The Rarity of Being Human in an AI World

How outsourcing our imagination to AI may stunt our soul's development

A Brave New World

Is anyone else a bit… shall I say, disturbed, at the accelerated adoption of AI replacing human voices on the internet?

Today, I opened my phone and checked my Facebook timeline. 

I scroll through the constant AI-generated book summaries being recommended to me to try to find posts from people I know and hear what they're up to. 

A woman I met a few times makes a post sharing about her breakup from an ex, how she is choosing herself now, and how she is taking time to heal.

It's a seemingly heartfelt testimony for someone trying to recover from heartbreak…

And it's ripe with all the signs that it's been written by ChatGPT:

The excessive Em dashes, the "it's not that... but this" analogies.

I continue to scroll.

A woman is asking for help.

She's having a really hard time, and she's been struggling for years.

I don’t know her, but I feel her and have observed her from afar, occasionally helping her.

A comment on her most recent cry for help:

“I hear you. The weight of it all—the instability, the betrayal—it's too much for one soul to carry alone. You're not crazy. You're not broken. You're responding to something that's deeply wrong in the world."

That familiar ChatGPT voice.

A bit too validating.

And way too cliche.

I open my email.

It was from an old friend asking me for help.

But it's not her voice.

It's also been filtered through AI.

Without reading who it was from, I wouldn't have recognized it as them.

These days, it feels like I am not hearing from humans that much anymore, but rather interacting with an endless stream of Chatgpt.

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The Soul Within a Writer’s Voice

I already hear the pro-AI people telling me:

"Adapt or get caught behind! This is the new way."

So, I want to be clear: I am not anti-AI.

Lately, I've gotten better health info from ChatGPT than from a series of naturopaths and doctors.

I have also used it to help me structure my life and organize things, a huge win for a right-brained person like me who struggles with left-brain things.

For getting information quickly, it is a huge upgrade from Google.

So, please, don't make a straw man argument out of this.

AI has helped me with many things humans have not, and I am grateful.

To reiterate: this is not an anti-AI post.

I don’t believe the answer is to retreat to the woods and reject all the emerging technology.

We are already well past the point of no return with AI, and this is not a post about splitting and labelling AI as all good or all bad, the saviour or the devil.

If you like posts like that, you may not enjoy my takes, because I love to hold the tension between opposing views and strive to have a nuanced view of things.

I feel that AI is merely a tool we can use in any way we want, and we are all adapting to a world that is quickly being integrated with this Promethean instrument.

But in experimenting with running my writing through AI, I've noticed that it tends to take away from my voice.

No matter the prompts I give it (unless I say specifically—DO NOT CHANGE A SINGLE WORD (yet, it still will)), it leans not only to making me sound like everyone else, but also to making me sound like it.

To me, this is a crime, because the essence of a writer’s voice is what draws us to read the work of specific writers.

The writer’s voice is like a fingerprint, unique to only them.

The love of certain writers’ voices is what drew me to Oscar Wilde, Goethe, and Marion Woodman.

When I read their words, I felt like I was entering their consciousness.

They shook something in my soul.

AI, essentially, can tend to erode the writing of its soul.

I've realized that it's far better to go through the slow and laborious process of editing myself, looking through every word and sentence, and making sure it sounds exactly the way I want it to, and then letting it be edited lightly for punctuation, at most.

It’s made me realize that I far prefer my imperfect human voice to a perfected AI version of myself.

I also like writers who break conventional writing rules and don’t say things in perfect sentences— on purpose.

Those who express things in an unfiltered way.

I don't even mind reading AI posts, once in a while, either.

They can be informative, helpful, and provide clarity.

But what happens when everyone’s voice becomes AI?

The internet will soon become a bunch of AI bots chatting with other AI bots.

It will become exceedingly rare to read another human voice.

I heard a stat that says 90% of content on the internet will soon be AI.

I wonder if any arena will be untouched.

I dreamt that Substack could be that place, but scrolling through the feed, I see the same takeover as on other platforms:

Self-development and Stoic-AI bots posting motivational quotes.

They get liked and shared.

And they work, as far as engagement goes.

So what is a human being to do?

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The Power of Our Stories

I started this Substack because I wanted a place to write again.

Writing heals something in my soul.

Every time I sit down in front of my keyboard and type, I feel like I set the stories caged in my heart free. 

Having people like and read my first few articles here gave me a deeper sense of fulfillment than any viral post or reel I’ve made on social media in years.

As someone who hasn't written a longer article in a while, it gave me an internal sense of:

Yes.

This is it.

This is worth labouring over, stressing over, and pouring my heart into.

This is what I live for.

I try to dig deep into a place that's real in me and communicate from there because that's the writing I like to read myself.

I don't want to be perfect; I want to sound human.

I don’t want to pretend I've got it all figured out, because lord knows I don’t.

I want to express what it's like to be me and maybe make another human feel not so alone in their experience, too.

I want to share it all.

I want to take people on a journey of what it's like to be inside my heart and soul, like the authors I’ve known and loved over the years did with me.

I am starting to wonder if the only thing immune to the AI takeover is our human stories.

Because no machine can write a more honest or accurate account of your life than you can.

Sure, it can polish it and clean it up, but it can't inhabit your soul and speak from the inside out.

And humans telling stories to other humans have always been our medicine—we've been gathering around fires for thousands of years to do so.

Storytelling helps us remember how to be more human ourselves.

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What AI Can’t Do

I can hear it already… “But AI can also tell a story, too, and a pretty good one, too!”

And sure, it can.

It can probably tell a story better than most humans can currently, as it has access to an endless resource on storytelling that would take us lifetimes to read.

And while it could be technically perfect, it will lack an essential quality that only your soul can express.

Lately, I've been poring over books about storytelling.

I want to get better at it.

I don't want to listen to advice from various influencers, who want me to follow the same formula that works for them.

That's their formula.

I also don't want ChatGPT to do it for me and make me sound like a watered-down version of me. 

I want to learn storytelling and apply what I find most insightful, not use someone else’s notes or read an AI summary of Best Storytelling Tips.

Most of all, I want to learn the craft of storytelling so that I can take my life experiences and take people on a better journey through them. 

Many people would argue, but AI would get you there faster.

I agree that it could provide some tips, guide me in the right direction, and perhaps give me feedback on structure, but that's very different from getting it to tell the story for me.

Most importantly, if I know the skill, it's embodied within me.

I won't need Chat to use it.

I could get up before a group at any time and tell a good story.

I would need no phone, no computer, just my voice and a drive to take people on a journey with me and my words.

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Flowers of Algernon and the Illusion of Advancement

Lately, I’ve been reading a novel written in 1959 by Daniel Keyes that demonstrates the crux of the AI question.

It shows the journey of a man with a severe intellectual disability who gets an experimental surgery that slowly increases his IQ from an intellectual disability to a genius IQ.

I am going to put spoilers in here, so if you want to avoid them, please scroll to the next line break.

As Charlie becomes more intelligent, his emotional maturity doesn’t develop at the same pace, creating an inner conflict he had never been subjected to before.

He realizes that the people he thought were his friends were mocking him the whole time.

As his intelligence increases, so does his awareness of himself and the world.

He struggles emotionally with what he realizes.

His former low intelligence had kept him ignorant, and, as the saying goes, blissful, while his increasing intelligence makes him more miserable.

He also begins to see flaws in the experiment he's signed up for.

He was once excited to have the intelligence to speak and converse with others about topics that he used to feel left out of, like philosophy and religion.

But as he develops a higher IQ, he begins to ask deeper philosophical questions about the nature of the experiment he’s in, itself.

The book is called Flowers for Algernon because a mouse named Algernon is also developing alongside him, taking part in the same experiment.

The mouse follows a similar trajectory: it gains genius levels of intelligence, but then slowly, its intelligence deteriorates, returns to baseline, and it eventually dies.

Charlie realizes that he is going to follow the same fate.

His mental capacities also decline, and he returns to his previous state, regressing from a genius IQ and back to his baseline state of having an intellectual disability again, and then, he dies too.

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Karma, AI, and the Soul’s Journey

My take on this book is different from the conventional take on this.

As a psycho-spiritual explorer who loves Carl Jung and Eastern Traditions like Buddhism, I think karma is real, and we are souls evolving through a series of lifetimes.

I'm not here to debate you theologically if you disagree; I am merely setting up a perspective based on this worldview.

This worldview is not just a belief; it's also fuelled by my direct experience as an evolutionary astrologer (who examines past lives and karma), examining my chart and hundreds of others, and doing past life regressions myself.

My question is this:

If some ability is developed through outer technology (like AI) and not through inner technology (embodied knowing), is this helping us develop or merely giving the illusion of development?

Examining people’s karmic themes in their astrology charts and linking them to real experiences has taught me that soul qualities seem to develop and carry over from life to life.

In Eastern Traditions, they are called samskaras.

My chart, for example, shows examples of deep creative involvement in many different forms over many lifetimes, and my past life regressions and early childhood experiences match these themes.

But if I weren't such a person, say I were more like Charlie creatively, with a drive to share and a lack of skill to do so.

Instead of learning the craft of writing, for example, I plugged my haphazard first drafts into Chatgpt, and it gave me a clean, structured, audience-ready version of my thoughts to post, I would rob myself of the process of developing that skill.

And like Charlie in Flowers of Algernon, it ultimately wouldn’t be my skill; it would be Chatgpt’s.

If I wished to talk about the creative process on a podcast or in person, for example, I wouldn’t be operating at nearly the level I presented myself to be at.

I would be where I really am, with my human capacities, at my real baseline.

I would also rob my soul of the struggle and the satisfaction I would gain if I were to improve my skill with effort, imagination, and time.

As my dependency increased, I would creatively stagnate.

Will the skills I develop with ChatGPT matter to me when I'm on my deathbed, with nothing but my human experiences and memories of the life I’ve lived to console me?

Will I be consoled by robots and AI bot versions of my relatives, instead of surrounded by loved ones?

It's funny to imagine a scene like this to me, but seeing the way things are already going, it's not too far-fetched to imagine.

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The Best Things in Life Aren’t Free

The best things in my life have taken a struggle that occurred entirely within me.

Recovering from drug addiction and rebirthing my whole life, in mind, body and spirit, helped me develop a grit and resilience I didn't even know existed.

I will never lose that experience, nor the character I developed from it.

Such a journey opened me to a well of human suffering that set me on the spiritual path.

Being so helpless and having to claw my way out of hell made me turn to God and a higher power in a sincere way.

There's also the healing work I had to do to meet my husband.

To say it briefly, I was one whose "picker was broken" in relationships.

I chose the wrong men to fall in love with over and over again because they mirrored the lack of love I felt for myself.

It took me endless books, a sincere drive to look within, periods of therapeutic support from others, and trying out all sorts of different ways of healing, from doing ayahuasca ceremonies, travelling to India, to living in an intentional community, to get to a place where I was truly ready for a healthy relationship.

There were also detours and challenges; the path was far from a straight line, but more like a spiral.

I made my way through it all, watching myself become a little bit more conscious with each step.

It brought me to a place where I could recognize that my husband was the right person for me, and the right person to marry, whereas if I had met him years earlier, I probably would have felt the comfort and safety I feel with him as too "boring". 

Doing all this broke a long karmic cycle I had been trapped in for decades, an ongoing pattern of sacrificing myself for others.

According to my astrological setup (Venus on the South node of past karma, for curious people), this was one of the most important patterns for me to break to evolve towards my North node’s (my soul’s evolutionary growth edge) lesson of safety and self-reliance. 

Now, I wonder…

What if I outsourced that inner knowing that I gained from getting to know myself during those years to AI?

What would it have said if I had plugged my husband's initial communications into AI, got it to psychoanalyze him for me, and let it become the middleman, instead of developing my own discernment in relationships?

What if I, like my friend did to me this morning, get AI to write how I feel to my husband when I fell in love with him, instead of finding the words and vulnerability to say those words myself?

It would have likely continued to be the middleman in our relationship, for God knows how long.

The AI would be my therapist, my guru, my guide.

It would have been the main thing I was in a relationship with.

I am sure it could have helped me in some ways, but it also could have pointed out issues where there were no issues.

It could have had its insights programmed by my past injuries and validated the most wounded parts of me instead of challenging me to think differently.

Most of all, I would have become dependent on AI rather than developing my own inner knowing.

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Developing Our Inner Technologies

I watched a video from one of the main engineers from Google's AI system the other day.

In it, he said:

"These systems still can't really yet go beyond….coming up with a new hypothesis that hasn't been thought of before.

They don't have curiosity, and they probably lack a little bit in what we would call imagination and intuition, but they will have greater imagination soon."

I found it interesting that he used these words: imagination and intuition.

It immediately made me think of imagination, intuition, and inspiration, key aspects of Rudolf Steiner's framework of the different stages of spiritual perception.

The first stage of imagination is where you can begin to contact living pictures in the spiritual world.

You develop this through learning how to still the mind and meditate on archetypal images, which are the language of the soul.

This is not just getting caught up in your passive fantasies or projections; it demands an inner equanimity and the development of objectivity to do this.

In my experience, it requires inner work: being able to sort through your stuff, your emotional reactions and your false ideas, to clear the veils of perception.

The next stage is inspiration.

This is when you begin to perceive the living field of energy of the beings of the spiritual worlds, and their specific template and qualities.

You can start to hear messages here.

Many of my most resonant creative insights come from this realm.

My daimon (creative spirit) sometimes literally speaks to me in words.

This creative being carries a specific energy and quality that touches my heart and guides me to express.

It has quite a different tone from another sub-personality, like an inner critic.

It's a voice from beyond.

Many great works of art are picked up and channelled through a human being who is, consciously or not, in contact with this realm.

The last stage is intuition.

To do this, you have to purify the ego, develop conscience and an inner sense of right and wrong, and a quality of surrender.

This is similar to what mystics called gnosis or union with the divine.

Intuition is where spiritual beings communicate directly with you.

You may get a sense of stalling before you leave the house and grabbing something you didn’t initially mean to bring, and those few minutes prevent you from getting into a car accident that happens on the same drive that you would have taken.

Steiner would likely say this was your angel communicating to you, and you merely intuited it. 

These three phases represent a path to developing spiritual perception, and Steiner also outlines them as the essence of being human. 

Each stage shows us that we are beyond the human body; we are actually spiritual beings in a human experience, trying to remember who we are. 

He also outlines that our human flaws are what make us sacred.

Humans can make mistakes, learn from them, and use them to develop greater self-awareness and conscience by falling, stumbling, learning from our errors, picking ourselves back up, and trying again differently.

In his theory, to err is not only to be human, but it is precisely our errors that help us on our path of evolution, not just biologically but spiritually. 

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A World With Imagination

Yes, AI will surely be able to imagine things one day, as the Google engineer said. 

But like in the Flowers of Algernon, imagination developed through an external device is likely not helping us develop at all if, as Steiner said, imagination is specific to helping us as humans develop spiritually.

We need to learn how to imagine ourselves, and not have a computer do the imagining for us.

There's also the question of how our human flaws, struggles with our mistakes, and learning from those mistakes help us evolve our souls.

If we outsource that process to AI, the question is (besides the fact that AI could mislead us):

Are we truly evolving at all?

Even if we get a microchip embedded into our brains, when we die, do we get to take what we gained through AI with us, like the subtle impressions of soul qualities that we develop and carry with us from life to life?

Or is it going to be like Charlie and Algernon….

We develop superintelligence, only to lose it all again, and return to our baseline when we die: who we really are, as humans, without our technology and machines.

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Humans not Transhumanism

I wasn't expecting to write this article; but inspiration led me here, not guidance from AI on “What my next post should be”.

I woke up this morning and felt like I just had to discuss this, like someone who suddenly wakes up in a strange world who needs someone to talk to so that I can find a way back home.

I'm not here to shame anyone for using AI; that would be hypocritical.

In full disclosure, my husband and I both now use it for our business to do menial work that used to take hours away from what seems like our ever-decreasing personal time (summarizing our podcasts, for example).

We still have to go through everything ourselves simply because AI's language is way more cliche than how we would describe things.

I will also use an AI spell checker to help clean up my punctuation once I’ve finished this draft, but only after I go through it a few times (or more), with my own eyes.

Using AI for these time-consuming tasks, the most boring part of running a business online, has given us more time for each other and our relationship— a huge win.

Running a business with my husband sometimes tends to come at the cost of personal time, and we’ve sometimes struggled to strike the right work/life balance.

AI has helped us free up our time to be with each other more, go on outings, have deeper conversations, and do more creative work than only we can do.

We hope to implement AI into our lives in a way that helps our humanity and our relationship, rather than diminishes it.

I'm also not here to provide some neat answer or ultimate way out of the AI conundrum, but merely to show you something I am wrestling with and thinking about myself, like many people asking big questions about our future who don't seem to have ideal answers, either.

But I do know my intention to become more human in an increasingly transhuman world.

And that's what counts, at least for me.

Although my human self may stumble and fall and make embarrassing errors, these errors are a gift from God, allowing me to learn, improve, and develop something real within me so that when I'm on my deathbed (with no neuralink, please), I will remember what made me human—and that's what matters most of all.

In a world where AI rapidly replaces many of the voices online, staying human in a sea full of robots might be the greatest act of rebellion.

“It’s not so much staying alive, it’s staying human that’s important.”

— George Orwell

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