Whatever else anything is, it ought to begin by being personal
The title of today’s post comes from one of my favorite movies, You’ve Got Mail, starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan.
This post is about AI
Recently, two of the people I have paid for coaching in the past have offered new! and exciting! options to work with them. They spent time training some version of ChatGPT or Claude or whatever to “sound like them”, and now you can pay them a monthly fee for access to a fake version of them that will allegedly give you good counsel about whatever it is you need.
Friends, that is not personal service.
That is only slightly different from asking an untrained AI bot a question, and in this case, there’s not really going to be a way for the people who created these chat bots to monitor the actual advice or opinions being disbursed in their names, using their digital AI image (in one case) and/or an AI version of their voice (both cases).
I suspect that somewhere out there, there’s a high-level business coach or two who is advising their clients to create these sorts of products, and that both of the folks I am talking about got their advice/training from such a business coach.
So I will say here what I said in a story over on Instagram:
I hate AI, and especially generative AI. I wish it didn’t exist.*
I won’t be using it in my coaching business. When you get coaching or a tarot reading from me, it will be from me. Because “whatever anything else is, it ought to begin by being personal.”
It may mean that you don’t get an immediate response, but truly . . . how many things are really that important? Especially since so much of what I do is to encourage people to get in touch with their inner voice (or inner voices, if we’re being honest), and to learn to rely on their own inner compass for guidance.
I am a witchy coach. I rely on my training, my intuition, and my psychic abilities when I work with clients, whether that is during coaching, while running workshops, or while reading tarot or oracle cards for my clients. I am not going to outsource any of that—from writing a blog post, email, or social media post to offering advice or counsel to anyone—to a heartless computer program.
*Why I wish that generative AI didn’t exist: For those who don’t know, I am a published author and poet, and I have many friends who are far better-published than I am. Many of them are involved in lawsuits because their work (words and/or artwork) was stolen by the companies that created ChatGPT, Claude, OpenAI, etc. Their copyrighted books, which are a form of property, were taken without their permission and fed into computers so that AI can give you something that “sounds like” an answer to your question. It may not be right, but it could “sound like” a correct answer, even if it is drastically wrong. Using AI to write something, create art, etc., not only uses a ridiculous amount of water, causing harm to the environment, but also means that whatever you get from it is based on the stolen work of others.