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AI chatbots seem to be taking on an unexpected role as a tool for manifestation.
Manifestation is the belief that you can create your own reality by focusing your thoughts and intentions on your desires. The concept started trending on social media during the pandemic — and TikTokers seem to have found a new way to spice up the practice.
Users are sharing how AI has helped them enhance their traditional manifestation practices, such as visualizations, vision boards, positive affirmations, mantras, and rewiring negative beliefs.
A 32-year-old Chloe DeChelle works as an empowerment coach who teaches manifestation. She told Business Insider she had been searching for new ways to teach manifestation skills and techniques to "different kinds of minds."
She said she first came up with the idea from "BookTok," a subsection of TikTok where people discuss books and sometimes create fanfiction around characters in them. The community inspired her to come up with personalized stories for her clients based on their aspirations — but she didn't have the time to write one out for each client.
So she turned to ChatGPT and now tells her clients to use a fill-in-the-blank prompt to help with creative visualization.
"The more detailed you get with it the better," DeChelle said.
DeChelle said people have experienced the chatbot guessing details about them correctly, leading some to believe that AI is spiritually interacting with them. DeChelle said this could also be due to AI connecting dots and probabilities based on data.
Lisa Van Meurs, a 26-year-old TikToker living in Barcelona, also started using ChatGPT as a manifesting tool for creating vision boards and story prompts.
"For me that was the first time I felt the feeling so strong. It was so detailed," Van Meurs said.
Van Meurs said that prior to using ChatGPT, her goals changed every couple of months, and it became too time-consuming for her to manually rewrite the story every time her desires shifted.
Another TikToker, 29-year-old Britta Stevenson, told BI she uses ChatGPT throughout her hourlong daily meditation and journaling sessions. Stevenson uses the chatbot to provide on-demand help for a number of manifestation and therapeutic practices, including rewiring limiting beliefs, which are opinions about your life or yourself that could be blocking your ability to manifest your desires.
Stevenson said she asks ChatGPT to analyze her written down visions and identify themes and roadblocks in her writing. Then, she asks ChatGPT to help her rewire her thinking patterns by giving her counterexamples to her fears. She said the practice helped her overcome her anxiety about creating content.
Stevenson and other users on TikTok refer to the chatbot as their "bestie" or "mentor." She said the nice part about ChatGPT is that if you don't like the advice it's giving you, you can ask it to focus on another output or tell it to change its tone.
Clinical psychologist and manifestation expert Anna Kress said AI can be an "incredible tool to enhance manifestation practices," and can help people "break through psychological barriers."
"I can see it being extremely useful for people who want to try manifestation practices but struggle with creativity or visualization," Kress said.
But she added that the tool comes with risks. Kress said some people share personal information about themselves or others without consent. Others have tried manifestation methods by cloning the voice of a romantic partner and having it say things they want to hear, she said.
"This type of practice has ethical implications as well as mental health ones," Kress said. "By overfocusing on trying to manifest a specific person, we can lose sight of our ethical boundaries and what it means to manifest healthy relationships."
Kress recommends using the tool as a supplement, rather than a replacement of inner work and personal insight. For example, you can use ChatGPT to create journal prompts but then you should reflect on your answers independently, she said.
