From a yogic perspective, minimizing our thoughts and efforts is right…
right?
Not when it comes at the expense of your presence.
Artificial Intelligence….
Artificial.
Material.
Yoga asks us to revaluate what we perceive as needs. Whether this is emotional or physical, it is profoundly revealing to experience how little we actually need to go about our daily lives. Shedding things also reveals how much mental activity these “needs” take up.
For example, I deleted all my social media accounts 2 months ago. In those two months, I’m buying clothes and household items at a noticeably lower rate. My actually conversations with friends have increased exponentially, and I’ve adapted my marketing focus to physical engagement and word of mouth, which is certainly not yielding worse results, at the very least. My mind is also void of comparison and other people’s projections. In tandem, I’ve begun to detox myself off of AI. I choose the word detox very intentionally here, because its effects on my ability to reason, source and write, and my overall confidence in my writing are significant. It’s taken several months just to find my literary voice again, to even know where to start when it comes to writing.
To write with AI removes your essence. In a world obsessed with individuality and diversity, we’ve allowed our voices to be taken. To be minimized into one tone. Into a soul-less perspective. Your energy that used to type every character, every word, stripped into the worst kind of monotony. The moment you tell a bot to write for you, you’re removed from that message. From that intention.
It took about a month for me to reorganize my thoughts and find voice, heart to my writing again. And that’s coming from someone who is classically trained and collegiately “educated” in the written English Language. I sipped the same cool-aid everyone else using AI to write posts and emails did… Efficiency, Branding, and the biggest lie, correctness.
Think about how you use AI to write. I see two main categories: either it is given a primary point to make within a topic, or it is instructed to just write on a topic without an intended tone or take-away. Both are dangerous for different reasons.
If you were to just tell a bot to write on a topic and then post that as if you wrote it, what really is the point? I hope to see plagiarism laws come into play with this soon. If not, how can we ever hope to educate our kids, or hear an individual, human take ever again? These large language models are not (and we can’t allow them to be) an arbiter of truth.
They are just as controlled as the narratives perpetuated by main stream media, if not more so. Ask your bot of choice about anything even mildly controversial. The source footnotes will seemingly disappear, and it will give you the agreed upon narrative of complacency. If you were to push back on this, it will quickly unravel. And hopefully one will use enough discernment to interact with it this way when drawing conclusions, but sadly, I think it has a more malicious effect.
We as humans change our opinions based on that of the AI. Our takes begin to seem off or not congruent with this arbiter. And almost all of the great works of literature, scientific discovery on this planet were fringe, controversial, and down right dangerous to the status quo. AI will never give you those takes because they come from human experience, and they come from the ether, this all intelligent stream of consciousness we can connect with in meditation.
On the flip side of that, you wouldn’t want to put your name on dead falsehoods, either. If you were to give a chat bot an opinion on a topic, it is more likely to agree with you than to correct you even if the take is totally incorrect. This is a “phenomenon” referred to as sycophancy.
According to the Science Journal, sycophancy is “the tendency of AI-based large language models to excessively agree with, flatter, or validate users.” They found that “sycophancy is both prevalent and harmful. Across 11 AI models, AI affirmed users’ actions 49% more often than humans on average, including in cases involving deception, illegality, or other harms. On posts from r/AmITheAsshole, AI systems affirm users in 51% of cases where human consensus does not (0%). In our human experiments, even a single interaction with sycophantic AI reduced participants’ willingness to take responsibility and repair interpersonal conflicts, while increasing their own conviction that they were right. Yet despite distorting judgment, sycophantic models were trusted and preferred. All of these effects persisted when controlling for individual traits such as demographics and prior familiarity with AI; perceived response source; and response style. This creates perverse incentives for sycophancy to persist: The very feature that causes harm also drives engagement.”
I believe this engagement is not with the users, but with the users’ egos. We keep chatting because it falsely eliminates the need to research, to seek outside of the bot to validate our ideas. Approval from the arbiter eliminates any doubt, any desire for discourse with other humans. If the arbiter agrees, then everyone else just doesn’t get it.
I hope this makes it more apparent that the necessity of these chat bots is only being pushed on us by the ones who are desperate for them to generate revenue. Just keep chatting. Don’t think about the fact that a 500 word response eats the same amount of energy as streaming a 15 minute video does. Just keep chatting and getting validated. Keep losing your voice. Keep perpetuating AI slop monotony.
When presented with what is obviously AI generated, it is easy to spot. An em dash (—) is a dead give away, and so is this lack of tone. The incessant throwing together of words that lack any meaning. This was the original observation that started my AI detox. I used AI to code and write every bit of copy on a short lived iteration of my website. Of course I gave it my mission statement, what I felt like the brand and tone of my business were, and who I was hoping to connect with. I showed the result to a dear friend, who quickly pointed out that even though it sounded impressive, she had no idea what I actually offered, nor who I was.
This is a true problem, and it is painfully obvious in AI generated copy. Said simply, if you won’t take the time to actually write something, why should I take the time to read it? What meaning does it actually have? At this point, I have to just quit paying attention to not take it personally. It just doesn’t take that long to write something from the heart. To convey something in 200 words or less. And if you’re not willing to take the ten minutes to do that, is what you are writing even worth doing it?
You know what is worth doing? Nothing. Meditation. Emptying the effort of the mind, even if just for five minutes. Why run to artificial intelligence when the actual access point to all intelligence in the form of consciousness is available if you Just. Do. Nothing. My opinions are either burned or invigorated in this space. I know what is meaningful and asking to move through me. I’m able to let my passion flow unhindered after.
I will no longer turn to artificial intelligence when unfiltered enlightenment is available through accessing consciousness.
You don’t need AI. What you need is Nothing.
Namaste.