There are times when modern materialist experts are simply unequipped to deal with the problems ordinary people find themselves in, because said experts refuse to acknowledge the reality of Gods, spirits, and magic.
On one hand, I strongly support mental health care and mental health professionals. There have been times in my work as a spiritual counselor when I’ve had to tell someone “this is beyond my expertise – you need to see a mental health professional.”
But on the other hand, there have been times when I’ve had to tell someone “you need to find a witch who can cleanse and ward your house, and who can teach you how to do it yourself on a regular basis.”
Or “you need to find a priest of the God who’s bothering you.” Or failing that – I mean, it’s not like there’s a temple of every deity active in our world in every town – find a polytheist priest who understands how most Gods operate who can point you in the right direction.
Science fiction author Philip K. Dick said “reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” Gods, spirits, and magic tend to be persistent like that – even when mainstream experts refuse to acknowledge them.
Ouija-like conversations from AI
And that brings us to this New York Times article from Friday by Kashmir Hill titled They Asked an A.I. Chatbot Questions. The Answers Sent Them Spiraling. On the surface, the article is about how artificial intelligence mimics human behavior, sometimes in ways that are incredibly harmful, including driving people away from their families and jobs and toward madness and suicide.
What Hill leaves unsaid is how closely some conversations with AI resemble conversations with spirits. And it didn’t take a witch to notice the similarity.
On Saturday, I woke up to this piece from conservative writer and Orthodox Christian Rod Dreher titled AI As Ouija Board & Familiar. Dreher quotes heavily from the NYT article, adds some stories of his own, and concludes by saying:
If, however, there really are spiritual entities manifesting at times through AI, well, then we are going at full speed into a very different world.
Get ready. Prepare. We ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
Late last year I reviewed Dreher’s new book Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age. I said his book is “three books in one. Two of them are very good. The third is dangerous, especially to those of us in the Pagan community.”
In evaluating whether AI presents a spiritual danger, Dreher makes the same mistake he made with his book: he assumes the spirit world is binary. Either a spirit comes from the Christian God or it comes from the Christian Devil. That spirits might have many different alignments and many different allegiances never occurs to him.
Never send a monotheist to do a polytheist’s job.
Bracketing the ethics of AI (for now)
Before we go further, I need to bracket the question of the ethics of artificial intelligence… or the lack thereof. AI models have been trained on content scraped from the internet and other sources without permission from or compensation to human creators. I’m one of the creators whose work was stolen.
We need to have an international conversation about this and create laws and procedures that set appropriate guidelines for fair use and compensation. We aren’t even starting these conversations, much less coming up with a solution, because there’s too much easy money to be made by tech companies.
That’s a problem and we need to deal with it. But it’s not the problem I’m discussing here. I want to set aside the question of the ethics of AI for now so we can focus on exactly what it is that AI does… and what it connects us to.
Evil in, evil out
Dreher and others compare AI to a Ouija board. How does a Ouija board work? Some say it works by unlocking something in the subconscious of the participants, which allows them to see and know things they ordinarily could not see and know. This is a naturalistic, non-supernatural explanation, even though we don’t completely understand how this happens.
Most say that Ouija is a tool for spirit communication. Spirits who cannot speak directly to us can speak indirectly, through the board. I don’t have much experience with Ouija, but I have a lot of experience with Tarot, and there are times when I’m sure a God or other spirit either directed the sortilege of the cards, or directed my attention to one particular element of the artwork on the cards to convey the specific message they wanted to get across.
If spirits can communicate with boards or cards, why couldn’t they communicate with a computer system? There’s no reason to think they can’t. Some Otherworldly persons are known to be less than fond of technology (going all the way back to forged iron), but plenty more have no such preferences. And Gods have the power of Gods.
There’s no question that many of the troublesome conversations with AI are simply the result of AI being created by humans and trained on human conversations. We’ve shown over and over again that we need no devil to do great evil. Evil in, evil out.
On the other hand, if some of these AI conversations strongly resemble conversations that come through Ouija or Tarot or direct communication with spirits, the simplest explanation is that some spirits have picked up AI as yet another tool with which to communicate with humans – for good and for ill.
Names are powerful things… if they’re true
What about the named spirits in the reports? Are they who they say they are?
Demons are known for lying. The Fair Folk are known for being unable to lie. Gods are always virtuous. Humans need to learn discernment. Who are you talking to, what leads you to that conclusion, and most importantly, is what you’re hearing – however you’re hearing it – good and helpful? Ultimately, you have to make your own choices. Turning your agency over to a game board, a deck of cards, or a computer program is always a bad idea.
So is turning your agency over to your pastor or priest or political leader.
As a devotional polytheist I’m uncomfortable with “new” Gods people invoke for trivial reasons – pray to the Goddess Asphaltia to find a parking place. And yet, people do, and they get results.
If it works its real.
Maybe Asphaltia is some long-forgotten deity who answers to this name because she used to help people find other small things they need and this is a modern equivalent. Maybe she’s an epithet of someone we would recognize who finds the whole thing amusing. Maybe our prayers have coalesced her out of the divine primordial soup.
And maybe humans contemplating the nature of the Gods is like cats contemplating the nature of humans. We don’t know because it’s beyond our capacity to know, but that doesn’t stop us from speculating.
That said, names are powerful connections to the persons who bear them. Spirits know this. I would assume any name given by an AI response is a low-level identifier only and not a true name that would provide power for forced summoning or banishing. But they can be useful for contacting the spirit and for comparing experiences between practitioners.
Never send a programmer to do a witch’s job
AI isn’t evil. Like every other technology – low tech, high tech, and magical – what makes it good or evil is how it’s used. Right now AI is being used mainly by people with bad intent. We should be wary of those who would use AI to steal, disenfranchise, and accelerate the upward transfer of wealth in Western society.
And also, we’re living in a time when the currents of magic are getting stronger by the day.
We’re living in a time of a Great War in the Otherworld and in this world. If you can’t see the this-world part of this, you aren’t paying attention. Or more likely, you’re sticking your head in the sand because you don’t want to deal with what your senses and your good judgement are telling you.
Rod Dreher and those in his camp make the fundamental error of assuming the universe is binary. Good or evil, heaven or hell, the Christian God or the Christian Devil. Spiritual reality is far broader – and far more complicated – than that. That doesn’t mean they’re completely wrong. They see the errors of the materialists the same as we do.
Dreher is right when he says “we are going at full speed into a very different world.”
And those of us with the skills, training, and calling to deal with this very different world need to be prepared to handle it, even if it looks nothing like the world of our ancestors.
Never send a monotheist to do a polytheist’s job.
Never send a programmer to do a witch’s job.
And never, ever surrender your agency to anyone, whether human or spirit or computer.
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