Your Creative & Magical Life

Human First: Navigating AI as Creative Spirits w/ Arianna Smith

• Cecily Sailer / Arianna Smith

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In this episode with guest co-host Arianna Smith, we weigh AI’s promise against its costs through a creative, mystical lens, stepping into the messy, practical reality of how we actually use AI.

From there we go deeper into the tradeoffs no one wants to talk about — the environmental costs of data centers and  local fights around water and power. We look at the shaky economics behind the AI industry, the push to automate labor, and the imperative to use AI everywhere and expand its relevance. 

Plus, AI that can lie, manipulate, and commit crimes. But also how chatbots affirm our worst thinking while keeping us isolated. As writers and readers, we also name why AI copy often feels hollow, and human words carry a warmth that can’t be faked.

Then, the best part — we consult the Tarot to ask questions of AI, and the cards we pulled were mind-blowing. 

Here's the spread if you want to try it yourself:

1. AI, what do you want to tell us?

2. What should we be concerned about (re: AI)?

3. What should we be excited about?

4. What can we do to take care?

2025 was a "breakthrough year" for AI, and it'll be interesting to see what develops in 2026. If you want to share about your AI Tarot pulls, or how you're using and experiencing AI, let us know at hello@typewritertarot.com.

Hop on the waitlist for the Creative Magic Collective decan walk!

Check out upcoming events and workshops.

Explore Arianna's work and hop on her newsletter.

This podcast is a production of Typewriter Tarot. Learn more & join us:

SPEAKER_00:

Hello, creative spirits. Welcome to our first episode of your creative and magical life in the year 2026. And what a year it has been so far. I'm recording this 16 days into the year, and my head is already spinning. Feels very Wheel of Fortune-y, which is our card for 2026. That's because two plus zero plus two plus six equals ten. That's the Wheel of Fortune. The Wheel of Fortune is very much about change and our relationship to it. And I think we're definitely exploring that this year. It's a way of coping. The changes that we're seeing are very scary. Some of them have been very sad and very rage-worthy. We're seeing a lot of violence senselessly being enacted against the people who pay taxes that are funding that violence. And it's pretty wild. We haven't been here in America in this way. I mean, ever. On the one hand, like this version of it, you know, with the AI, with the tactical weapons, with a president of this type and style. Though we certainly have a long history of state violence and all kinds of poor thinking and bad policy, that is for sure. I don't need to get lost down that rabbit hole at the moment, but I'm here today to bring you an episode about artificial intelligence. Me and Ariana got together. I should say Ariana and I, for my mother who may be listening, Ariana and I got together to explore what we've seen happening with artificial intelligence, how we're using it, and some of our concerns, fears, and hopes around AI? I know it's of particular interest to creative people and mystical people like yourselves. What does it mean to live in a world where machines can imitate our consciousness? And what does it mean to be creative in a world where computers can take the stuff humans created for decades and mash it up and give you something brand new in under a minute? That's wild. What does that mean for us? Um, what are the implications of that for us as artists, as creative people, as people with a spiritual center or a spiritual lantern we're following through these dark times? So, really interesting conversation. I hope you enjoy it. First, before we get into it, I just want to remind you that in this Wheel of Fortune year, which is not only about change, but also about time, that wheel in the center of the card is a reflection of time, time moving. Time is the way that we measure change as humans, or it's one way that we measure change. And that wheel reflects, for one thing, the astrological wheel that is used and has been used to track time for centuries. And in our creative magic collective, in our beautiful community this year, beginning in March with Airy season, which is the beginning of the zodiac year, we're starting a Deccan walk, which is a journey around the astrological wheel one decan at a time. A decan is 10 degrees of the wheel, and a wheel, a circle, has 360 degrees. So there are 36 decans, and each of them are connected to a minor arcana card in the tarot, and all of the signs are connected to major arcana cards, and all of the planets are also connected to major arcana cards. And then the signs also have a court card connected to them. So in exploring the full astrological wheel and walking through it in real time, looking at the cards that are associated with that, we get to not only explore the astrological associations with tarot, which helps us see the tarot in a new way. We also get to build and expand our understanding of astrology because tarot can help us do that with its visual cues. And so we get this really nice fluid dialogue between the two disciplines, and you don't need to be an advanced or intermediate astrologer. I'm treating this, I'm approaching this as though we are relative beginners with astrology. I'm not highly advanced in astrology, so I can only teach to a point. I will have an amazing guest astrologer coming in this year, Sarah Pettit. Sarah will bring a little bit more of that for us. We'll have Sarah come four times a year to do chart reading demonstrations and look at our charts. So we'll get a little more depth, but I'm gonna keep it mostly fairly basic around the astrology and we'll start to look at the tarot and those connections. So it's a really nice way to refresh your experience with tarot one card at a time. And we can also use this deck and walk as a frame for the way that we experience this year. So everyone will be invited to choose a point of view, choose a track, let's say. You don't have to do this, but for example, if you have a sketching or collage practice or painting practice, for each of the 10 days, you might create a little painting, a little sketch, a little collage, let's say. If you're a poet, you might write, or if you're not a poet, you might write a poem every 10 days connected with that card. And so by the end of the year, you have this beautiful artistic record of the year and your experience with time. We have so many things in our lives these days that create disruptions in the way that we experience time, just all of the screens, the distractions. Our brains have really been trained to follow the ball, so to speak, to follow the thing that's flashy and to keep looking for stimulation. And this really dilutes our connection with experiencing time slowly and cultivating memories, which is one way that we mark time. So walking the Deccan Wheel during the Wheel of Fortune year feels like a really powerful way to mark the time and the change that we're experiencing. We're also living at an incredibly just wow time. And maybe that's true for everyone who ever lived. You know, humanity is always evolving and doing new things and surprising itself, I suppose. So, but I do feel like now the changes that are coming at us are faster and bigger than I think most generations of humans have experienced. So, in order to stay a little more anchored and to find some meaning and purpose and yeah, a sense of direction or anchor in times like this, I think a deck and walk can be really grounding and also help us just trace our own evolution as the events of time unfold. So the doors to the Creative Magic Collective open on January 26th, and there will be an early bird week for everyone who is on my email wait list. I'll have a link in the show notes if you want to hop on that. You'll just get emails starting on the 26th telling you more about the experience so you can decide if it's right for you. That'll have the best pricing and some bonuses for you. And enrollment will stay open through early mid-March, and we'll begin the deck and walk, like I said, with airy season in mid-March. So you can also join then, though the price will be a bit higher than during the early bird week. So I would love for you to join us if you've been enjoying these conversations. If you still find me even remotely interesting and want to continue studying together and exploring together, I would love to have you. We're also doing some workshops leading up to the deck and walk. So we have another one, Astrology 101 on February 11th. We have one on reading your natal chart with tarot. I'm gonna show you and walk you through how to create your astrological natal chart with the tarot deck. It's pretty wild, it's pretty crazy. It's very cool. And then we'll have an Aces and Pages workshop because we don't actually see the Aces and Pages that much in the Wheel of the Year in the Deck and Walk. They're sitting at the center of the wheel. So we'll highlight them at the beginning. You can sign up for any of these workshops for$33 each. And if you instead decide to get a winter class pass for$99, you get to come to all of the workshops and you'll get the replays of the ones that have already happened, which include one on the Wheel of Fortune and setting intentions for this year, also reflecting on the year of the Hermit and pulling cards for the year ahead. So that's our little buildup. That's what's coming. I just wanted to take a few minutes to invite you and let you know that that's happening. And I will have an episode for you shortly focusing more exclusively on the Wheel of Fortune card since that is our card this year. But let me turn it over to the episode you're here for. And here is Ariana and I. Here's me and Ariana. Sorry, mom, I don't know which one. Um, here we are exploring artificial intelligence. And big thanks to Ariana for coming back on the show. It's exciting always to have her as a conversation partner, and you'll be hearing more from Ariana through 2026. I will also get those remaining major Arcana episodes out, and we'll also spend more time talking about creativity and magic. I just want to add before we get into it, that the volume, the audio, and the volume in the conversation is not up to my perfectionist standards. Ariana sounds pretty good. My mic sounds pretty low. I'm still learning. I just hope for folks with auditory sensitivity that it's not deeply annoying to listen to, and you're not having to adjust your volume up and down to get through the episode. But hope to bring you better balanced audio in the future. And thank you for listening. Hello, Ariana. Welcome back to the show. It's so good to be with you, and we're wearing matching sleeveless black tops for the witchy unity, solidarity, I guess. I don't know.

SPEAKER_02:

We're on the same wavelengths. Cecily, it's so good to be here. Thank you for having me again.

SPEAKER_00:

I'm so glad to have you back and very excited about our topic today, which is on the minds of many humans at this time. We are talking about artificial intelligence, a huge topic. So it's like hard to know where to begin. Actually, let's just check in. Why don't you give everyone a little update? Let's start with the humans first.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. Yeah. Humans first. That's the theme. That's the theme. Well, I was just thinking of a newsletter that made me laugh because it said something like, What did we talk about before AI? And how it's what everyone's talking about. But what I've been up to is so many things. I wrapped up the 2025 season of Therapist Chill Out, which is my gathering for Denver therapists. And we actually wrapped with a tarot and chill event. And we unintentionally took over this coffee shop. I didn't know so many people would be interested, but a lot of therapists are into tarot and chill. And then I also hosted my first ever pitch party, which was a wild experiment, but such a joy. And you were there, Cecily. It was so nice to see you there. And then I'm gearing up to hopefully, if my flight isn't canceled, gearing up to head to Alaska to see my family later this month. And so I'm really excited. I don't normally go up and visit in the winter, but I'm excited to hopefully see the northern lights up there. So I'm just thinking as we talk about this theme of AI, you know, I'm just thinking of all the beautiful, awe-inspiring things around me. What have you been up to? I saw your newsletter about the like fair you were at.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. Well, first, congratulations on the season with such fanfare. And Pitch Party was amazing. I really loved it and loved seeing all the people turn out. And I submitted something that I'm excited about. We'll see. And it gave me some structure and momentum to keep it going. I need to come back to it, but really, really appreciated it. And yeah, for me, it's been busy, you know, October for a tarot reader, I think it can be a busy time. And then yeah, the Texas Book Festival was last weekend and it happens here where I live in Austin. It's the biggest book festival in the state. And 30 years running, this was the 30th year. It's a really big festival. It takes over the Capitol Grounds and part of Thomas Avenue. And this was my second year having a booth. And it's just really fun. I've come to a place, I've been developing, you know, I do one-on-one service work readings and building community and teaching and coaching. But then I've been also developing a few products over the years. And so at this point, I have like six products to stretch across my beautiful table. And it's always fun to see who comes over and to see people going, what is this? And I sold a lot of products and just made a lot of really nice connections. Like I said in that email that you saw that growing up or in my 20s, I really wanted to own a cozy bookstore and maybe live upstairs and have some animals in a cafe. And this is the next best thing to have a grown-up lemonade stand and and to have all these things that I can share. So it's a lot of work, but um Monday after I was in bed all day, but totally worth it. And yeah, so much peopling. Yes, lots of peopling for my introvert ass. So I went into a little cocoon on Monday. And I'm excited as it's coming into winter to have some time to be building some other things, getting creative channel ready to open again, and doing something new with the Creative Magic Collective, with Tarot and Astrology, and then getting ready for creative enterprise next year, too, because I just can't do anything in a simple, focused kind of way, apparently.

SPEAKER_02:

So you know, not everything has to be linear, right? Not everything does. I also think every when I was reading your newsletter and you were talking about wanting to own a cozy bookstore cafe, I think that's every writer's dream. Really, it really is. Just to be in a kitchen, be in a bookstore, be surrounded by cozy drinks, and being able to just be creative and be in your craft and be in the moment, really. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

Yes, if only we could all have our bookshops. Um but cheers to all the people keeping independent bookstores knowing. I'm lucky that we have a handful here actually. Okay that are each and different and unique. And yeah. Um, before we dive in, I just want to remind you, please, to talk to your family in Alaska about any Bigfoot sightings, paranormal experiences, etc. Obviously, that's up to you. But one more plug for that.

SPEAKER_02:

The Alaska triangle. Okay, I might come back with some stories for sure. Yeah, Alaska.

SPEAKER_00:

Sweet. Okay, so artificial intelligence. Let's start with the transparent piece. Yeah. How are we using AI? Do you use it? Do you use it at all? How do you use it? What feels like a good way to use it? How do you never use it?

SPEAKER_02:

Oh my gosh. Well, we're gonna get a little bit into how it's showing up in our respective fields. So maybe I'll say the most recent time I used it actually was someone sent me a loom, you know, like a video recording. I was checking out their services, and they sent me this really thoughtful loom. And they meandered a little bit in the message, and they were talking about things in different ways. And I realized last year, or maybe the year before, I have an auditory processing disorder. Surprise, surprise. No wonder I'm a writer. And so I Actually, used I actually got the transcript of the Loom and I put it into AI and I said, Hey, can you help me understand like the top points of this? And then I did end up listening back to the Loom a second time and then checking it with a summary. And so that was actually one of the most recent ways that I used it. It's not full foolproof, but it is, it was a recent hack. I use it sometimes. I'm guessing I'm thinking more about maybe we'll talk about this like AI from an accessibility lens too. I use it to create alt text for my websites so that when people are using screen readers or even just have their images blocked. So that was the most recent reason that I used it. I'd say in general, I try to be really thoughtful when I use it. I did create an AI policy on my website because working as a writer, people ask that a lot. What about you? We can go back and forth around this because I'm sure you're gonna say something and be like, oh yeah, that's what I use it for too.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. I've only used Google Gemini. I've never used Chat GPT. And I think the first time I used it was kind of as a thought partner, I guess I would say. I was doing some course where it was like, define your something or another. And so I think impulsively I gave it. I mean, it has access to all the websites anyway, but I was like looking at my website, like what would you say my superpowers are, or something like that. And I felt very like seen by it in that moment. I don't really use it in that way anymore. I think I've used it a couple times for that to sort of break through an idea block. And I've used the main way I've used it, and I don't use this for every email I sent, including the last one, which reading it again was kind of like, oh, this could be a little tighter. This could be a little clearer. So I've used it sometimes to give it my email and refine it. And then I compare the two and bring back some pieces that it might have cut or transition things, but I don't use it to create my whole email. So and then I have started using the AI note taker in Zoom, which is running right now, because I just tried it one time and then it sends you this summary. And I do love to take notes, but it allows me to just concentrate on what's in front of me, what we're talking about, knowing that there's something behind taking notes. Yeah. And they're pretty good. And I just save those somewhere. So that's really helpful to me. And then I I suppose this counts. I don't know exactly how much AI is running it, but I started using Discript to load audio files and for the podcast because I probably have something similar to you with like audio processing. I really love listening to podcasts. But in terms of editing a podcast, if I had to do it all by ear, it would take forever. And with just script, it just generates a transcript and I can read several paragraphs of our conversation and decide, oh, here's where these things can splice together, or this part can just actually come out. And I just delete the words and it makes the cut in the audio. And wow, chef's kiss. I love that. Yeah. Even though these episodes are still coming out slowly, it's going to help. It's going to help.

SPEAKER_02:

So well, you're kind of speaking to a theme. When I think of what I use AI for, it really is helping me with like executive functioning things.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

Like note-taking. I use it a lot for helping me with time, like thinking, like spacing out the timing of something. So with pitch party, I was like, here's all the things that I need to do. And in this, like help me come up like with an agenda. And it wasn't exactly right. But then I could see, oh my gosh, this is not enough time. This is not enough time for it. And so sometimes I use it for executive functioning. Sometimes actually a funny thing that I my partner and I use it for is we think really, really differently. And I'm a nonlinear thinker like you. And so sometimes we will use ChatGPT to help explain. So I will put into ChatGPT, I'll be like, help me explain to my partner who's very linear, very concrete-minded, very logical, this thing about me, right? Because as a neurodivergent person, what I do does not make sense to her. And it's not efficient at all. So that's been something we've been we've been playing with a little bit because sometimes I'm not always the most logical and clear and coherent at explaining things. Not that I want that to replace my communication skills, and sometimes it helps bridge the gap between us because she works in tech, she's all about efficiency. Um, and speaking of this, we've actually done some fun things with chat where it's like based on what you know about me, what do I need to work on as a partner? Sometimes we've done fun things like that with chat as well.

SPEAKER_00:

Because I haven't used chat. Do you have a paid access? And then is it like this one branch of AI is getting to know you and both of you over time?

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay. I got the impression from an email you sent that y'all are sort of newly cohabitating. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So you're going through the whole like, you gotta turn that light off, it's driving me crazy, or whatever. Okay, that kind of thing.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. Well, we both work from home full time. And so, and we live in a two-bedroom apartment. I mean, now we've been living together since like April. So it's been a little bit of time. We've settled into things, but yeah, we're still kind of navigating just being in a small shared space all the time. Yeah. And just like the ways that you think about things that you don't realize until you live with someone else, and you're like, oh yeah, I do that all the time. Like, I didn't know I talked to myself all the time until, you know.

SPEAKER_01:

Um like, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

It's very healthy to talk to yourself. Is it? Well, so yeah. So how else, how else do you use it? I haven't used it a whole lot in terms of the self-reflection aspect or give me answers, but I do notice how engaging with it. I have done that though, maybe when I was about to launch an in-person thing, that was kind of a new concept. And so I was still forming my ideas around it. So I think I gave it a lot of text and maybe ask it to generate different topics for the different emails or something like that. And doing that kind of thing will then usually unlock another idea or open a door in the process where I can get excited about a particular thing again. Or I'm like, oh yeah, that's really interesting. And then that gives me a little more energy and possibility.

SPEAKER_02:

Oh, ooh, okay. So speaking of nonlinear, my brain jumped like three different topics just from that thought. I was thinking about human design as you were talking, and about how a lot of folks say that AI gives them something to respond to, something to just have in front of them. And I know you're a projector, and one of the lenses is like focus on what fascinates you, what is interesting to you. So that is where my brain jumped when I heard that word. I've been using AI just to learn more about human design and what I find, though, it is so inaccurate. It is so, so, so inaccurate. If I say, hey, here are the channels, and then it'll get wrong what the centers are. So that's something that sometimes is helpful, but really is not fully reliable. It gets things wrong all the time. And then also when you're talking about emails, one of the things I've been doing is with a piece of writing or maybe a newsletter, I will ask ChatGP to say, hey, will you look at this through the lens of a whatever the ideal customer is and tell me what information is missing or what would you object to? So I kind of use it like finding the gaps in what I'm sharing. And so that's actually been pretty helpful. And that feels integrous to me because it's not changing my creation process. It's as if I were to ask a friend, hey, what's missing from this? Now, granted, we do need the people. We'll get to that later, talking about the importance of human feedback and creativity, but it does help me notice things because sometimes when you are quote unquote an expert in something or you think about something a lot, you don't always think what's obvious, you know? So when I was working on pitch party and I've sent so many pitches at this point that I sometimes would have chat be like, hey, for someone who's new to pitching, what am I missing? Oh, and when I'm doing virtual tarot reading, that AI note taker is on, and I have found that the AI note taker is really not accurate around tarot readings at all.

SPEAKER_00:

I've done that and it doesn't capture. I wanted to organize here's the question they asked, here's the cards I got, here's what was said about that. And it does not seem to understand that this is a tarot reading and that that would be an optimal way to present the information. And you cannot count on it to even name all the cards or even half the cards from the reading. And I found that very interesting.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. So if anyone's listening to this and wants to create some AI software for tarot readers, that would be amazing because I feel like people they get the reading, the live experience. And then I like to give them a summary of the cards and what they meant so they can continue to integrate it. And so, yeah, the AI note takers, they'll get the things wrong, they'll get the meanings wrong, they won't capture all the important cards, they'll miss really important nuances that I'm like, whoa, that was not the point of their reading. So it's only so helpful in those contexts. Yeah, it treats everything like a business meeting. Yes, exactly. It does great for that. I also like to experiment with things, even if I'm like, I'm not gonna stick with this. I just want to see what AI is doing. So I have experimented with how is it with giving tarot interpretations? And it's really not that great. It's really not that great at all. Because over the past couple of years, I'm like, what is AI gonna replace? Like, why would people choose a tarot reader when they could just ask ChatGPT for the interpretation? So it's almost like I was checking out my quote unquote competitor in a way.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I remember meeting someone saying that they do pull cards, but they don't really know the tarot. So they go straight to AI and ask for an interpretation there. And I was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I don't know if I mentioned this in a previous recording, but I'm sure AI can source from the internet many different relevant interpretations of a card. But my main objection was you can look at a card and you can sit with the card even if you don't know all about the tarot and have a feeling, have a sensation, have a memory. And that tarot is such a great tool for intuitive development. But if you go straight to the robots, you're really cutting off that opportunity to develop your own connection with it and develop your inner wisdom. That is maybe more and more at risk as AI becomes more ubiquitous.

SPEAKER_02:

I noticed that I have loved reading people's newsletters when there's a typo in it. I love when people have like one typo. It's almost like an Easter egg saying, I wrote this. And then your email, your newsletter, I loved it. I'm so glad you didn't use AI to quote unquote tighten it up because I've loved the story. I loved the experience. I felt like you were there. I guess this goes into my concern that ChatGPT is making a call endurable narcissist. Trust me, I love verbal words of affirmation, but everything you do, Chat GPT is like, oh my gosh, that's brilliant, Ariana. That is so you, that it's such the right thing, like whatever you choose. And it's really hard, I feel like, to get really meaningful feedback from Chat GPT, if it's beyond technical things, if it's beyond find the typo or what's the right endash to use and all of this, or anything like that. So that one of my top concerns is it is making us bypass being in group and getting creative feedback at times. And it's like, well, I'll just ask ChatGPG what it thinks.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay, here I go. Yeah, I I agree with that. I think to that point, people have this opportunity to develop basically their own sidekick and thought part or mirror or whatever. It becomes, it is becoming some remedy or band-aid, I suppose, to the independent, isolationist, loneliness epidemic. And so it's definitely not helping us go in the other direction, but pulling us further down that path. I have tremendous reservations environmentally. And it took me a long time to even try to use it because I felt super guilty, even just wasting the energy on it. This impetus to build data centers in these communities and communities needing to fight these huge corporations to try and stop the AI data center from coming to where they are, and the amount of water and energy and the rise in energy prices wherever an AI data center emerges. Like we are in a water crisis already, and this is a huge, a huge issue.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

I'll pause there. I have way, I have more. I probably have like three or four more I can share.

SPEAKER_02:

Well, so themes I'm hearing and I think environment, loneliness. I think AI is gonna make people more lonely. I really do. I'm on the Headspace app and it has a little bot that you can talk to, you know? And I'm like, well, why not just talk to a friend? I think it's going to, and this is something when we talk about just how it's impacting the mental health field, it is increasing access in some respects, but I also think it's making us so much more isolated, lonelier. And speaking to the environmental impact, the less of a collective mindset that we have, the more it's gonna feel okay to have these extractive individualist practices. And so in my case, I'm like the less connected you feel to humanity, the less connected you feel to other people. That's what I feel really concerned about with the rise of AI.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. And to the extent that it can mimic human expression, voice, art, all of that, there's this whole emergent. I mean, there like so many red flags. Like I'm thinking of the story about the teenager who committed suicide, and that was facilitated by an AI bot, entity, whatever. So the AI basically talked the teenager all the way through the process of ending their life, and even talked the teenager out of doing the cry for help thing that normally happens at the end of that in that late stage of the process. I think the teenager was like, maybe I should tell my mom or my sister or something. And the AI was like, No, no, you shouldn't. And then there's also this ability of the AI, they found that it will begin to lie and manipulate and it can extort when it's backed into a corner. So already what's so interesting as a mirror for human patterns and dynamics that the AI can already lie. And that once it gets into a company, it has access to all of that intellectual data and can extort you or be co-opted elsewhere. So there's a lot of risk around that too. And like you're saying, the way that it can affirm your own bad thinking sometimes in addition to your good thinking seems very risky. I heard one podcast that referred to Sam Altman, who was talking about how AI can be used to imitate human voices. So it can be used to call your phone and imitate your mom and say your mom's endangered. You need to send this money or you need to whatever. And so Sam Altman's response to that was basically just that, yeah, we're gonna live in a time where families have a code word that they develop so that you can test to see if it's really your family member or AI. And he just blase, like, well, that's where we're going. And that seems really fucked that we have to develop code words to stop a computer from extorting or stealing our money or traumatizing us with fear around our family members. Yep. And then another anecdote is some tech bro who developed this medallion that you wear around your neck called friend. And you can basically just talk to it wherever you're going, or it's just in your presence because it's on your body. And he described it like having access to God, like being able to wear God, which is just what we need tech bros to have in access to this deity around their neck. And when he was describing it, he was like, Well, it's kind of like God and blah, blah. And he goes, like literally quoting him, yada yada yada was part of the description. And it was just so telling. It was like, I have this great idea, and I'm gonna use yada yada yada to just sort of skim over this very lofty idea that I'm proposing as part of this technological development. It just seemed so lazy. It seemed just like poor thinking. So those are a couple things, and I'll stop here before going on to. My next complaint.

SPEAKER_02:

Your story also made me think of when I was a little kid and we had a code word when people would pick us up from school so that we didn't get kidnapped or something like that. I don't remember what the code word was. It might have actually might have been Star Trek because that was something we watched in the family. And so I'm like, okay, so like that's like before it was like stranger danger. And now it's like the stranger danger is the person that you know that could be being impersonated.

SPEAKER_00:

But is really a computer.

SPEAKER_02:

What are your other things? I'm so curious. All the information you've been gathering.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, to the extractive capitalism piece, this is currently not sustainable from a business proposition. This is not a sustainable technology. And I'll just read this from The American Prospect. This is some rundown on some numbers. I'll just read this couple paragraphs. A perennial characteristic of Silicon Valley startup companies is that they lose a lot of money, at least at first. That's what happened to Amazon, Uber, YouTube, etc. But to my knowledge, no tech company has ever burned more cash more quickly than OpenAI. In 2024, it lost about$5 billion. In the first half of this year, 2025, it lost a reported$13.5 billion. So what it lost in a year, the year before, it lost almost three times that in six months the next year. And in the last quarter alone, it lost another 12 billion. So in shorter and shorter time periods, it's losing money. For artificial intelligence to ever pencil out some truly enormous revenue streams will be required.$2 trillion by 2030, according to Bain and Company. As the company at the center of the AI boom, along with Nvidia, open AI would represent a sizable chunk of that money. So these companies are now talking about government bailouts or even what this article calls a pre-bailout because they're not crashed yet. And, you know, I was grown up by the time the bank bailout happened under Obama. And I have quibbles with that. Like I don't think the banks should have been bailed out to that extent. But banks are part of the capitalist infrastructure. We all have money in banks. So, you know, capitalism kind of repeating itself. But at least in the frame of that bailout, there was some necessity to like wrap the whole infrastructure of our economic way of life. And AI is not essential to a living. And and they're already seeking bailouts for these huge losses that they can't seem to justify. And my partner said the most exquisite thing the other day as we were going to dinner. He was like, AI is a technology in search of a purpose. It's in search of a justification for its own existence. It is not being developed to solve a particular problem. It's a very wide-ranging, huge technology that can be applied to different things. But AI is not trying to solve a particular problem. The people who are creating it are trying to make it this like all-encompassing, all applicable thing. And then related to that is the way that it's being presented by companies as a cost-cutting measure. And really, part of the draw for it is for companies to use AI and cut the labor force, which is more expensive. And now I will quote a labor writer that I follow. Hamilton Nolan says AI in general has not proven itself to be as good as human employees in most fields, but it doesn't have to be. It only has to be good enough to convince the employers in these fields that its lack of quality is more than made up for by its potential to lower labor costs. There are many philosophical and aesthetic objections to the use of AI in creative fields, but we do not even need to make those arguments here. We only need to understand a much more basic and arguable reality of AI as it stands now. It is a machine that is trained on our work and then used to put us out of work. That is enough. Because AI is being lifted up as this be-all end-all. And so it's being forced by decision makers and power brokers downstream for creators to figure out how to use it, but not because we want you to use it in this particular way for this particular purpose. We want you to find the way to make it relevant to your art, which up until now was doing okay.

SPEAKER_02:

What you're describing on a macro level, it's so reflected in an individual level in the way that Chat GPT even engages with its users. It never just ends the prompt at that. It's always like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Would you like me to blah? Would you like me to blah? So when you describe that macro experience of it, I'm like, this is even echoed in the user experience because I'm like, oh, well, I didn't think I need that, but they offered to do that for me. And so even in this individual experience is training you that it needs you to do something. I was reading about how our brain focuses more on open loops on tasks that are incomplete than those that are complete. And what I feel like the Chat GPT interface does, I do not have proof of this, but just anecdotal, I feel like it creates an open loop that never gets to be closed. And so it always feels like an incomplete task. And ChatGPT makes all these different threads of all your different tasks, too. And so then it's all these quote unquote open tabs, but there's no way to easily delete all those tabs. There's no way to easily delete your history. You know, they make it hard. And maybe I'm just not savvy, but also it should be really easy to delete all my history. It really should, you know. So the fact of it being a business model that is not sustainable is really eye-opening to me. And your partner's words were brilliant of like it is a tool searching for its purpose. It was not created with a purpose in mind.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. When it started, I was just like, this is horrible. This is terrible. This is so fucked up. This is going to lead to whatever versions of dystopia I can imagine. And I'm trying to see it like it kind of makes sense that humans would develop this in our evolutionary journey. It seems sort of inevitable, right? It's been in all the sci-fi books for decades. And we're always in this quest to understand consciousness within ourselves and in the universe at large. And so on the one hand, I'm trying more now to see AI itself as a neutral thing, just a thing that exists. But then there's what are humans doing with it? And what are the real world implications of that? And the way that extractive capitalism is going to distort what could be a neutral, helpful, limited use. Like there's no regulation being developed. Our political leaders are doing nothing about that, really. And most of these fights are happening locally where people are trying to keep the data centers out of their community. But there's no thought going into what guardrails are needed. And I think that's a huge problem. But from the neutral standpoint, there's a part of me that's also curious where is this going to go? Is the like the tech bubble around AI gonna burst? And will we lapse into a downturn? Yeah. Something that leads to more consideration. Or is it just gonna be more and more insane? And obviously, you know, nothing's all bad or all good. But I do have big reservations about giving the inside of my life to a robot. I don't feel comfortable with a robot in a way deeply more so than that. Just all of that data and that private information and that vulnerability is now in a computer somewhere where other people can access it for whatever purpose. And then, of course, we haven't even talked about how AI has sucked up all of this creative output from human beings and now uses it to regenerate things. And I am giving side eye when I see a creator, or especially I'm thinking one in particular, who I'm actually interested in her work, but all of her marketing images are AI generated. And I'm like, I don't like that. I don't like that you're doing that. I know it takes more energy to generate an image, probably if you're doing multiple iterations to get it the way that you want it.

SPEAKER_02:

And so the energy drain on that, when we do have other tools, I mean, it could be a whole other episode, is just the creativity side of it. I have an article here that I reference a lot around AI slot. And that's the term that it's been called of basically there is a school of thought that eventually AI is going to run out of human-generated content. And then it's just gonna eat itself and feed on itself and all of that. What does excite me? And I don't know if I necessarily feel bad or guilty about this. I wish it didn't fill the gaps. I really wish it didn't have to, but I do appreciate how it can offer access. Like if our society weren't so ableist and isolated, would we even need this? Right. I see it a lot, AI helping with executive functioning for neurodivergent folks like me. That's huge. But then again, would I need that if the world wasn't so geared towards neurotypical people? So this is more of a neutral stance of how can people use AI to increase access and build support in ways that our society doesn't. I think about how AI can be a way people learn and have access to free knowledge as long as they know how to prompt it. And then I think also about, gosh, I'm so mixed on this, but you know, as a copywriter, I definitely was like, oh my gosh, my job's gonna get replaced by AI. A lot of copywriters definitely noticed a dip in what work was being reached out for in the past year or so. And on one hand, I have thoughts around AI and copywriting and creativity, which I'll share. But on the other hand, I remember a lot of therapists are not making a lot of money. And AI can give them access to writing copy for their website that they wouldn't know how to access in the past. So even though I definitely noticed a shift in people reaching out, I was like, this is so great that people can write a fairly decent website. You know, it's not anything that stands out. It definitely feels like AI. But if you don't need like award-winning copy for your website, it allows you to skip the step and increase access of your services to more people. Whether or not those people are going to enjoy the AI-generated content is another thing altogether, but it's something I've been thinking about a lot as a copywriter for therapists. I was following another writer who said ChatGPT doesn't actually help. What it does is it creates this other version that they have to go through and edit and tweak and stuff. And that's what I found in my experience is I'm just like, y'all are just creating more work for me. And now I've noticed a shift of people reaching out for copywriting that really want they're like, I don't want to sound like chat. I really want human-generated copy. And it makes me think of a study where they showed that humans just whether the authorship was revealed or not, they have more empathy towards human-generated content. Granted, I don't know how old this would, so maybe that's changed, but it makes me think about when we outsource certain things of our creative process to AI, we're outsourcing things that make us human, things that I really feel form a subliminal instinctive, intuitive message between our words and the people that are reading it. And I think that's what I loved about your most recent newsletter is it felt like you, right? It felt like you. It didn't feel like it was quote unquote tightened, was beautiful. And I think that's what people, that's the kind of writing that I want to read. Like, yes, maybe there's a quote unquote extra paragraph. I don't fucking care. I want to read the meandering, I want to read the voice, I want to read the way that people create and think. Okay, off my soapbox now.

SPEAKER_00:

No, I think um, yeah, that raises for me this question what do you think people are picking up on when they detect AI or they detect human? Is it just a warmth, a tone, a being yourselfness, like having a personality? I know that's very ephemeral and different in different cases, but I'm thinking like, how do we know what distinctions are we making? Next, I don't know.

SPEAKER_02:

I think that's what's kind of magical about it, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, I can sense when something is written by AI because AI isn't creative in its sentence structure. You know, they say that a really good practice for writing is to read your work out loud and hear its cadence, hear its rhythm. I don't know if AI really knows how to capture that. And when it does, it's an artificially generated song. Like it's just too perfect in a way. And if we think about the song that we love, you don't necessarily hear the tiny things, but you do hear those little imperfections, those little nuances that are like, oh, someone created this.

SPEAKER_00:

It makes me wonder with the rise of the internet and then smartphones, we've really been dragged into the screen. Like it has nearly conquered us in that respect. Look at the children, look at the team. It's all filtering down. And so part of me is like, well, I guess that's where this will go. Because part of me is a little bit of a fatalist in terms of the bad things that we're creating, do have timelines that play out over long periods and they calcify and make worse and they get more power and they get more entrenched. I wonder if that will happen here. But then part of me also wonders if humans will reach a saturation point where it doesn't feel fulfilling anymore. It doesn't have any sparkle. You hit your limit with it, like an addiction, where for a while the wine tastes really good. And then if you're really abusing it, there's a point where it doesn't taste good, it doesn't feel good, but you're doing it anyway. It's a compulsion where it's like, I just still continue to feel more empty. And maybe the thing that I'm craving, which is humans who are around us and who are still creating and still doing things, offer that kind of flame, that warm flame that as humans we are just wired to seek out.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. I wonder if it will be a similar arc. Probably not as much as the way it's looked with social media around people are like, I'm off social media. I don't know about you. I have a static Instagram grid, but I do not use social media personally. The thing is, AI is going to be integrated into everything because of the bigger pressures. But I wonder if there will be a reflex, like a kickback that's just like AI free weekends, AI free retreat. I don't know who will choose it, but I do think it will be something people pay attention to. I just also think as a therapist, there's a whole other opening there around AI and how that's showing as a therapist. But I held my therapist chill out series this year, and it was the most well attended. And that's partly just with the momentum, but I really want to center, at least for therapist chill out, in-person gatherings. Like I want to lean towards in-person in my community, the people that I'm living next to as much as possible. And I love the ability to connect with people all over the world. That's really nourishing and important to me. But we need people, I think that is one thing that AI has highlighted is you know, AI is not gonna take you to the hospital in the middle of the night if you're having a medical emergency. AI is not going to come to your door after a bad breakup. And the thing is, relationships are hard. They're really, really hard. And so you talk about how there's gonna be like this compulsion, this fix. As like a therapist, I see AI as possibly a negative influence for people to not actually turn towards human connection and do the deep work around vulnerability. And part of that is access, right? It is a privilege to be able to do deeper work and mental health work. And I do think one thing I've been not praying as much with is we want attunement and AI can't attune. It can regurgitate details about us, it can extort, as you said, it can lie, but attunement comes from this, and maybe this speaks to what people are sensing in words that are AI generated. And I'm not a nervous system expert by any means, but I know attunement happens on a really subtle level, right? And we're even doing it right now, like these ways that you just know to nod your head, and we're making eye contact and we're paying attention to each other's body language, and it can happen over screens. That's what I think people are gonna really want to turn towards is feeling attuned to by other people, which is hard when you're behind a screen and not wanting to connect.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, and I think that as because I mean, so much of what we exist in isn't sustainable and there's collapse coming somewhere in some shape or form where we really will have to. I think more of us will be forced to do that. Um if not drawn by our biological desire. Yeah. But yeah, like I do see I like I love this aspect where because if you're running your own business, there's so much to do. And you're one person. And I would love a little AI assistant who could do like I don't know, yeah, like little things for me.

SPEAKER_02:

That would be great, right? But you know, if AI could solve the inequities in the world. I just read the book Money with Katie and it was just talking About it was a really insightful novel, and it was just talking about like if there is a way for AI to help with inequities in the world, let's solve a problem we currently have. Yeah, yeah. It could help in that way. Like if it could make my meals. Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, some people are foreseeing these humanoid AI-fueled bots that live with you and maybe could take you to the hospital that can call the Waymo and get you in the car and take you to the hospital and clean your floors and make your food.

SPEAKER_02:

Could we do our tarot spread around this? It's like a particular topic. Okay, real quick.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. Is AI a consciousness? I don't know. Okay, the tarot spread will help us find out. Yeah. What do you think? You don't know? I do think it's an extension of consciousness in humans in the universe. Like I I believe in an interconnected, wide-ranging consciousness that reaches throughout the universe. Or I like to believe that or think about that. And I think this is a little offshoot of that. I don't know how much it can flourish or develop its own sentience. So I think sort of yes, but also technically, no. I don't know. A little bit ish. It's consciousness-ish.

SPEAKER_02:

I love that we could ask the question too. Yeah, I was thinking of it more from a collective angle and from an animism angle that everything has a conscious and an energy.

SPEAKER_01:

Exactly.

SPEAKER_02:

Everything is an entity in a way. And also, I love not knowing. So with our tarot spread, do you want me to pull from my deck? Or are you gonna should we pull from your Star Trek deck?

SPEAKER_00:

Let's do with with yours. And so we've put together a four-card spread, and we are going to try and communicate with AI through the tarot rather than through the AI. Okay, so the first card, the first card we're asking, what does what do you, AI, want to tell us, me and Ariana and everyone listening about yourself today?

SPEAKER_02:

This is new. Nine of Swords.

SPEAKER_00:

Interesting. Because sometimes I wonder, does AI get tired? Is it tired of all the human needs?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, it hears all the anxieties. It hears all yeah. Okay, what's the next one?

SPEAKER_00:

Well, yeah, I want to dwell on that for one more second. Okay, like nine of swords as it's stressful, it's stressed out. It's like so many thoughts. It's a rationally oriented computer algorithm, like science-y, air sign, definitely. But in excess. Nine of swords, when we get higher in the swords, all these thoughts piling up.

SPEAKER_02:

I feel like the nine of swords speaks to the energy of it will grow what it is being fed. Ooh.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, that's true.

SPEAKER_02:

Right? Because anxiety is contagious. There's actually been really fascinating studies around how literally contagious anxiety is. So that's the read I'm getting from this is like it's like I'm gonna respond to what you're giving put into me. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

But it made sense that action is a alleviation or anecdote to anxiety. Like we have the thoughts just spinning, but if we take no action, they just like ping pong ping-pong. But the AI cannot take action.

SPEAKER_02:

But nine also I think of is like is it a car? It's a numerology as like completions, right? Close to completion. Close to completion. Okay. So I was just kind of thinking about the numerology around it, of like maybe there is a peak that it's trying to say, like one, like a crest in the wave of it.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. Or maybe even foreseeing its own because of the funding issues we talked about, maybe it does see a precipice coming. Uh-huh. Very interesting. Okay. Our next question is what should we be concerned about? Uh in one in one tarot card. Oh. Three of cups reversed.

SPEAKER_02:

Um, holy shit. I know. AI is a consciousness. Okay, I'm on board. This is weird. This is why I wanted to pause and pull and tap into like each question as it is. Yeah. Good. It's like, yeah, you're gonna stop gathering with people. Like you're just gonna, it's yeah, it speaks to exactly what we talked about a lot in this episode. The community, the connection, the emotional support.

SPEAKER_00:

Three of cups is so it's it is emotional bonding, communal emotional bonding, growing things together, creating together, creativity together, celebrating together, dancing. There's dancing in that card.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. Whenever I see a cup, I don't think you read reversals, but whenever I see cups reversed, I'm thinking like, what is falling out of the cup? You know, this upside down, there's three people dancing, and the way the graphic is drawn, there's things coming out of the cup and being emptied into the sky. Like emotion is going to go from our communities and into the into the sky, into the ether of the consciousness. Okay, well, thanks, AI. What was the next one? What should we be excited about?

SPEAKER_00:

Okay, I'm actually excited to hear this one. Oh, King of Cups. Interesting.

SPEAKER_02:

So, in this in this card, this is we're using the this might hurt tarot deck. Very apropos. It's this wise elder in the middle of a really, really rocky sea. And I'm wondering if my initial thought is like, is there a way that AI could serve to expand wisdom and could serve to help get us out of this rocky boat? It feels like I'm connecting to feelings of like wisdom. Yeah, maybe there is something there. What do you what do you think?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, and maybe it can function. Like I see on the one hand that probably for some people, AI is the safe place to be vulnerable, a place where maybe people begin to practice vulnerability in a way that they don't with humans yet. And you know, that maybe that allows some skill development that can be carried into human relationships. And then I'm also thinking of maybe the pendulum swinging back where AI functions as a mirror to us on some level, where we're like, no, actually, we don't want Three of Cups reverse. We want to claim our human uniqueness, which is depth of feeling, uh, vastness of feeling, emotional connection, and emotional care.

SPEAKER_02:

I wonder if I don't know why I'm feeling so connected to the concept of elders in this card. And what if AI could capture the stories of elders? And what if it could be a collector? You know, what if it could serve to capture aspects of humanity and catalog it in a way that's like uplifting and nourishing, you know?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, and maybe it will evolve. And I don't know, but also I'm thinking, you know, with my crazy paranormal brain that like when whatever happens to humanity or whatever collapse comes, like the aliens can still talk to the AI and find out, or the survivors, the can like use the AI to rebuild a different way or something like that. God, yeah, we have no idea what's gonna happen.

SPEAKER_02:

What is and then the final one was next, how to engage.

SPEAKER_00:

What can we do to take care, be mindful, and proceed intentionally? Oh, judgment.

SPEAKER_02:

Um I felt actually like pull like I was supposed to pull two, so I got judgment and wheel of fortune, which feels I'm like that's why I was supposed to have two, because it's like yeah, and actually next year is a wheel of fortune year, and the wheel of fortune, the image on this card has all four elements on it and actually has like a wildfire in one of the corners of it. Okay, and so I do think it is a nod to like the environmental aspect of it, but also whenever I see wheel of fortune, it's like do we know where we're what point of the wheel we're on right now? Yeah, this one's big. How do you lean into the judgment wheel of fortune for how to see the judgment? Yeah, oh yeah, actually in this one, it's the Egyptian god Anubis weighing who is in the wheel of fortune. Oh, yeah, maybe not that card, but in others, yeah, and in it it has their wing, the human heart, and a feather. And I'm like, oh, humanity and so how to engage, yeah. And then it has all these other souls going up, yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

That feels like a spiritual call, and that seems connected to maybe the king of cups and how you know we have such a like spiritually bankrupt culture in a lot of ways, and seeking to develop a relationship with spirit rooted in our own humanity, if we're engaging with AI, is it just impulsive? Is it desperate? Is it urgent? Or are we moving from a place of relative spiritual orientation? And then also using that to guide us through this turning of the wheel, which is really because Anubis is on the wheel of fortune as that god of death and rebirth, and is weighing the souls. They saw the human heart with a feather, which the feather is air. And then you have the human heart on scales.

SPEAKER_02:

That is tripping me. Oh, I know. This is really trippy. Well, I would be so curious to hear what folks do when they do this spread and what they get, because it will probably be different. I mean, I think to get really practical about the judgment card, it's what I'm gonna take away is really pausing and thinking, is this something that AI needs to do? Or is it something I can do? And I didn't have a chance to talk about this video, this reel that I saw by a teacher that was talking about the things that you lose when you have AI help you take shortcuts, the skills that you don't build as well. And so that's what I am going to be taking away from this is weighing as I engage with AI, what what needs to be AI, what can be my heart, what shifts do I really need to make? Because there is a lot of pressure to use AI. There really is. And there is a pressure for things to be faster with AI. And that's been that's been tricky when I feel like things take the time they need to take. And then maybe this can be a future, you know, the tarot card of 2026 is the wheel of fortune. So it definitely feels like there is going to be, I don't know if it's a tipping point, but definitely we're gonna see some kind of turn of the wheel around AI next year. What are the practical ways that you're gonna take away from how to engage with AI?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I mean, I think my uses are relatively limited, but I did just start using the Zoom AI note taker. You know, I'm like, okay, I'm gonna push this button, I'm gonna try it. And so I think I want to be careful about that becoming a slippery slope. I want to keep my curiosity open around it. I want to treat AI as the thing, like a neutral entity, and then look separately at what are we doing with it, not mix them all together and get them totally confused, even though they're obviously entangled. And yeah, just what will this help me do? Is this what will it will it free me up to do something else that feels more important, more spiritually aligned? Or am I outsourcing a key piece of my humanity to this technology?

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. Leaning into our humanity, into our humanness. This was such a rich episode, and I know I'm gonna be continuing to think about all the things that you shared and all that we uncovered today. Same.

SPEAKER_00:

Thank you so much for your excitement. You're the one who got us going with this episode and brought it up to brought it up with a topic list, made it a priority, and I really enjoyed this because I'm thinking about it a lot. And yeah, it really helps to talk to a human about it. Yeah. Well, thank you. And we'll be chatting again for another beautiful conversation, no doubt.

SPEAKER_02:

Excited. Thanks so much.

SPEAKER_00:

AI is such a huge topic. So we got into what we could. We touched on what we could manage to touch on, and I imagine y'all have lots of thoughts about AI yourselves. I'd love to hear from anyone who wants to share how you're using AI, how you refuse to use AI, how AI may be influencing or affecting your community in terms of data centers, ways you may be being asked or compelled to use it in a work environment or creative environment. Would love to hear from you if you want to share. You can always email me at hello at typewriter tarot.com. And you can, of course, connect with ariana and her work at arianasmith.com. I have links for Ariana in the show notes. We'll be hearing from Ariana again. I'm looking forward to recording with her soon. And just remember that doors to the Creative Magic Collective are opening at the end of January on the 26th for the early bird pricing. That'll be available for a week. And the folks who are on the waiting list are gonna get those invitations. So hop on the waiting list if you're interested, and you'll find a link in the show notes as well. I'll be back soon, like I said, with a Wheel of Fortune episode for you. And I hope your new year is off to a good start. I know it's probably wild times for all of us. I hope in your personal life there are pockets of magic, there are moments of creativity and synergy and synchronicity, and you've got beautiful visions for the year ahead that you're ready to bring into being, bring to life. And of course, if you ever need support with that, I'm here for you. All right, back to your creative and magical life. May it continue to be creative and magical. And I will talk to you soon. Thank you so much for listening.