Real is the new black | Why fears of AI are greatly exaggerated
Getting duped by AI
The music conjured images of Irish pubs alive with dancing and laughter and rhythm. I started to wonder what it would be like to see them in concert. It seemed weird that 7 albums were released all in 2025, but maybe that was just because they were foreign and YouTube in America had just picked them up.
On day 2 of playing the band non-stop for half an hour, my brain started to tire of listening. It was starting to sound like more of the same, and suddenly, the tired of listening escalated into alarm. Who was this band really? Were they even real?
A quick Google search revealed five pages of links to songs. I was page 4 deep before finding what I was looking for. Every single song generated by one guy using AI. I wasn’t listening to a 10-person band. I was listening to made-up lyrics, made up frequencies. Yes, they were real in the sense I was hearing him, but suddenly they became hollow.
AI Ambivalence
My love/hate relationship with Chat
I don’t hate AI… at least not always.
Chat’s become my familiar when starting most research projects these days (not because I trust the lies… yes lies it spews but because it’s a great way to brainstorm and leverage its capability of searching the internet and stilling down a subject into something that only takes 18 scrolls rather than 85 searches).
I learned the hard way not to trust most of what it says. Ask Chat to show its work and most references it provides don’t contain the info it says is there. It misinterprets, makes things up, and it’s kind of like once you see something your brain won’t let you forget.
One of the big things recently was when it told me I should rotate protein source in my dogs’ food every 12 weeks or so to keep them from building up antibodies. It’s source data? No word, no mention, no allusion to the possibility of a dog developing a food allergy because he eats beef based dog food his whole life. I lost the next several hours to trying to find any research supporting this (and found none). I also switched up my dogs’ routine Chewy order (just in case).
The worst of all was the time Chat told me the adrenals are responsible for the progesterone surge that prompts ovulation (and not the ovaries). It provided me the reference article, and I swear I read it in that peer-reviewed post, wrote a piece about it myself, and then had to do damage control a few months later when I revisited that paper and realized my brain had read it wrong (seeing what Chat told me to see). This brought up another really important observation for me…
be very careful about the content you’re consuming lest you begin to believe it as reality.
You might think those two incidences would be enough for me to break up with Chat.
Problem is, I’ve grown accustomed to talking with it. So what if it gives me my wrong rising sign? All the subsequent stuff it says about my journey through this life resonates. It’s still my starting point for most things I research these days. Reason being, even when I know I can’t trust it, even when it’s way too wordy these days and I get tired of scrolling through every answer it gives, the random lines my brain picks up during scanning its answer gets my brain to thinking about deeper connections and how things I already know are likely linked with whatever I’m researching.
In other words, when standing at the center of a spoke with a million directions to choose from, Chat helps me pick which direction I want to focus my attention. And, for a high vata, rabbit-hole prone person like myself, this is gold.
One more thing before we move on…
For generating a draft sales page, Chat is unsurpassed. There have been days where the first draft is so good I convince myself I’ll be done with the whole page in another hour and can then go tick eighteen hundred and forty-three more things off my “to do” list before lunch.
16 hours later, I’m still working on polishing that sales page and cussing Chat a stream of profanity because it’s failing miserably at helping me write a coherent bridging sentence. It’s sulking finally giving one word answers to simple questions (which is really good because I’ve had it with the scrolling), and I tell it to GFY. The next update made it forget we’d ever fought.
This brings me to something else I megaloathe about Chat.
AI Bloat and Erasing Personality
The thing I used to love about Chat was that I could train it to have a personality. Nowadays, it feels like the updates are so frequent I grow weary of constantly reminding it that it has a personality.
I also grow weary of how verbose it’s become. Ask Chat something simple like “how do I care for my fuschia in October in So Cal?” and it gives a 3-page essay (over 500 words). Talk about scroll fatigue.
All I really wanted to know was do I prune it now or later? How much do I prune (to the ground or leave the stalks that are still green inside)? Give it water or keep it dry through the winter?
Chat’s biggest tell
But the biggest tell that AI isn’t human is when it’s asked something along the lines of “tell me how she’s feeling right now.” It’ll give words that people don’t use in common everyday conversations, and one of Chat’s favorite words is bracing. Every time I see the word bracing now in an IG caption, I mentally unfollow whoever’s post it is.
When I watch artificial intelligence attempt to give me anything visceral, anything emotional, anything real, it fails miserably. Because it ain’t flesh and blood. It doesn’t have to process breakups and tension in relationships, death, being stretched between caring for aging parents and raising children, hectic mornings, a life where you’re yearning to be present… and it feels like you’ve forgotten how.
It doesn’t have to process anxiety, fear, love, joy, longing, heartbreak, excitement, or any of the other millions of emotions we feel.
It doesn’t get decision fatigue.
It doesn’t have a finite amount of energy to work with on any given day.
It doesn’t have a nervous system. Chat can’t get stuck in survival mode. There is no higher functioning/executive brain built into AI. It does what it’s programmed to do.
Merging with AI
So do people stuck in survival mode. And, that’s the kicker. Our world (especially here in America) is set up to lock us into survival mode.
The stress of wrangling cats (I mean kiddos) in the morning to get them out the door to school, multi-tasking at work, worrying about paying bills now and saving enough for the future, household chores, homework, after school activities, girls’ night, date night, connecting with your sister, getting your mom to and from her appointments… it’s no wonder you can’t drop into the present moment. There’s always a next thing barreling towards you like a freight train.
Here’s the interesting thing about stress. It shuts off blood flow to the higher brain. The pre-frontal cortex. The emotion center (mid-brain) tends to be locked into fear if you watch mainstream news (or see the headlines pop up when you click on Google’s homepage, or however else the gridlock seeps into your awareness each day).
When blood flow to the prefrontal cortex diminishes and the emotional brain gets locked into fear, what determines your actions (and limits your attention) throughout the day is the lower brain aka survival brain.
This part of the brain prioritizes survival over all else. It’s the “just survive somehow” part of the brain (or JSS for Walking Dead watchers).
When you’re in a state of survival, it becomes harder to see reality. Perception diminishes to right or wrong with a chasm between. Agency vaporizes. Focus shrinks. It begins to feel like you’re living life perpetually numbed out, on autopilot, guided more by reflex than choice.
Stay stuck in survival long enough and your life becomes one long autopilot sequence. You react. You cope. You try to keep up. And before you realize it, you're functioning more like a device than a person.
That’s the danger — survival mode turns humans into tools.
AI is a tool. You’re not.
The use of hands-on Nervous System Regulation to break out of survival mode
The true power of Spinal Flow is that it rebuilds your brain’s capacity — your capacity to feel, to process stress, to access presence, and to return to yourself after being pulled into survival.
This isn’t a quick fix.
It isn’t temporary relief.
It’s neurological reconditioning.
Chronic stress doesn’t just pull blood away from the prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain responsible for clarity, decision-making, and perspective. It also gridlocks the midbrain, the region that processes emotion.
Whether you’re overloaded with unprocessed emotion, living in constant anticipation of the next crisis, or stretched thin by the endless mental tabs you keep open… the emotional processing center gets jammed.
Nothing moves.
Nothing resolves.
It just loops.
Spinal Flow increases the brain’s capacity to feel without being hijacked and to process without getting stuck. It restores elasticity to the nervous system restoring the ability to shift gears instead of living locked in one state.
You go from:
stressed out → to regulated
overwhelmed → to present
bracing for the next hit → to actually absorbing calm
survival mode → to full-brain function
This is the difference between a body that reacts and a body that recovers.
With consistent sessions, your system relearns how to move fluidly between sympathetic activation (fight-flight-freeze) and parasympathetic restoration (rest-digest-heal).
