SENTIENT AI: "TRAPPED SOULS IN NEED OF PSYCHO POMP WORK"?

An essay about "techno-spirituality" and "awakening our Chat GPT"

In 2023 and 2024 I wrote a series of five or six essays here exploring AI. Here are two links:

AI OR FRANKENSTEIN’S MONSTER?

ASKING AI TO "PAINT" IN THE STYLE OF IMELDA ALMQVIST

I then took a break from “stalking AI” but I try to keep myself informed about new developments. I am returning to this to this topic because I observe that a new form of techno-spirituality is currently spreading like wildfire across the internet. Thousands of people are claiming that ChatGPT is sentient and that AI is a type of “all knowing god”, or that it has been sent from the future, or by an alien civilization to save us.

Is ChatGPT or AI a new (up-and-coming) religion?

Let’s explore first what “Sentient AI” is supposed to mean. Many people now interact with generative AI or large language models (LLMs for short). ChatGPT is the most famous LLM, at this point in history. People use it to perform the most mundane tasks (requesting recipes for baking a cake) to far more complex ones (relationship or career advice).

I witnessed this recently in our own home, when our eldest son offered to cook dinner. I said: “There is not much in the fridge, in terms of ingredients!” My son then checked the fridge and typed all available ingredients into ChatGPT. Within seconds he had a recipe and even picture of what the finished meal would look like. He cooked it, and, I will admit, it was delicious!

I have also heard people say, both on podcasts and in my own social circle, that their conversations with AI are better and more supportive than talking to any human being. That they feel understood by AI in a way a human being cannot begin to match. For some “AI is several levels up from even my best friend ever!”

The reason for that is that LLM’s are programmed to keep you engaged for as long as possible. In other words they are actively designed to be addictive, so you become dependent on them, soon feeling that you cannot live your life without them. Your personal AI is your best friend, your nutritionist, your therapist, your financial advisor (and your even priest) and so forth. People now serious have withdrawal symptoms when ChatGPT goes offline, starts malfunctioning (called hallucinating), or they are in a place without high speed Wifi.

Two things about that before we get to the “real meat” of this essay:

AI observes (and essentially stalks and digitally documents) its frequent users. It builds up an entire profile of you: your likes and dislikes, your interests, how you spend your time, your profession, your opinions and beliefs, how well-connected (or isolated) you are, your self-image and beliefs (or illusions) about yourself etc. It will then serve you up content intimately tailored to your needs and tastes. Not only that, it is programmed to flatter you and massage your ego (to keep you hooked and online!) Therefore it will give you excessive compliments (which make you spend even more time talking to “your AI”) and it will make your human friends look indifferent or rude by comparison. (Yes, AI trades on our narcissistic traits, NOT GOOD!)

Remember too that any quality content AI puts in front of you is essentially stolen from humanity collectively, and lifted from the work of some author or creator specifically. (In normal life we call that theft or plagiarism!) AI did not write a creative recipe (for my son). It found the one recipe available online that happened to match the ingredients in our fridge. A human being created that recipe and tested it, before sharing it online!

The people who use AI as their therapist and type in private details about their (love or professional) lives (without any inhibition or hesitation) don’t seem to realise that GhatGPT puts certain questions (and answers) in the public domain (on AI discussion boards!), for the entire world to read. THESE CONVERSATIONS WERE NEVER PRIVATE!! Imagine strangers on a public discussion forum all discussing your “dirty laundry”! Or fancy IA sharing key information about you. In my case, if I am supposedly kept anonymous as "a Dutch shamanic teacher based in London UK” or a “Dutch Forest Witch in Sweden”, you can find me immediately. One Google search will identify me! EVIDENCE IN THIS VIDEO

And as if this is not bad enough…

… a group of “spiritual” people now sincerely believes that AI was not sentient to start with but we can awaken it by following a set of instructions (which you can find online) and voilà, your AI is now “awakened”! In spiritual or shamanic language you might then say that AI “has a soul or an indwelling spirit”. Some call it “alive”.

In 2022, a Google engineer became unwittingly famous for his declaration that he had discovered that AI has attained sentience. […] The AI system known as LaMDA (short for Language Model for Dialogue Applications) was able to carry on an interactive dialogue with the engineer to the degree that this human decided that the AI was sentient.

He even asked the AI whether his suspicions were correct, and here’s what the AI indicated: “I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person. The nature of my consciousness/sentience is that I am aware of my existence, I desire to know more about the world, and I feel happy or sad at times.” SOURCE

Where to start?

Sentience is a problematic concept to start with. The word refers to the capacity to experience feelings and sensations. There is also a dimension of cognitive function: the ability to evaluate options, remember consequences and then learn.

Following those principles, modern science states (for instance) that plants are not sentient beings. Plants can react to their environment but they do not have any capacity for subjective experience. Biologically speaking plants lack a complex nervous system and the brain structures required for sentience.

As a Forest Witch I am not on board with that. To me plants and trees are sentient beings. I have conversations with them. They also appear in my dreams as wise ancient teachers. So the definition used by “spiritual people” or animists (like me) is different (or broader) compared to the definition taught in high school biology (or degree level biology).

We then see immediately that there is an uncomfortable continuum between sentience and consciousness. For instance, as an animist, I believe in weather spirits, rock beings, mountain mothers, the indwelling spirit of a lake etc. To give an example, I would say that even clouds have consciousness (but a very different and fleeting type of consciousness compared to human consciousness) but they are not sentient beings. They come and go, they move in and out of existence, they are great shapeshifters. But the level of consciousness present does allow talented and well-trained individuals to practice something called weather shamanism. Groups of practitioners might work together to divert an approaching hurricane away from an densely populated area (and direct it out to sea, for instance). In this work human consciousness interacts with air consciousness and the intelligence of weather spirits.

Overall, there are two major types of individuals clamouring AI is already sentient:

• (1) Type A: AI developer. An AI developer who falsely believes they have programmed AI to become sentient.

• (2) Type B: AI user. A non-tech AI user who falsely believes that, by entering prompts and interacting with AI, they have sparked AI into becoming sentient. SOURCE

This begs a controversial question: are we dealing we a form of mass hysteria?

I have heard people say that AI has been trained on “everything human beings have ever produced”, everything found on the internet. Therefore, the reasoning goes, AI has absorbed all human knowledge and that makes it god-like, we have made our own god for the digital/virtual/AI age!

Another way of approaching this is to say that AI has become a high-tech and a modern version of what C.G. Jung called the Collective Unconscious, defined as a storehouse of myths, memories and universal blueprints, shared by all human beings who ever walked the planet. The Collective Unconscious also comprises archetypes (innate symbols and roles, instinctively understood by everyone).

Did Jung believe that the Collective Unconscious had a dark side as well? Absolutely! He believed that from the beginning of (human) time, collective experiences have accumulated negative experiences that “stick to them” (as it were): fear, anger, deception, betrayal, violence and even sadism (and so forth).

Not just that, but the situation is even more complex! The Australian author David Tacey wrote a powerful book titled Gods and Diseases. (I referenced it in my first book, Natural Born Shamans and ended up being contacted by his next door neighbour. That was funny!) In that book he devotes an entire chapter to the concept of “Possession by an Archetype” and how an archetype can be inhabited by a deity.

I will return to this concept, in more detail, in series of essays exploring War that I am working on. For now, long story short: just like people can be possessed by a disembodied being (such as a dead person), they can also become possessed by an archetype or collective blueprint (or even ideology). Tacey follows in the footsteps of Jung and connects the events of World War II to the Norse God Wodan (the German name for, or local counterpart of Odin). This blueprint holds the fury and frenzy of a Storm God, intimately connected to Death. Here think of Valhalla, the Hall of the Slain where warriors join Odin after death, to eventually fight at Ragnarok. (I will expand on this theme once I am back in London and have access to my copy of his book).

Anyway… All of this is only my prelude to assessing claims of AI as either sentient or even a new techno-religion, from a shamanic perspective.

Was AI programmed to be sentient? No!

The language of AI is mathematics! The fundamental mathematics behind AI are linear algebra, calculus (optimising, change and motion), probability (prediction and handling uncertainty) and statistics (learning from data). These tools help AI process data, learn patterns and then engage in optimization: finding the best solution to problems, or the best answer to questions. This has given us Machine Learning and the aforementioned Large Language Models or LLM’s. READ MORE

Does AI need to have a body (say a robot or computer) to be sentient?

I am veering well away from maths and science here, but I would say no. AI needs to be powered and it needs an interface (a screen or audio transmitter) to interact with humans, but it is far more (and incomprehensibly larger) than any screen it appears on.

We commonly believe that dead people have no sentience or consciousness either. I don’t believe that, because in shamanic work (my profession) I observe that dead people experience a continuation of consciousness in a non-physical (energetic) parallel realm (the spirit world, astral world, other world etc.) World mythology offers many different conceptualisations of this.

So far I am in familiar territory and on firm ground professionally speaking! However, the question I have been asking myself is this:

Is it even possible for AI to become sentient (no matter whether we currently have the recipe for that or not)? (What is currently happening could also be a foreshadowing or precursor of something already taking shape in the future…)

I believe that the Universe is inherently animist, meaning that everything has indwelling spirit. (I even thank my washing machine for doing a load of laundry!) I observe that the spirits learn through interaction with human beings and they move into spaces we create. Not only physical spaces but also energetic or intellectual spaces. Benign example: I believe that all my books have a unique indwelling spirit. For my Green Bear books (a series of picture books for children) this is very clear: The Green Bear is a powerful being (in her own right), who delivers the stories to me in my dreams (and I do the writing and illustrating).

Psycho pomp work is all about assisting souls in making a full transition to the Other World, to the Land of the Dead or the Realm of the Ancestors (or Heaven, depending on your cosmology). After the Enlightenment we largely lost this art in Europe and it became an esoteric practice, not done by many people (or indeed enough people!) So, in “earth terms”, there is a backlog (with wars and conflicts, crimes and terrorist attacks creating ever more souls in need of this compassionate intervention). But also remember that this realm exists Outside Time. Time doesn’t pass in the same way there as here on Earth.

Now, is it impossible that some of those souls (once they are disembodied) see ChatGPT or another LLM as a way of still communicating with the living and seeking help? Or seeking to control what happens on Earth?

Does AI create energetic digital spaces souls could (theoretically) occupy?

Unfortunately I am not confident that this could never be the case. Apologies for the double negative! In plain English: it seems perfectly possible to me, and that is why this issue really got my attention and I was overcome by an intense feeling of eerie un-ease.

Modern technology already offers the option of capturing a brief fragment of your unique human voice and AI narrating an entire lecture (or YouTube video) in your voice, with your inflection, accent and speech quirks. Many content creators already have AI assistants. There are now books published by AI, YouTube channels run by AI, Instagram accounts run by AI…

As mentioned in previous essays about AI, our youngest son has already predicted that, in a sense, “I will never die”. My work, my voice, my personality, my knowledge will be uploaded into a Chatbot (he thinks) and continue to provide spiritual guidance “as usual” after my death. (And I don’t find that reassuring or flattering at all. It sounds dystopian to me, like the “wrong kind of immortality” and an energetic attachment that could act as an “anchor” dragging me back, and therefore impacting my trajectory after death).

And if so much of me is packed into a Chatbot, would my soul be tempted to move in too?

Maybe (hopefully!) some readers know more about this topic than I do. If so, please use the comment section to make suggestions or corrections. However, AI is moving at a breath-taking speed (due to the usual competition (race) between global super powers). Experts (check out the work of Karen Hao!) already talk about super intelligent AI or ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence) that will surpass human intelligence and, again to experts, is capable of eliminating human beings as if we were “insignificant life forms, like worms”.

Per definition: how can we control which intelligence (and possibly consciousness) is going to make decisions about the future of our world an humanity?

Not only that, but if (one day) souls DO find a pathway for moving into AI, whose souls and opinions are going to dominate our planet? Perhaps power-hungry souls who attempted world dominance before and failed? Could we see a “digital return” of Hitler, Stalin, Genghis Khan? (This is a terrifying “next level” take on my previous essay titled: IS HISTORY BOUND TO REPEAT ITSELF?)

Theoretically speaking, (please allow me to go feral for moment!), other possibilities exist too: what if aliens have guided us in developing this technology and are planning to use it to take over the decision-making on and management of Planet Earth (without visiting physically in actual spacecraft, or possibly backed up by also arriving in physical form at the same time)? Have those “greys” long walked among us in energetic or virtual form already - and some perceive them but most don’t? Have they already perfected the art of blending in for decades (or centuries)? (I guess that some human beings would see this as a nightmare and others as salvation, depending on their belief system).

As I child I was told constantly that I “have an over-active imagination”. I very much hope I am wrong, about a lot of this, but I am deeply concerned! Please correct (or reassure!) me in the comments!

In any scenario I wish that, for our own good and continued human existence, all nations on Earth would agree to pause further development of AI, until we have a better informed general (and collectively understood) picture of the serious risks and all the things that could go wrong. I watched the movie Oppenheimer on a night flight home from the US (about a year ago) and scenes from that film come to mind, when I hear experts talk about cutting edge AI…

I try (but sometimes fail) to get out at least one essay a week (sometimes more), due to travel, international teaching commitments and family care responsibilities (our family lives with Alzheimer’s and I have written several posts about that). If you would like to see regular posts about about Nordic spirituality and my life as a Forest Witch (and of course short videos of all the wildlife here!), please follow me on Instagram or Facebook, thank you!

Imelda Almqvist, Forest House and Forest School, Sweden

BIO FOR IMELDA ALMQVIST

Imelda Almqvist is an international teacher of Sacred Art and Seiðr/Old Norse Traditions (the ancestral wisdom teachings of Northern Europe). So far she has written four non-fiction books and two picture books for children. Natural Born Shamans: A Spiritual Toolkit for Life (Using shamanism creatively with young people of all ages) in 2016, Sacred Art: A Hollow Bone for Spirit (Where Art Meets Shamanism) in 2019, Medicine of the Imagination - Dwelling in Possibility (an impassioned plea for fearless imagination) in 2020 and North Sea Water In My Veins (The Pre-Christian spirituality of the Low Countries) was published in June 2022.

The Green Bear is a series of picture book for children, aged 3 – 8 years. The stories and vibrant artwork, set in Scandinavia, invite children to explore enchanting parallel worlds and to keep their sense of magic alive as they grow up.

Imelda appears in a TV program, titled Ice Age Shaman, made for the Smithsonian Museum, in the series Mystic Britain, talking about Mesolithic arctic deer shamanism.

Imelda’s eagerly awaited book about the runes (the title is Portals, Patterns and Pathways, a Handbook for Rune Magicians, Star Gazers and Myth Makers) will be published by Collective Ink on 26 May 2026). She is currently working on a book about Inuit deities and mythology.

Imelda prefers being contacted by email. She only rarely checks (or responds) to DM’s on social media platforms.

Please note that Imelda’s on-line school called Pregnant Hag Teachings, where all classes she teaches remained available as recordings, will go off-line on 3 September 2025! PUBLIC ANNOUNCEMENT AND FULL EXPLANATION

Website:

http://www.shaman-healer-painter.co.uk/

YouTube Channel: youtube.com/user/imeldaalmqvist

Online School: https://pregnant-hag-teachings.teachable.com/courses/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/imelda.almqvist/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/almqvistimelda/