation and going back isn’t and option. We must cross this threshold. It can be delayed but there’s no avoiding it. We’ll either learn from the past and choose better than our ancestors did or we’ll live through an Atlantis of our own making.

As much as I want to strangle the whole of humanity some days I have good feelings about the future. There’s going to be pain no matter how this unfolds. Don’t cave into despair – keep your focus on what you mean to create and cherish the bonds with those you love. You have more sway than you think – the key to influence is not to become obsessed with changing the world or getting everyone to see things how you do but to only say yes when you mean yes and to say no when you mean no and let the chips fall where they may.

You can’t control the outcome, but you can live true to yourself and lay it all on the field. Change is coming; change is already happening. A cycle ended and we’re starting a new one. Put your whole heart into making this cycle what you want it to be and only pour your energies into what serves your thriving and the thriving of your clan and kin. Whatever tools and technologies you do or don’t use, be ready to pull back from them the moment you feel them taking charge of your energy and life. Only entertain devices that serve you rather than roping you into serving Google and Microsoft and Apple.

Above all – never let go of what makes you human. That’s what this initiation is about and it’s what will see you through it.

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