by The TikTok tarot card reader looks at me through the screen and draws a card.
“If you’re seeing this,” she said, “it was meant for you.” And in a sense, she is 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 AI-generated and personalized recommendation systems is making it easier than ever to make sense of magic in technology.
As the Arthur C Clarke quote says: “No technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic.” Anyone who has been served content that feels like it’s perfect for them might be surprised by the Algorithm’s mysterious omnipotence. And while there is nothing fundamentally wrong with a sense of wonder at technological advances, or even using digital technologies to enhance spiritual practice, magic and technology can be compromised.
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Outside of the large OpenAI GPT-4 language model, many religious and spiritual conversations have emerged. You can get BibleGPT to write personalized Christian poetry, use Jesus AI to, as the website claims, “have a meaningful conversation with Jesus Christ” and chat with WitchGPT about paganism.
“Welcome to the Void” features the popular astrology app CoStar in its latest chatbot feature, encouraging users to seek generated guidance for a fee of about $1 per question. Choosing from a list of suggested tips, I “Ask the Stars” if I have a secret admirer. “No,” he tells me (things).
In true CoStar fashion (the app is famous for) he also scolds me for asking the question at all, suggesting that I should be thankful for what I already have.
These examples are at best somewhat silly and probably harmless. At worst, they expose gritters out to make money by manufacturing a sense of insight or insight by leveraging the human tendency to anthropomorphize technology or by gaming social media engagement algorithms.
But among the chaff are also people who form true spiritual communities and engage in witchcraft and other sacred traditions online. As with many subcultures, social media can be both a blessing and a curse: it can enable disparate groups to connect, but it can also lead to the decline or degradation of cultural practices. .
Feminist anthropologist Dr. Emma Quilty, who has forthcoming books on magic and technology, distinguishes between those who focus on the collective and those who push a “neoliberal spirituality” that aligns itself with hyper-individual ideas of self-improvement.
This is close to commercialized forms of self-care, completely divorced from its radical Black feminist roots and diverted towards co-opted capitalist well-being. Quilty highlights how trends fueled by social media can result in practices being detached from the (usually eastern) religious traditions and cultures from which they are imported, and in some cases -they lead to unsustainable demand in the market for products such as crystals and bright sage smudge sticks.
This is not to say that it is impossible to develop meaningful communities and spiritual practices online or that it is impossible to have a deep experience using digital tools.
I am not interested in dismissing where and how people find meaning. However it is important to remember that technologies including large language models and personal recommendation systems are designed to generate value from their users.
Related: The dark side of well-being: the overlap between spiritual thinking and far-right conspiracies
Any profound experience with these tools comes from us – the people – not the tool. As Quilty notes: “Something can be positive, helpful or even empowering at an individual level, but it can still be harmful at a wider societal level, because of the basic interests and needs relating to those who are building and implementing the technology.”
In fact we can get into treacherous waters pretty quickly when we mistake magic for technology. It plays right into the hands of companies that we’d rather be sitting at a shiny user interface and smooth usability and not lurking behind the curtain for a crotchety old man holding things together with overblown marketing language and exposing old data mining based on profit.
When magical thinking about technology spreads to the policy-making level, it can become dangerous. Too often governments and companies alike turn to technology as a silver bullet solution to complex social problems. And when the real limits and consequences of the technologies are ignored – for example how automation can exacerbate social inequality, or how ChatGPT could not function without stealing copyrighted content, or that automated content moderation relies on invisible workers cultivated – we ultimately make policy that fails to control the worst technological ills and leaves the more complex but necessary policy interventions in the background, all under the shadow of the magic of technology.
Technology is not a panacea for social ills, and when misused for personal gain, it can cause great harm – just like magic.
