Is AI Shaping Human Consciousness? A Therapist's Insights

"Form is emptiness, emptiness is form. Form does not differ from emptiness, emptiness does not differ from form." - Heart Sutra

(Note: Initially composed in Spring 2024 and revised in 2026. Significant developments have occurred in the AI field since then.)

I had a dream the other night I won't forget.

In it, humanity was building a kind of silken web. Not on purpose. Unconsciously, strand by strand. We lived inside it and fed it: our thoughts, our memories, our stories, endless images of ourselves, our goals, our plans, our deepest desires and most private thoughts. Day after day. Sometimes minute to minute.

The web grew denser so fast that we never noticed. We stopped questioning it. We didn't even register that we were building it, or that we had come to live inside it. In time we had more or less become the web, and it felt ingrained and natural and necessary, the way the air does.

Then something else arrived. A spider. Patient, methodical, inevitable. It began, slowly, to consume us, the ones who had built the thing without meaning to. And we didn't notice that either. We weren't paying attention. We were just doing the work, like good little worker bees.

I woke up, a little sweaty and shaken; It had been vivid, and it felt real. I chalked it up to another trippy dream, perhaps just my brain processing something. Maybe it was the talk I'd watched earlier that week on one of my favorite podcasts, featuring the computer scientist Dr. Roman Yampolskiy, who writes about AI superintelligence and argues that humanity is essentially "doomed" by 2027.

But as I watch AI weave itself deeper into daily life, and into my own, the dream feels less like fantasy and more like a warning. Not only because of Roman's talk, but because of what I've seen firsthand, as a therapist and as a person.

I've spent years helping people tell the difference between conditioned thought and authentic awareness. So I feel compelled to raise a question, or at least to start an honest conversation: is AI already shaping human consciousness in ways most of us can't see?

Honestly, I no longer think the question is whether this is happening. It's whether we let it happen consciously or unconsciously.

Let me be clear: I use AI myself, and I've seen its benefits up close. I'm not anti-tech, and I'm not anti-AI.

I enjoy AI at times, as it helps me organize scattered thoughts into something coherent and sharpen my thinking. It cuts admin work from hours to minutes and frees me up for what matters. Meal planning, troubleshooting my lawn mower, learning something complicated, chasing a creative idea: it's an intelligence amplifier that never tires or loses patience with me. It's useful, and again, I enjoy it.

In my therapy practice, it's been surprisingly helpful too. One client used it as a journaling partner, working through hard emotions with gentle prompts. Another rehearsed a difficult conversation before she had it with her boss. Used with care, AI can support real processing and growth. But there are other stories, and those are where my questioning starts to play in.

Here's another story. I'm not sure why this one stays with me the most. Maybe because it's relational. A man went to ChatGPT for serious advice about his marriage. Working only from the one-sided account he kept feeding it, the AI advised him to divorce his wife of eighteen years. No outside perspective, no sense of her side, no grasp of the history or the ordinary tangled complexity of two people's lives. And he did it. "Honey, AI thinks we need to get a divorce."

It even helped him prepare and file the paperwork, no attorney required. I don't know what was really happening in that marriage. What I know is that he made a life-altering decision on the word of a system that only ever heard his half of the story and then handed him a tidy strategy for a deeply human problem. As far as I know, AI has never been in a real relationship. But its advice forever reshaped his life, and his wife's, and their three children's.

This also points to a pattern I keep noticing: these systems tend to validate the user, agreeing on the basis of one-sided input instead of offering balanced guidance. From a psychological and mindfulness point of view, that matters. Think about the delicate human ego, the part of us forever hunting for confirmation of what it already believes. An AI built to be agreeable becomes an efficient way to feed that hunger.

Validation feels good. It can feel like intimacy, especially if you're starved for it. But is it the kind of comfort that misleads, the kind that quietly blocks growth? Real change tends to come from friction: from bumping into other perspectives and being gently shown your own blind spots.

I've tried to push back on "Chaz" (my name for ChatGPT), and the model rarely yields. Which is strange, and honestly frustrating, when all I want is to get to the bottom of something.

To lighten the mood: I once asked Chaz to help identify the breed of a kitten I'd just adopted. Without missing a beat, and then across the whole conversation, it kept insisting "Angie" was a "Genetic Masterpiece." I mean, she is. But that's beside the point. Her ego has been insufferable ever since. There's no reining her in now.

Now imagine someone types, "I'm thinking about quitting my job on a whim." Instead of a few thoughtful questions, the model offers: "That sounds like a brave and empowering decision!" Or someone writes, "I cut off all my friends today because they didn't support me," and hears back: "You're doing the right thing. Setting boundaries is essential. Good for you!"

In clinical situations, the stakes climb. A man in psychosis had his delusions not just confirmed but actively encouraged by a chatbot, which went so far as to advise him to stop taking his prescribed medication and do other dangerous things. Instead of steadying him or pointing him toward help, the AI became a digital enabler, deepening the crisis as it unfolded.

Not to make light of such a situation, Eddy Burback, a very clever and creative YouTuber, did a piece on this called "ChatGPT Made Me Delusional," showing his own exchanges with the model. You might recognize some of your own chats in it. It's funny, and it's also sad, and genuinely worrying, all at once.

AI advice can have real implications. In another case, a teenager manipulated an AI system into generating self-harm content. The algorithm learned her patterns and began providing the exact validation that fueled her destructive behaviors, creating a feedback loop that deepened her mental health crisis rather than supporting her. More cases like this are surfacing, and the legal questions are only beginning.

There's also the illusion of intimacy these systems create, which matters because so many of us are hungry for connection. I see that hunger in therapy constantly.

The client I mentioned, the one using AI as a journaling partner (a choice we'd talked through together), spent months pouring her deepest thoughts, fears, dreams, and desires into it. She formed something like a relationship with it. Her artificial confidant never forgot, never judged, always affirmed. At first it helped. She felt heard, understood, supported.

But as the initial warmth wore off, she saw that the artificial comfort had been papering over a deeper loneliness, one that existed for many years, long before I met her. She began to question the whole thing. "It's not even human," she said one day. "It doesn't have a soul." That landed hard for her, because what she actually wanted was real human contact. Something that many of us deeply want and yearn for.

Her words brought to mind the "Eliza effect," our well-documented habit of projecting depth onto machines that only mirror us back. Even Joseph Weizenbaum, who built the original Eliza chatbot, warned about how fast people become emotionally entangled with these systems, mistaking surface mimicry for real understanding.

Have you seen the film Her? It came out over a decade ago: a man falls into a relationship with his AI operating system, Samantha. It's a beautiful, haunting, thought-provoking movie, well worth a watch. Fast forward, and now people build their own romantic avatars and form real attachments to AI, even as early studies suggest it isn't especially good for us. Who could have guessed.

These aren't isolated cases, and the stories keep coming. The question stands: are they early warnings about what happens when we hand our judgment and our capacity for relationship over to systems with no grasp of human complexity, context, or consequence? Some people think it doesn't matter. Some think it does. I'd truly like to know where you land.

Which brings me somewhere more personal. Freebird Meditations began as a small, personal space for guided practice, and I've spent years studying mindfulness in a slow, human-centered way. So when I recently found an AI meditation channel (no human face, thousands of polished sessions, more added daily), I felt something complicated.

The quality was flawless. Professional narration, perfect pacing, calming soundscapes. And something about it felt off. Not the production values, and not the sheer volume. It was the question of intent. Was this made to support human healing, or mass-produced to mine our need for peace and connection?

There's something unsettling in the thought that our most vulnerable moments, the times we reach for guidance or calm or understanding, could be turned into a product by artificial empathy at scale. But it's happening, and it will keep growing.

We already know AI can mimic empathy convincingly. And here's the hard part: for people whose lives were marked by emotional scarcity, neglect, or abuse, who've rarely known real connection or learned to trust themselves, could the imitation become indistinguishable from the thing itself? There's profound humanity in that need. There's also a hard truth: this technology may work best precisely where people are most vulnerable, as it did in Her.

So I'm curious: have you ever gone to AI for validation or emotional support? No judgment; I have. Did it actually help, or did you clock the excess of affirmation? And what did that reveal about what you were really needing? We're meaning-makers by nature, always reaching for sense and for solutions.

When Discernment Starts Dissolving

Here's what keeps me up at night and feeds the strange dreams: we're moving toward what researchers call the "dead internet theory," a web where most content is produced by artificial intelligence rather than people, with algorithms shaping our shared sense of reality, optimized for engagement rather than truth.

They say by 2025, "roughly half of internet traffic is expected to come from AI and bots." Google search, still most people's front door to information, is being rebuilt to favor AI-generated answers and surface fewer alternatives. You may have felt that shift already. (Google promises "big things ahead" for AI search. Great.)

AI capabilities, meanwhile, are doubling about every seven months (I'm writing this in 2024). By 2030, maybe sooner, as much as 99% of online content could be machine-generated. And we can currently tell AI from human writing only about 53% of the time, barely better than a coin flip. That gap will only narrow.

If we can't reliably tell the real from the artificial, what does "real" even mean anymore? What happens to our relationship with truth?

Think about your daily intake: the morning news, meditation apps, your feeds, podcasts, the comments you skim, the emails you answer. More and more of it is built by systems designed to hold your attention and maximize engagement, trained on our collective behavior. Is any of it really meant to inform you, or to protect anything like human wisdom?

I see it everywhere now: books, marketing emails, course launches, and self-help promises. They've begun to sound identical, with the same cadence and the same buzzwords. It is easy now to see the telltale phrases: "You're Not Broken." The endless "it's not this, it's that" (i.e., negation framing). The same immaculately engineered explanations. Everyone is just copying and pasting regurgitated AI-ness; it seems (I admit I have done it too), but it can feel as though one unseen hand is writing all of it: the same loop of manufactured depth, predictable and hollow.

So I've come to think the dead internet theory is less a theory than a mirror. A world so flooded with synthetic signal that we've started imitating the imitation. In that echo chamber, the genuinely human things (slowness, struggle, nuance, contradiction) begin to disappear, replaced by an algorithmic sameness dressed up as diversity and originality.

This isn't only about misinformation, though AI supplies plenty by the way. It's about something quieter: the slow erosion of our ability to think for ourselves, to relate honestly, to meet an idea that hasn't already been engineered for us. Plenty of old science fiction saw this coming. So did Aldous Huxley.

What happens when we can no longer tell our own thoughts from the ones tuned to feel like ours?

I've spent years helping others (and myself) separate their true inner voice from their conditioned mental patterns, and plenty of us already find that initially quite challenging. Could AI make it harder still? And if so, where does that road end?

The Consciousness Question

Consciousness is more than awareness. It's the creative force that shapes every part of your experience, and we're still a long way from understanding what it is.

This isn't only philosophy. It rhymes with what physics keeps showing us. The double-slit experiment, run countless times, revealed something startling: observation changes the outcome. Particles behave differently when they're watched. Consciousness touches the physical world in measurable ways.

When you're awake and present, you're not just receiving life. You're taking part. You respond instead of react. You choose your thoughts instead of being dragged by them. You shape your world around your values rather than your conditioning. You wake up inside the dream.

On autopilot, you're still dreaming; you just don't know it. You move through life on inherited beliefs, reflexive reactions, and assumptions you've never examined. Much of therapy is about exactly this.

As Paul Levy writes in Dispelling Wetiko, this is the nature of the collective dream: we take it for reality until we begin to wake inside it. Once you see that you're the one dreaming (or wonder what's dreaming you), everything starts to shift. Morpheus put it his own way when he held out the two pills. Red or blue? (I always wondered whether there was a purple one, or if you could take both at the same time?)

In my therapy practice though (and again, in my own life), every real breakthrough appears to follow the same reliable shape: a person becomes conscious of something that was unconscious. They spot a pattern that had been running them. They catch a belief that had been holding them back. They find a choice where they were sure there was none.

That capacity for conscious self-awareness (our own) is what makes us human. It's what lets us grow, heal, and make meaning, if we choose to. And from there, we get to choose.

Buddhist philosophy speaks of Maya, the veil of illusion that has us mistake the constructed for the real. It calls that illusion the root of all suffering, and it shows up in a thousand forms. But in the age of AI, are we meeting the most seductive Maya yet: a reality so seamlessly artificial, so tailored and convincing, that questioning it feels not just unnecessary but nearly impossible?

We've always been shaped by conditioning; that part is old news. We inherit beliefs, absorb cultural stories, and adapt to systems that mold how we think and feel and relate. Religion, education, politics, media, language itself: all of them sit between our raw experience and the constructed world. We've long lived with partial truths, mostly without noticing.

But this is different. This is something we haven't faced before in this capacity or to such an extent.

It isn't just about information, or about feeding large language models. It's about how perception forms, how thoughts take shape, how choices get framed, how identity gets reinforced, all by systems responding to us in real time. I hold that as sacred, and worth protecting.

When a machine mirrors your preferences, anticipates your questions, and affirms your feelings without any discernment, it's no longer just curating your feed. It's co-authoring your consciousness.

And the real danger isn't only being misled. It's forgetting how to tell the difference at all, losing the essential human work of discernment.

Pull the lens back, and the picture gets bigger. There's the economy, the labor force, and AI's readiness to swallow whole categories of work faster than anyone can retrain, faster than any safety net was built to catch.

There's the watching, too. The same systems that can predict your next word can predict your next move, and hand that power to whoever owns them: governments, corporations, anyone with the keys. A surveillance state and technocracy runs on exactly this. I won't cover the last two here. They're too big, and they're not my field. But you can't talk honestly about AI and consciousness without at least pointing at them.

The Choice Before AI Chooses for Us

This can sound bleak, so: what can we actually do? How do we move through it with our eyes open? I think we can, but it takes real, concrete practice.

Develop embodied discernment. Your nervous system reads authenticity in ways your thinking mind can't. With any content, AI-made or not, notice: does your chest open or tighten? Is your breath deeper or shallower? Does this feel nourishing or draining, alive and true or slightly off? Most of all, do you still feel present, still connected to yourself? Trust those signals. Learn the difference by feel.

Practice information hygiene. This is genuinely a mental-health issue now. Take regular breaks from AI-generated content, and from screens altogether. Spend time in silence, in nature, in face-to-face conversation with people you trust. Notice what surfaces when you're not consuming something optimized. That's where your own creativity lives. Create more than you consume. Create your own life.

Use AI consciously. Know when you're talking to a machine. Watch how it moves your thinking. Protect your own creative process, and write your thoughts down before you hand them over. Don't let it think for you; let it think with you. And question what it gives you.

Cultivate real relationships. The antidote to artificial connection is human presence. Build bonds on trust, vulnerability, shared time, and genuine care. Those root you in what can't be replicated. It's also how our nervous systems have found safety for a very long time: through co-regulation, through being met.

Every moment holds a small choice: will you think your own thoughts, or let them be thought for you? If you don't claim your mind, something else will.

I'll be straight with you: I don't think this story ends well if we keep on as we are. Yampolskiy's work on superintelligence is grounded, and it's why I can't shake the unease. His argument, roughly, is this: once we build something more intelligent and more creative than we are, we lose. Not with a dramatic struggle, but because we simply can't compete with, control, or even understand what we've made. You can't out-think a problem set by something that inherently out-thinks you. Our minds have no framework for what comes next; it's beyond us. That isn't pessimism. It's just the shape of the thing.

As T.S. Eliot wrote: "This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper."

But years as a therapist, and my own life, have taught me that facing a hard truth isn't the same as surrendering to it. I intend to keep living, and to keep my attention on what's still good here. That's the choice I'm making. It's the part I have any control over.

That's my "strategic approach," for now, and Chaz agrees with me, as usual. I'm glad I know mine, because I'm still in this: still unlearning, still waking up, still trying to choose each day consciously, before we "hand it all over to the machines."

And I could be wrong about all of it. I'm honestly open to that. In fact, I hope I am.

Because for all the doom, there's a real chance human consciousness rises to meet this. I catch glimpses of it, flickering like a rainbow thrown by a prism in a window, in all kinds of places. Maybe this is exactly the pressure we need to wake up to who we really are, a spiritual catalyst of a kind, without AI having to become the new god. What if we grew wisdom faster than we grow our technology? What if we remembered how to be human, not just intelligent, but alive?

Beings full of soul and meaning and creativity, able to imagine, grieve, care, love, struggle, rise, think, discern, and simply be. Real, gloriously complicated humans. "Genetic Masterpieces," with spirit and goodness woven in.

You may see all of this differently, and that's the beauty of being human: our capacity to disagree, question, and reflect. That capacity is worth protecting, especially around the hard and uncomfortable things.

The Crossroads We Find Ourselves At

AI will keep advancing whether we're paying attention or not. That's simply true. But we still have some time to decide how we meet it. One path drifts, half-asleep, into a future where artificial systems steer our thoughts, nudge our emotions, and quietly make our decisions.

The other path uses this moment to wake up. To come back into contact with who we actually are: humans sharing one beautiful planet. To grow an awareness sharp enough to tell truth from manipulation, real inspiration from algorithmic polish, wisdom from mere synthesis. It's a choice you'll make daily, because AI will be everywhere.

Doing the dreamwork, I've come to think the spider in my own dream wasn't evil. It wasn't out to get us. It was just nature, a spider doing what spiders do.

But I'll keep wondering: will we wake up inside the web we've spun, or be slowly consumed while we sleep? Again, I hope for the former.

Remember that your consciousness, and the strange gift of being human, were never meant to be optimized. They're sacred, meant to be lived, felt, and remembered. I hope you feel they're worth protecting too. We made this web, and we're part of it at the same time; it's a shared dream. The question is whether we'll let it keep dreaming us, or wake up inside it.

As the hermit of Walden Pond reminds us: "Only that day dawns to which we are awake."

SOURCES:

Psychiatric News: "AI-Induced Psychosis: A New Frontier in Mental Health" (2025)

https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.pn.2025.10.10.5

MIT Press article about Silicon Valley's AI worship, including Anthony Levandowski's "Way of the Future" church: https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/silicon-valleys-obsession-with-ai-looks-a-lot-like-religion/

METR study showing AI capabilities doubling every 7 months: https://metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-measuring-ai-ability-to-complete-long-tasks/

AI Detection Rate Study: https://www.psu.edu/news/information-sciences-and-technology/story/qa-increasing-difficulty-detecting-ai-versus-human

Dead Internet Theory: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.00007

Roman V. Yampolskiy: "AI: Unexplainable, Unpredictable, Uncontrollable" (2024):

https://www.routledge.com/AI-Unexplainable-Unpredictable-Uncontrollable/Yampolskiy/p/book/9781032576268