GenAI

A World Without Hands

| Allyson Shaw
A close up of a section of a painting featuring a white feminine hand holding a shell. Salt or water runs over the shell. The hand is graceful and delicate against a black ground, and is framed by an elaborate lace cuff.

—on the spiritual cost of generative AI—

In this Post: 

▫️AI & Spiritual Practice
▫️How to Turn off AI Overview in Chrome
▫️A strange development in the world of GenAI Tech & further discussions.

..storytellers weaving truth into our dreams — their voices carrying medicine across generations, their tales smuggling hope past the censors of despair, imagination as the technology of survival.

— Rob Brezsny  

Generative AI is present in every area of our lives—constantly pushed onto us as we research, write, think–even meditate and pray. New Age gurus tout this tech as a handy spiritual advisor. Why not short cut the path through the dark night of the soul? Suffering is overrated, right? What is atonement or empathy for, anyway? Aren’t these difficult emotions in the way of us living our best lives, actualising mindful wellness?

In his book Digital Dharma, Deepak Chopra™️ promotes the use of  GenAI for spiritual growth. Chropra claims ChatGPT can act as a research assistant, personal confidant, a therapist/healer and a guru. 

Chopra believes a human therapist or healer is expensive, and a GenAI based one is free and available 24-7. Yet we know that this tech comes at a great environmental and cultural price. (I have written about this extensively in previous posts—see links below.) Generative AI consumes vast amounts of energy and clean water. Greenhouse gas emissions from Big Tech’s AI are over 660% larger than reported.

“ChatGPT, the chatbot created by OpenAI in San Francisco, California, is already consuming the energy of 33,000 homes. It’s estimated that a search driven by generative AI uses four to five times the energy of a conventional web search. Within years, large AI systems are likely to need as much energy as entire nations.” from nature.com.

To answer this question of demand, Open AI’s Chief Executive Sam Altman is proposing nuclear fusion to solve this looming energy crisis and is a prime investor in a large fusion company.

Microsoft has already turned to nuclear power to fuel its AI language learning programs. The company has purchased Three Mile Island, the Pennsylvania plant that was the site of the catastrophic disaster in 1979. The notorious Three Mile Island is being renamed the “Crane Clean Energy Centre.” 

Generative AI may seem to perform as a friend and therapist, but the dialogue model is service based. GenAI mimics this human exchange—it can never replace it. ChatGPT therapy is the cause of a worsening mental health crisis. Language learning models acting as ‘friends’ and therapists mirror delusional patterns back to the user. Crises have occurred after vulnerable seekers “engaged a chatbot in discussions about mysticism…” A recent paper by Stanford researchers found that leading chatbots being used for therapy, including ChatGPT, are prone to encouraging users’ schizophrenic delusions without trying to ground them in reality. I acknowledge all the caretakers of these spirit-modes—all who have been exterminated, and all who have kept this way of working in the world alive so that I might also do this work.

According to Chopra, the guru is GenAI’s most advanced role. Consulting a GenAI guru opens a ‘path to wisdom, insight, intuition, and expanded consciousness.’ Because the AI guru is ‘stripped of religious/spiritual connotations,’ Chopra considers it pure—freed from divisive human traditions and their texts. In language learning models acting as gurus, sacred texts are strip mined for content and remixed to suit the user.

Is the novelty of Generative AI worth the environmental, cultural and spiritual price?

In these dark times, I have taken solace in my spiritual tradition—a shamanistic path of hedge-witchery that involves working with plant and animal allies, spirits of place, and ancestors. This work defies written language; it’s rooted in oral tradition. I have cobbled together methods saved from extinction by First Nation people, anthropologists and modern scholars. 

In drawing all hands, GenAI can’t draw one convincingly. I would argue that in describing all faiths, all spiritual realities, Generative AI can’t even render one authentically.

In my extensive research writing Ashes & Stones I found that some witchcraft confessions suggest ecstatic spirit work. During the witch hunts, shared folk traditions, including these, were demonised by the church and state. Fragments of witchcraft confessions are a distorted lens, but they hint at animist trandition.  (See research by Carlo Ginzberg, Julian Goodare, Éva Pócs and Emma Wilby for more on this fascinating subject.)To walk a spiritual path, one must understand what has come before.

I acknowledge all the caretakers of these spirit-modes—all who have been exterminated, and all who have kept this way of working in the world alive so that I might also do this work. This is a debt that will never be repaid and can only be acknowledged. Recognising this is uncomfortable, heartbreaking–ego-eradicating–and yet this recognition is central to the work. It is the work—at least for me. I found this path by listening deeply, not to a Generative AI language model, but to the enchanted world, to written accounts and salvaged texts. 

Maybe this is where I differ with Chopra and the rest—I’m not looking for self-improvement or the actualisation of personal potential, but for a connection with the sacred. Visionaries hone their spirit ears over time. It is messy work; one never arrives, despite the idea of “Enlightenment” or wholeness being an end point. We are all capable of visionary experience, though many do not want this. GenAI eradicates the need for a spirit ear—for deep listening. In mashing all traditions together in a false ‘oneness’ of consciousness, it erases them all. 

GenAI can’t help us with our individual paths because it is describing all paths. There is no short cut through this process of learning by reading or listening to the teachings of those who have come before. In trying an easy tech soloution, we disown this inheritance. GenAI jumbles it up and smoothes out the challenging edges. Something is being broken here-a myriad of ancient contracts.

To walk a spiritual path, one must understand what has come before. The vast array of tradition will never be understood in one lifetime, yet this attempt to grasp our place in this makes us human. Spiritual tradition, no matter how fragmentary—connects us to what has come before, to both the sacred and the profane. Perhaps those who have come before can show us not only how to do it, but also what must never be done again.

My father, a minister in his youth, taught me that the way something is translated, like the Bible, can totally change its meaning. There is no one way to read a text, especially an ancient one written in a different language. He also used to mock the Unitarian church even as he respected their openness-he’d say, you can’t really trust someone who won’t put their money on a horse. It’s where he attended church, anyway. He acknowledged there were many horses, many races, and he instilled this in me.  At a certain point, you must devote yourself to a path, a way of working–put your money on a horse.

A spirit tradition comes to us through millennia of care taking-ceremonies, rituals, and prayer. People lived and died to safeguard meaning distilled through devotional practice. While there may be correspondence between distinct faiths, the traditions are not the same. They can’t be lumped together in a GenAI distillation. Some New Age seekers have consumed world faiths as a pick and mix variety. GenAI just makes that easier.

Generative AI can’t draw hands. They come out seven-fingered, distorted paws, claws, or flesh mittens. It can get so many other things right—why are hands so hard? Some say these models are evolving, getting better—but what if they aren’t? Already musicians are finding the model cannibalises its own distortions by exploiting its weaknesses. Tools like Nightshade and Poisonify and the ‘poison pilling’ of art and music files are just the beginning.

Hands—and some have argued thumbs in particular—are uniquely human. When learning to draw, one often starts with their non dominant hand as the perfect model. What you think a hand is—five fingers, a palm and thumb—is not how it appears. (This is another spiritual object lesson.) Get the hand wrong and it looks broken, alien, or weirdly out of joint. Anyone who has taken a life drawing class has had to solve the problem of the hand, sometimes at speed. They are intricate, expressive, and ever-changing. They lack symmetry. One can’t just double half of it and mirror it as one might a front-on face—as weird as those mirror results might be. 

The ancient hand paintings in the Argentinian Cave of Hands are some of the first art ever made by humans. They are stencilled with ochre in the depths of the cave—each the soul-mark of artist-visionary ancestors.

Hands are unique to an individual in time and space, right down to our fingerprints. They express a universal language beyond the written or spoken word. Hands have healing powers no GenAI can ever master. Think of a time you hurt yourself—you automatically touch the place that is hurting. Many therapists, healers and medical professionals can attest–the compassionate touch of a fellow human being is unmatched in its power. 

In drawing all hands, GenAI can’t draw one convincingly. I would argue that in describing all faiths, all spiritual realities, Generative AI can’t even render one authentically. Is it any wonder these immediate, ‘spiritual’ fixes are being offered to us at a time of great unease—when climate catastrophe and political despots threaten our world? What happens if we turn away from this ‘help’ being offered, to the analog world patiently waiting for us to look up from our screens?

Follow these simple instructions to turn off AI Overview in Chrome: https://tenbluelinks.org/#chrome-ios

Some Follow Up Links:

More on Nightshade and Poisonify: https://decrypt.co/203153/ai-prompt-data-poisoning-nightshared

In a bizarre turn… “A Prominent OpenAI Investor Appears to Be Suffering a ChatGPT-Related Mental Health Crisis, His Peers Say.” It’s a ramble worthy of a Philip K. Dick novel. https://futurism.com/openai-investor-chatgpt-mental-health

“AI industry horrified to face largest copyright class action ever certified. Class actions could financially ruin AI industry, trade groups say.” Millions of authors, artists, musicians, translators and researchers who have had their work stolen by big tech training language learning models are watching this go down. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/08/ai-industry-horrified-to-face-largest-copyright-class-action-ever-certified/

7 Ways to Minimise Generative AI in Your Life & why this matters

| Allyson Shaw

This post originally appeared on my Ghost.io Blog.

In this Missive:

  • Soul searching about the ecological & spiritual cost of Generative AI
  • 7 Ways to Minimise the Presence of Generative AI in Your Life
  • Links to other posts I have written about GenAI. 

This was a much longer post, but I lost several files when I upgraded to the new iOS. (I also lost the outline of a novel.) Let this be some kind of object lesson. Perhaps if I can summon it, the rest will come next month.

I’m old enough to know better, to have lived life another way—without algorithmic feeds and Generative AI. I’m looking back, not to claim some kind of nostalgic escape but for tools to move forward. My generation built the internet into a tool everyone could use. I remember those early days, learning to code in HTML, hosting listservs, and starting a web log. I was filled with optimism, and the World Wide Web promised an open, egalitarian space.

That vision has been corrupted by venture capitalists and billionaires who now push Generative AI onto us in every digital activity. This unregulated, cannibalistic technology has become immediately and irrevocably present in our lives.  

It’s a small, daily way of refusing a reality imposed on us–a rehearsal for larger disobedience.

For eight years I taught Argumentation and Research at the university level, and I asked my students to always think critically, to evaluate the greater context of any idea. I would say a source is only as good as its citation. Generative AI threatens to obliterate our ability to effectively evaluate sources and think critically. This infiltration is happening so quickly that our souls have whiplash from the cultural collision with this technology.

Meta has stolen the work of my colleagues. This cultural theft is unprecedented in the history of the written word. Musicians, artists and writers now must compete with their own pirated works in an already algorithmically challenging landscape.

The novelty of Generative AI comes at an enormous price. Generative AI consumes vast amounts of energy and clean water. Greenhouse gas emissions from Big Tech’s AI are over 660% larger than reported. Microsoft and ChatGPT are now turning to nuclear energy to fuel their language learning systems. The environmental cost of AI is disastrous, and this alone should make us question its use.

7 ways to minimize the presence of AI in your life

We are way past a boycotting stage; these are things I’m doing to minimise the presence of Generative AI in my life. It’s s a small, daily way of refusing a reality imposed on us–a rehearsal for larger disobedience.

  1. Unplug from devices and online life as much as possible. Read a book. Sing. Play or Learn a musical instrument. Draw, paint, write long hand on paper. Knit. Brew. Meander. Garden. Dance. Go clean a beach/park/woodland of plastic detritus. 
  2. Invent other offline endeavours and share them with others–leave them here in the comments.
  3. Turn off all devices when not using them—this saves energy & helps make your use of tech more intentional. 
  4. Maximise time spent online. When you log on, consider what you want to do. Set an intention. Be focused about what you hope to find out, who you want to connect with, what you will see/watch/do. 
  5. Consider offers of Generative AI help carefully—can what I’m doing be accomplished without this ‘help’? 
  6. Do some soul searching—is there a helpful use of Artificial Intelligence in my life right now? What parts of my life am I willing to give over to this in exchange?
  7. Ask yourself what you’re unwilling to give up to Generative AI. Your voice? Your writing or art? Photographs you have taken? Your creative process? Has this already been taken from you or those you love, respect or admire? How does that reality feel, and how can those emotions guide you in moving forward?

Other Missives on Generative AI

Tryouts for the Human Race: on silencing and generative AI

Unpacking My Books: Walter Benjamin, Bibliophilia and Word Hoards.

Making truth Irresistible—practical tips for making your online life less oppressive

Life Rafts for Everyone: thoughts on the collapse of truth at Meta

Did you get something out of this post? Throw a little something in my busking hat! https://allysonshaw.ghost.io/#/portal/support

A Strange Splendour

| Allyson Shaw
A vintage postcard of the surreal burn through the Cliffton’s cafeteria dining room.

What was I writing about 23 years ago? I was waxing lyrical about the high camp of a vanishing downtown Los Angeles. I published these essays in an online zine M and I edited called Die Cast Garden. I coded it using Dreamweaver made illustrations with Fireworks (before Adobe bought this software the pair were glorious, but I digress.) I found the zine on the miraculous Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. 20 some years ago, Die Cast Garden was my answer to publishing in general—I couldn’t find an agent or publisher for my work so I made zines—xeroxed paper ones and HTML websites.

Last month, The Atlantic broke the news that Meta has used LibGen, an enormous database of copyrighted material, to train its AI, all while big publishing goes after The Internet Archive, a registered library using controlled digital lending and legal fair use.

When I look back at this work, now miraculously archived on the internet, it’s not with nostalgia but disorientation. How did we get from there—hand-coding websites that promised freedom from publishing hegemony—to this? Mega corporations indulge in piracy on a vast scale. For what?

I am playing cat and mouse: deleting X, coming off Meta, seeking an alternative to Substack. As I shuffle, it feels like disappearing.

But here is something the good internet has salvaged; may it be a boon.

Vintage postcard of Broadway at night, downtown Los Angeles

A Strange Splendor

When I moved to Los Angeles, I refused to be at home. I couldn’t go blonde or schmooze at parties. I wouldn’t drive a car. I walked it. Almost as a dare to myself, a dare to love this sprawl of a city, I began my search for its heart, for an L.A. I could claim, an LA of spooky movie palaces and other people walking, of Cumbia and cafeteria comfort food.

The search ended downtown, in the heart of the jewelry district. I walked down Broadway and came upon the then-closed Bradbury building– it was empty and dark, still. Gray rays of sun made their way down from the glass ceiling to illuminate the lacy iron work and gorgeous red wood. It was like looking into some strange church, all delicacy and logic, its congregation vanished while outside life throbbed: salsa boomed from storefront speakers, the Giant Penny sign a modest sun, a boot seller cried “Pasale! Pasale!,” girls and old women passed hand in hand as homeless men shuffled by and a bride with her bouquet and bridesmaid made their way down Broadway to a store front which offered Marriages and Divorces.

Now, anyone can enter the Bradbury Building; light floods it. It has been refurbished it to its original grandeur. A friendly guard will give you an information sheet explaining the building’s history. The only building by architect George Wyman, his dead brother spoke through an Ouija board, and suggested he take on the project.

[The Bradbury Building was made famous as a location in Bladerunner]

We have the treasure of the Bradbury building. So many other places, parts of the city’s history, have been torn down or left to decay. Much of the older architecture downtown has been reclaimed as mini-malls or “indoor swapmeets,” elegance replaced by an overwhelming abundance. It’s a bustling marketplace where you can get anything you want, and a great deal you wouldn’t want: fake doggie doo, fresh mangos, five dollar girdles, mood lipsticks, stereo equipment, and wind up GI Joes that crawl and shoot.

In the Broadway Arcade, this array of goods so distracted me at first that I did not look up, past the vendor’s plastic canopies to see the beautiful ceiling: hundreds of smog-encrusted glass panes forming an archway overhead, unable to compete with the cavalcade of goods below. Everywhere– dark forgotten corners, whole floors of abandoned, with all the activity going on below, at street level.

The Los Angeles and Orpheum theaters still show films, but most are now storefronts, the rest of the buildings vacant. One can still see the Palace’s shabby Florentine ceilings, or the baroque Bison heads on the Million Dollar Theater, once an Evangelical church and now up for lease. The Cameo houses electronic equipment and gold; The deco Roxie and the Globe theaters are full of bargain clothing. The State is a church, the Rialto now Discount Fashion. The Tower is empty.

A year ago, Broadway was under construction. Under generations of asphalt lie railroad ties. They were revealed during excavation; this place is always becoming something else. Ingenious immigrant communities sustain it, transforming it into a place of wonder and juxtapositions. Look up: the Pre-Columbian figures on the mural at fourth and Broadway dwarf you and tower over the “Little Angels” storefront filled with frothy communion gowns. On the same scale, a 7up bulletin board from the 80’s offers sun-bleached new wave.

Like everyone else bustling about, I come to shop and eat, go to the Million Dollar Botanica where you can pick up some Good Luck Floor Wax, cowry shells or a statue of scabby Lazarus while your prescriptions are filled, or stock up on dress socks at the Sixth Street Arcade, window shop for wedding gowns and work up an appetite. Then you can go to the neon and sawdust commotion of the farmer’s market. “Since 1917,” new red banners proclaim. Load up on pupusas and Tamarindo soda and check out the watch case by the sea food.

But if you are really after comfort, walk to Clifton’s Brookdale on Broadway. Partake of its sylvan fantasy and sit down on the miniature mountain. Watch the “limeade Springs” bubble by you. Here you get a good view of both the neon cross perched atop a tiny chapel and the moose head upstairs which stares back. There’s usually entertainment on weekends. On my most recent visit I had macaroni and cheese, beets in Mayo and flan as a woman sang Spanish ballads accompanied by a man with a Casiotone. Others, who knew the songs, ate and clapped along.

But the cafeteria isn’t always wholesome. According to “cruisingforsex.com” the toilets downstairs are “cruisy”– people meet in the Robinsons May Department store and walk down to the cafeteria because “it’s safer.” I cannot back this up with personal experience.

Vintage postcard of the waterfall facade of the Cliffton’s “Pacific Seas” location.

This is not the first Clifton’s. If you visit their website, http://www.clfitonscafeteria.com, you can see many vintage postcards of the different manifestations of Clifton’s. The original “Pacific Seas”, built in the 1930’s by Clifford Clinton, is now a parking lot– the intricate tropical façade with waterfalls and tropical foliage and sign reading “Pay What You Wish” are gone. But what a cafeteria it must have been. If only I’d been alive to see the Polynesian interior with real canaries, neon palms and a “rain hut” with showers every twenty minutes. Where else in the world could you eat chipped beef in such splendour?

My favorite Clifton’s, the Silver Spoon, almost thrived underneath the Orange smoggy awning at 7th and Olive until it was closed in the late 1990’s. While not as dramatic or beautiful as the Bradbury building, it was one of my favorite places. It had soul, and now it’s gone. Clifton’s moved there in the early 1970’s, though the building dates from the twenties.

The sign outside read, “The line from the door to the register takes about eleven minutes, but it’s worth the wait!” There was never any line when I went, only a few employees and elderly patrons. The old mahogany display cases were kept intact, and downstairs they were filled with old world knick knacks, ceramic ale mugs, pastoral-scene plates, and little clogs. Upstairs in the employee break room, the cases were untouched since the building’s jewelry store days. The cases displayed yellowed illustrations of earrings, chokers and bracelets, sending off black-penned rays of light. [How did I get in there? My younger self was intrepid. I miss her.]

The place just got stranger on the lower level, or “Soupeasy,” which featured a “The Garden, a Quiet Place for Meditation,” a hold over from the Pacific Seas location. This Garden was so quiet, you needed a token from the cashier to enter. Once inside you got a glimpse of a bench and glass case. On shutting the door you’re enveloped in darkness. Eventually, the lights in the life-sized diorama come on, illuminating a wax Jesus praying in Gethsemane. A disembodied voice, just like the nasal voice in a newsreel circa 1940 begins, “In these troubled times, many have died in war, but we live…many are homeless and hungry, yet we are fed and sheltered…” And one can’t help think that just outside the streets are filled with Angelenos—some are refugees, immigrants, and the displaced who’ve fled from poverty and their own war-torn countries, now meandering through the vendor’s stalls on the street above.

How strange to sit there listening to the sanctimonious voice, just after eating a meal of macaroni and gelatin, watch the colored lights illuminate Jesus in red and green, and not see it as funny. How strange to understand the innocence of the whole project, to be in that optimism, as the yellow light turns on the head of Jesus and the speaker closes, “Like Pontius Pilot, every man must ask himself, ‘What shall I do?'” And you are left in the dark to find the door.