A TikTok tarot card reader gazes at me through the screen and draws a card.
“If you’re seeing this,” she coos, “it was meant for you.” And in a sense, she’s right. But it wasn’t fate that brought me here, it was an algorithm.
Spirituality and mysticism have long found a home online, but the rise of generative AI and personalized content recommender systems are making it easier than ever to project a sense of magic upon technology.
Photo: AP
As the Arthur C Clarke quote goes: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Anyone who has been served content that feels eerily perfect for them might have wondered at the mysterious omnipotence of The Algorithm. And while there’s nothing inherently wrong with experiencing a sense of wonder in the face of technological advancement, or even using digital technologies to enhance a spiritual practice, collapsing magic and technology can be risky.
‘ASK THE STARS’
Photo: Reuters
Off the back of OpenAI’s large language model GPT-4, many religious and spiritual spinoff chatbots have emerged. You can get BibleGPT to write personalized Christian poetry, use Jesus AI to, as the website claims, have “meaningful conversations with Jesus Christ” and chat with WitchGPT about paganism.
“Welcome to the void” beckons the popular astrology app CoStar in its own latest chatbot feature, encouraging users to seek generated guidance for a fee of about US$1 per question. Choosing from a list of suggested prompts, I “Ask the Stars” if I have a secret admirer. “No,” it tells me (rude).
In true CoStar fashion (the app is famously sassy) it also rebukes me for having asked the question at all, suggesting I should instead find gratitude in what I already have.
These examples are at best a bit silly and probably harmless. At worst, they reveal grifters out to make a buck by manufacturing a sense of insight or enlightenment by leveraging the human tendency to anthropomorphize technology or by gaming social media engagement algorithms.
But among the chaff there are also people forming genuine spiritual communities and engaging in witchcraft and other sacred traditions online. As with many subcultures, social media can be both a blessing and a curse: it can enable otherwise disparate groups to connect, but can also lead to the diminishment or adulteration of cultural practices.
Feminist anthropologist Emma Quilty, who has forthcoming books on magic and technology, makes a distinction between those that focus on the collective and those that push a “neoliberal spirituality” which aligns itself with hyper-individualistic ideas of self-improvement.
This edges uncomfortably close to commercialized forms of self-care, utterly divorced from its Black radical feminist roots and redirected towards a capitalist cooption of wellness. Quilty highlights how trends fueled by social media can also result in practices becoming detached from the (usually eastern) religious traditions and cultures they are imported from, and in some cases lead to unsustainable market demand for products such as crystals and white sage smudge sticks.
None of this is to say that it’s impossible to develop meaningful spiritual communities and practices online nor that it’s impossible to have a profound experience using digital tools.
I’m not interested in dismissing where and how people derive meaning. Yet it’s important to remember that technologies including large language models and personalized recommender systems are ultimately designed to generate value from their users.
Any profound experience from these tools comes from us — the humans — not the tool. As Quilty notes: “Something can be positive, helpful or even empowering on an individual level, but can still be harmful at a broader societal level, because of the underlying interests and imperatives of those building and implementing the technology.”
MAGIC AND TECH
Indeed we can get into treacherous waters pretty quickly when we misattribute magic to technology. It plays right into the hands of companies that would rather us be awestruck by a shiny user interface and smooth convenience and not peep behind the curtain to reveal a crotchety old man holding things together with overblown marketing language and regular old profit-driven data extraction.
When magical thinking about technology spreads to the level of policymaking, it can become dangerous. Too often governments and companies alike are quick to turn to technology as a silver-bullet solution to complex social problems. And when the real limitations and consequences of technologies are ignored — such as how automation can exacerbate social inequalities, or how
ChatGPT couldn’t function without stealing copyrighted material, or that automated content moderation relies on exploited invisible workers — we end up with policy that fails to rein in the worst of tech’s ails and relegates the more complex but necessary policy interventions to the background, all overshadowed by the magical allure of technology.
Technology isn’t a cure-all for social ills, and can, when misused for personal gain, cause great harm — just like magic.
Many people noticed the flood of pro-China propaganda across a number of venues in recent weeks that looks like a coordinated assault on US Taiwan policy. It does look like an effort intended to influence the US before the meeting between US President Donald Trump and Chinese dictator Xi Jinping (習近平) over the weekend. Jennifer Kavanagh’s piece in the New York Times in September appears to be the opening strike of the current campaign. She followed up last week in the Lowy Interpreter, blaming the US for causing the PRC to escalate in the Philippines and Taiwan, saying that as
US President Donald Trump may have hoped for an impromptu talk with his old friend Kim Jong-un during a recent trip to Asia, but analysts say the increasingly emboldened North Korean despot had few good reasons to join the photo-op. Trump sent repeated overtures to Kim during his barnstorming tour of Asia, saying he was “100 percent” open to a meeting and even bucking decades of US policy by conceding that North Korea was “sort of a nuclear power.” But Pyongyang kept mum on the invitation, instead firing off missiles and sending its foreign minister to Russia and Belarus, with whom it
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has a dystopian, radical and dangerous conception of itself. Few are aware of this very fundamental difference between how they view power and how the rest of the world does. Even those of us who have lived in China sometimes fall back into the trap of viewing it through the lens of the power relationships common throughout the rest of the world, instead of understanding the CCP as it conceives of itself. Broadly speaking, the concepts of the people, race, culture, civilization, nation, government and religion are separate, though often overlapping and intertwined. A government
Nov. 3 to Nov. 9 In 1925, 18-year-old Huang Chin-chuan (黃金川) penned the following words: “When will the day of women’s equal rights arrive, so that my talents won’t drift away in the eastern stream?” These were the closing lines to her poem “Female Student” (女學生), which expressed her unwillingness to be confined to traditional female roles and her desire to study and explore the world. Born to a wealthy family on Nov. 5, 1907, Huang was able to study in Japan — a rare privilege for women in her time — and even made a name for herself in the
RSS