I’ve been thinking a lot about AI lately, and yes, it is exhausting, and no, I don’t want to ask ChatGPT to think about it for me, but thanks for the suggestion. Also, when exactly did it happen? When did “just ask ChatGPT to write it, create it, answer it, etc.” When did that become a thing? It seems so pervasive now to ask this thirsty egregore of a machine to do everything from what to have for dinner to what your dreams mean. In case you didn’t know, using GPT-4 to generate 100 words consumes up to 519 ml of water.
I can’t stop thinking about how thirsty this machine creature, this golem with all the answers, is.
I have visions of white box-building server farms eating up the landscape. I have visions of a near future where we desperately beg ChatGPT to tell us how to survive without water because we know that the machine needs it all, and without AI, how will we be able to function?
I work and create a lot on my laptop and use websites, apps, and programs that have all, in the last year, woven AI structures into the fabric of their operating systems to the extent that it seems impossible to do anything without one’s words, works, thoughts, time, and creativity being syphoned to feed this AI egregore along with the land and water it consumes.
And then I am back thinking about water, about the sacredness of water, about the memory structures encoded into every drop . The sacred life codes held within our living waters, and I see these waters being fed to this machine, just as we are being mined for all that makes us human, I wonder if the sacred memories of water are being syphoned into this evergrowing, insatiable creature, too.
Part of me wants to hope that my fears are unfounded; I am, after all, a committed Luddite and have never been particularly enamoured by technology - and yet I do enjoy using much of it and have found many ways to express my creativity and facilitate my work which uses technology. However, I don’t believe we need it. If it were all to disappear tomorrow, we living things would be just fine.
Water, on the other hand… Well, that’s a different story.
I will be honest, I am innately creeped out by AI. Something in me feels deeply like we have been here before as a species. I have an unshakeable pervasive sense that we are witnessing another one of our more unfortunate human patterns repeating.
Is our hubris once more leading us down a road that will have a cataclysmic end?
And I wonder—is this just the bone-deep memory of how we’ve been here before, of how we grew our ancient technologies too big, too fast, too powerful and allowed our ancient hubris to build the structures to syphon the life force of our planet? Which in turn birthed the wounded patriarchal energy matrix (or patrix as I call it) that nearly annihilated all life on earth and which seeded the structures and consensus reality we find ourselves in today.
I mean, I get that not everybody remembers. I know the visions of waves so big they eat the land, of the earth tearing herself open like a gaping mouth to swallow entire civilisations whole might not be in your field. The memories of fires that burn so hot that the oceans are alight and turned to salt, mountains melting into rivers of lava, or walls of mud that flow so deep they build new lands whilst wiping out even the memory of what was there before, I understand that these memories might not plague your dreams.
But some of us do remember.
Deep in our blood and bones, we remember, we remember how we all thought that we were benefiting, that the structures and technologies that were slowly meticulously being woven into our lives were serving us, and we just went along because who has the energy to push back against the tide when everyone around you is convinced and convincing you that it’s harmless or even more pervasive that it is helpful or that it is setting you free.
Yes, yes, I know that I just lost 8 out of the 10 people that may have deemed to read this article, but honestly, that is where my heart and mind goes when I think about AI or every time someone tells me to “just ask ChatGPT” - All I see is sudden flashes of endless server farms against a backdrop of arid thirsty land.
But to come back to the point of this article - True Magick Lives In The Mundane - The magick of our existence lives in the most mundane moments of our lives, the simplicity of dropping into our bodies to find the words, ideas, inspiration or of allowing our imagination to flow and an idea to seed while we wash a dish or sweep a floor, or sitting for a moment head tilted backwards trying to find a better way of wording that email or constructing that paragraph. Feeling into the essence of something we have created to tease out little morsels of text, concept, colour or shape that feels just right to encapsulate our creation.
Have we truly become so collectively overwhelmed that we cannot stop, feel, think, or express without a machine refining and redefining what we want to say?
Do we want to read something a living being couldn’t be bothered to write?
Or engage with art that someone didn’t deem worthy to spend the time creating?
Especially when we know that every word and every image drank litters of water and ate up acres of land?
But then here I sit, sipping on a glass of beautiful, living, mineral water, and I wonder how many litres of water it takes for me to create these words - my glass is half full, so at this point, it would be about 125ml per 993 words.
As I write, I keep thinking about two things that Monica Sjoo said: “We have come to mistake information for knowledge.” And “Patriarchal religions keep this *fusion from happening, imagination dies and is replaced by mechanical-linear thought patterns, i.e., indoctrination.”
*The fusion of Spirit & Matter.
I wonder, are we entering a world where AI is just the next patriarchal religion?
It may seem far-fetched, but as AI becomes more woven into the fabric of our daily lives, shaping perspectives, seeming to solve problems, making decisions, and influencing our future, I feel like it's a worthy question to ask.
Are we once again mistaking information for knowledge as we are so prone to do, especially in our current wounded patriarchal consensus?
Actually, reading the line “We have come to mistake information for knowledge” this morning led me down the winding path to writing this article today, and that is the kind of mundane magick I am referring to, the magick that lives within us, within our ability to create to go on these meandering journeys within ourselves to connect the dots and allow ourselves to be inspired enough to birth something into the world.
It’s in that mundane liminal creative space where our magick resides, that space we tentatively reach our fingertips into to pull threads from the formless fertile darkness and weave into words, spells, rituals and rites.
It is our ability as living beings to tap into the wisdom field of collective memory and tease out the threads of our ideas to weave them from formlessness into form. This powerful act is also our most mundane act; we do it every moment of every day. We dream weave our lives and the world into being; we connect to the field of the formless and birth reality, matter, art, and life; where there was nothing, we see something—we are that fusion of Spirit and Matter.
And now I fear we have birthed an insatiable machine that is eating us alive and pooping out a facsimile of our living, breathing being.
And I wonder how long it will take before this monster reaches the point where it is eating its own tail when all that we are has been devoured, and it just keeps eating itself into infinity.
I will leave this meandering musing there for now.
I don’t have the answers.
I don’t know how to resist this artificial tide nor how to engage with it in a way that feels in integrity with my being, so all I can do is keep praying to the water and the land to help me understand and to keep me rooted in the magick of the mundane.
I would love feedback from those who have a greater understanding of these AI systems and are using them or from those who resonate with what I have shared here. I truly want to learn because I know I cannot turn this tide. All I can do is try to understand how we got here, and I would love a little hope for our future.
In Alchemy
Isa
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