Gurus with Mechanical Heads
Om Money Padme Who?
Every story I write ends up being a story about the meaning of life. When I started putting together this one, it was supposed to be about AI and automated “soulspeak.” Sure enough, it ended up being about the meaning of life because this humble blogger is Russian and therefore, can’t help always thinking about God, the universe, and the meaning of life. Russianness comes with a certain internal setup. :-)
What does a meaningful life look like to me?
To me, it means living in accordance with your own Soul, which is a direct representative of the mystery of Creation. It’s about having harmony between all parts of you in different dimensions, your Soul being grounded confidently and effortlessly in your physical body (as opposed to hanging around due to the shock of trauma)—and being your most intimate Guide.
It is about addressing your challenges from the position of inalienable belonging and humble power.
What I am describing here is a physical state that needs to be maintained. It has nothing to do with an adherence to any particular set of talking points, religious or otherwise. It has nothing to do with sitting on a tree stump, puffing your cheeks, and saying spiritual words, like that Little Hedgehog from the Russian joke. Our beliefs can be very helpful in providing a framework for how we think about the world but being grounded in reality and one’s own Soul is a physical state. And in terms of our to-do list, the meaning of life is different for each of us, and only our own Soul fully knows.
We do have a giant problem, however. We live under domination (thank you, Steven Newcomb for finding a perfect word to describe the machine). The machine pushes our Souls out of our bodies through trauma and disrespect. That leaves many people walking this earth as hotels for all sorts of energy that’s not their own. Nearly everybody is abused, be it overt abuse or covert abuse. Nearly everyone is protesting but oftentimes, protest takes form of self-deceit or self-sabotage.
The foundational problem of society in this day and age is that by default, no one teaches us to listen to our Soul. Nobody teaches us how to talk to our Soul. Most of us wait until getting extremely broken to look for repair. Not only that, we are actively being tricked and beaten out of our own and very intimate meaning of life.
Being in harmony with our own Soul is replaced by seeking refuge from pain through various addictions, through pleasing our peers (who have been tricked by the machine to think machine thoughts and who therefore act temporarily as messengers of the machine) or through pledging allegiance to disconnected talking points (repeat after me, think correct thoughts or else, don’t be a traitor of our kind, follow this, do this, don’t do that etc. etc.)
Speaking of “traitors,” I really love this film.
Here is an amazing fact: it’s not the sadism of the broken souls who choose to be evil that breaks emotional spines, it’s the indifference and temporary insanity of wobblyfolk those who go under their spell and allow themselves to throw others under the bus.
What about AI?
The abuse of today is automated abuse.
It is not different in principle from the abuse of the past but it is more technologically advanced.
In the past, “spiritual talk” has often been used to rob people of their soul sovereignty, to confuse or enslave minds (and often, to steal land as well).
And there you stand, agape and alone, as a thousand commercials for panaceas for broken people are trying to invite themselves to the party.
This is not good, you think. And you realize that you are your own god, in addition to the one above. But even that, even that – you have already heard that somewhere, and the privilege cost you $999 plus hotel.
The speaker was charming.
(Strange Love in the Time of Kali Yuga)
Nothing changed there.
And here is Deepak Chopra of the Epstein List fame, suggesting that we “confide” in AI, which seems very similar to the idea of “confiding” in KGB priests during the USSR.
The “gurus” are responsible for their unholy deeds but here is another sick twist: This AI beast has been trained on a sea of genuine human art as well as on an ocean of effective marketing copy that had “borrowed” emotional expression from genuine human art—so it mimics effective “attraction-generating” writing very well.
Marketing acts very much like a drug, like MSG for the soul.
Yes, it is toxic. But it is also attractive, and as such, it works to attract.
I was blown away by CJ Hopkins’ experiment from a few months ago in which he asked AI to write an article on a particular topic in his style. Yes, there were a couple of glitchy phrases in that story but all in all, the AI-generated piece did sound a lot like him and was, in fact, one of the smoothest pieces by “CJ Hopkins” I have ever read. Wow. AI kept the wit in—and eliminated the struggle.
As I was writing this piece, I decided to reproduce his experiment and ask the robot to write a piece on a particular topic in my style. It informed me that it couldn’t write anything in anyone’s style but then it spat out a piece that was very smoothly written and in fact, matched my style. Then I asked the robot to rewrite it in the style of Leo Tolstoy, and I have to say, it improved “my” piece by a lot. Hmmmmm. :-)
We are at a crossroads.
Our entire civilization is about domination. Has been for a long time. Our economic model is largely about resource theft. In the past, they were mainly stealing land, water, gold, other metals and minerals, and physical work. Today, they are also stealing feelings and thoughts. This AI “companion” is great help at producing a lot of linguistic lollypops with a fishing hook baked in—and doing it fast.
Thus, when it comes to intentional “writing for impact,” i.e. titillating the readers’ pain points in order to addict attract and sell, this AI beast does a very effective job. Like I said, this is no surprise. It has “eaten” a gazillion of pieces written specifically to addict and sell, and it knows with precision how to manipulate minds—without being held back by the awkward human self.
Pangram
Yo, I go by Tessa Fights Robots (a nickname I used for my original blog and the music album I released about this very topic in 2017). I’ve been dreaming of fighting robots, protesting the mechanical world, Big Tech, and transhumanism for at least 20 years.
When Substack released Pangram, their AI-identifying tool, I thought, hmmmm. Usually, I use my nose to identify AI but when the tool was announced, I tried it out—and in my experience, it has been accurate so far.
In my testing of the tool, every time I thought that the piece was produced by AI, it was confirmed as such by this new tool. And vice versa.
Am I anyone’s AI moral police? No. Everyone has a free will.
Do I want to read AI-generated prose? Also no.
Do I trust my nose on to identify AI? Yes, I do! So there.
Who is better, my nose or the tool? If I had to choose between my nose and the testing tool, I would go with my nose. But so far, the tool has been confirming what my nose has found.
Also this:
On the other hand, there are AI tools on the market that “humanize” AI-written text—which I just found out.
I am scientifically inclined, so when I saw an ad for a “humanizer,” I did an experiment. I generated a short piece with AI—a very smooth lollypop— which was correctly identified by Pangram as AI. Then I “humanized” the lollypop using a free tool (one click!), and Pangram said it was 100% human-written, which it was not.
Well…..
Does protesting invasion work?
In my lived experience, it depends.
At this point in history, we may need to do more than that. I believe that this moment of history is here in the first place for us to reevaluate the very foundations of our existence, our civilizational roots.
Here is a piece that I wrote a few years ago (before 2020). I thought I’d get it published by the New York Times, lol. The New York Times didn’t want it (I wonder why) but it is still one of my favorite philosophical sci-fi pieces that I’ve written so far. I believe that restoring the importance of free will is where we start.
A confession: when I got pulled into “activism” years ago, I was naive. I thought that providing information would move mountains. Was I wrong? I’ve protested. I’ve raged against the machine, hoping to educate the world. I have gotten a few viral pieces out of that. But, today, I am sad about the fact that all the things that I was writing against have become a part of our everyday life. When it mattered, nobody wanted to listen, and now that so many people are talking about it, it could be too late to just protest.
The new voices that awakened to this much more recently are shaking fists at the very things that my friends and I were warning against—to the deafening sound of crickets—a long time ago. It is good that they are—but without a spiritual awakening of a true, non-denominational kind, I’m not so sure how much difference all this branded fist-shaking can make at this point.
Something else needs to be done now. Something deeper, more philosophical, more foundational, more spiritual, more along the lines of connecting to our souls.
This condition brings me back to John Trudell and what he described in his talk that I like so much. He was talking about how his generation protested, and made art, and the machine found ways to absorb the pushback—like it always does—how it munched on it, digested it, and turned it into harmless things, all while making advances in the real world.
In a similar way, my musician friends and I protested Big Tech, then my medical freedom friends and I protested the you know what—but if we look around, there are cameras everywhere, shops can refuse to take cash, standards for freedom and privacy are in the trash, and many people are just toiling to the best of their ability around all this inflation, with their heads down.
(Oh the engaging conversations about controversies over a glass of wine, oh the book deals, oh the sensationalist programs, do they matter? I don’t know.)
Has protesting been most useful in our own lives and our local communities all along?
In the meanwhile., AI has gotten very good at producing linguistic drugs lollypops. Public minds have been flattened and exhausted by social shocks, chronic illness, economic survival, inflation—and corrupted by excessive exposure to ever-self-upgrading verbal goo. People are being rewired to react to AI-generated goo much more eagerly than to regular human talk.
I don’t know about you but I can feel how I need to work extra in order to not to get dumber from swimming in the sea of AI-generated words. Have you felt that, too?
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I sure have felt it. And I recommend, if you don't already know him, Iain McGilchrist's many you tubes on this, and his book, The Master and his Emmisary. To me, we - I - MUST go on using my brain (of which your 'sensing nose' is part) and never let the machine calcify it, control it through its 'muscle' becoming lazy. Even if I'm still 'bottom of the class' (as I always was), I must use it (which is actually, now, why I think I was bottom of the class; I was told I must conform, but never seemed able to - funny that....) I will stay curious, thinking, sensing, refusing-to-send-the-ball-back, and dodge any 'actual insanity' button to my dying day.
Thank you for you great wriitng, as ever!
A.I. is a seductress. We must learn to tie ourselves to the mast to avoid her temptations. She beckons, and is beautiful, but succumbing means risking never returning. There's nothing like the real thing, as long as we wish to remain human.