A World Without Hands

Allyson Shaw

09 Aug 2025 — 7 min read

—on the spiritual cost of generative AI—

In this Missive:

▫️AI & Spiritual Practice
▫️How to Turn off AI Overview in Chrome
▫️Links to previous posts I’ve written on the ethical dilemmas of AI
▫️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 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?

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