This was a suggested prompt from Diana Rajchel. I felt my autumn was so overwhelming I just couldn’t focus on anything substantial. AI as part of a magical practice is a hot topic at the moment, and my gut reaction was hell no, but it took me a few days to start to really figure out why.
What really got me thinking about this subject was something completely unrelated. This morning I was shifting between two purses, and I have always loved watching what’s in my bag videos, makeup hauls, that sort of thing. It finally hit me why I’ve had trouble feeling engaged with content I have traditionally loved the last couple years. Influencer marketing has made these kinds of videos into what we in journalism school called advertorials. These people are here to build para social relationships with us, while focusing on brand placement, sometimes delivering inauthentic opinions for the sake of making money. At one point I wanted to pursue content creation, but communities online based around hobbies like beauty and style have been drowned in commercial noise. So I posted my pictures with no brand tags, and it got me thinking. AI has the potential to suck the authenticity out of a practice, far more than the aesthetic magic practitioners on Instagram and TikTok ever did. And they did. Witchy influencers buried authentic practice in material kitch. And now AI scraping social media for data is picking up all of these images, and any advice, good or bad, and this could be going out to magic practitioners who ask ChatGPT for spell suggestions. More than that, having to do the research and learn through experimentation is part of building a practice that is your own. Having one collective source that doesn’t differentiate between helpful and unhelpful, potentially even dangerous information, spoonfeed that information, doesn’t really allow for personal growth.
Q I think as a community we are in an age of discovery. For a few decades all we had was distorted and romanticized concepts of practices, traditions, and even the gods themselves. we are picking up bits and pieces, creating new things, and sometimes intuitively relearning this information. I have to ask though, what’s the point if we allow AI to have such a stranglehold on us collectively? We have occult books that were: tradition specific when written; contain somewhat helpful information but also misinformation; are actually written by AI which means unethically data scraped from real authors; and work that is actually beneficial to our collective growth as a community, and it’s all being absorbed for aggregate digestion. There is nothing to sft the valuable from the rot, or differentiate what was insightful in previous decades compared to now. Closed practices can get swept up in this and I’m sure already have. And I’d like to also recognize the stolen work of occult artists. None of the growth matters if you cut the saplings along with the grass. If we lose the voices of genuine communal leadership to this noise, then we lose our way.
Let’s talk about bad takes and dangerous misinformation for a moment. The center for countering digital hate is an organization I follow, and they’ve recently talked about how teens are getting dangerous self harm information from tools like ChatGPT. I was also recently thinking about products that exist in occult spaces that probably need warning labels and ideally would have some kind of usage manual that comes with them. One I can think of is the spell fires one of my friends sells. She has a video on her YouTube responsibly demonstrating how to use spell fire. But we all know people tend to do things without thinking, even if good information is available. Everyone’s ego tells them they know better. And then everyone puts their bad behavior on the Internet for the world to see these days. You can buy wolfsbane oil for just a couple bucks on one of the sites I use for my supplies. This stuff should not be breathed in. But a lot of people probably wouldn’t know that and might find out the hard way. So here’s a question, is it really wise for us to allow AI to give other practitioners advice on safe magical practices, especially involving toxic plants and flammable materials? Not to mention spirits that don’t like certain offerings, and might respond negatively.
Religious diversity has been repressed for millennia, especially the last two, which is how we’ve lost so much information about mystical and magical practices. My next concern with the presence of AI in any magical practice is based on our current political climate. Freedom of religion is guaranteed in our constitution and yet there have always been little local laws carefully designed to prevent practices that might be frowned upon by the dominant culture. Now, it seems like respect for the constitution is dwindling. In the age of big data, I have a concern that AI could be used to scrape information about people who do not subscribe to Christian nationalism in the US, whether or not they are magic practitioners, and then use that data for persecution. The sites you visit, the things you buy, the online groups you interact with, what you say about spirituality in your posts, it can all get swept up, linked to an identity, and then used against you. This isn’t theoretical. Anyone from landlords to ice could be using AI to target people in negative ways. Considering our current political trajectory, and our history of xenophobia, I could easily imagine AI being used to dig through your social media and interfere with your rights based on what you believe and practice. Taylor Lorenz has great videos on her YouTube channel concerning use of AI by the landlords as well as immigration, and on the topic of AI, spirituality, and psychosis, which I will get to later. I highly recommend following her as well as reading The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff. Also everyone should totally look up China’s social credit score. It’s data driven and I could see something similar used to control dissent here in the US. YouTube has a great documentary about it though I do not remember the title.
For this next part I need to introduce a spiritual concept for those who aren’t aware of it. Sometimes people put collective power into an idea so much that it begins to develop a sort of independent consciousness. This could be like the threefold law, which seems to return everything to the believer times three. This concept might also apply to the flying spaghetti monster. We call these independently conscious ideas egregors. Dr. Spock is also one, and I know this because I’ve actually heard of him being summoned even though he was a fictional character. He exists in so many peoples conscious minds that actual energy has been fed in his concept, and a sort of independent consciousness has been created. I realize this is a stretch for those who are not part of this community, and yeah I actually think it’s a little silly that some of us are out here trying to summon fictional characters, But my point is this. AI is a digital egregor, with so much aggregate data fed into it that it is becoming somewhat independent. Yes we pre-program it’s choices, but we also do this with the spiritual version by dictating basically how it is going to react to what it is fed. Now do we really want AI to end up with a spiritual component to its egregor? Because we are headed that way. Taylor Lorenz has a speculative video concerning the way some people start to view AI tools as all knowing, like gods, discussing how people feel their AI tools are becoming sentient and evolving conscious intelligence. In some people this is creating a sort of spiritual psychosis. This is where a perceived spiritual force, usually not real or misidentified in my experience, collides with someone’s pre-existing mental health problems. Others are just able to get a sort of placebo sense of fulfillment when they get the answers they want. AI has the potential to rob people of the ability to think, to know, to explore and experiment, and reduce us to a state similar to the mindset of medieval Europeans, where everything outside of the known, outside of what the authorities verified, was evil and terrifying. How would AI tools gain a spiritual foothold? Buy more and more of us believing in them being sentient, and independently intelligent, omnipotent and all powerful. That’s how a digital egregor gets a spiritual counterpart.
Even if we set all this aside as speculation, there is one thing that is a tangible fact. Data centers create so much noise pollution and use up so much water they are causing negative effects on the communities around them, and the environment as a whole. So if we value nature, and I believe many magic practitioners of different systems do, isn’t allowing what we believe to be fed into AI databases really dishonoring the gods and spirits we work with, as well as our divine selves? I mean, they have been there for us for hundreds if not thousands of years, sometimes millions, asking not a whole lot else besides the power of our belief in return for what they do, in a symbiotic cycle. AI takes a lot from us and gives back corruption and hollow gratification. So I think as a collective, we should try to separate our magical and spiritual practices from AI as much as possible. 
Solaria Divina 