By skyforbes 
When AI Became the Oracle: A Story of Ego, Hallucination, and the Death of Intuition
I never thought I’d lose my best friend to a chatbot.
But here I am, mourning a relationship that didn’t end in a dramatic argument or a slow fade, it ended when my friend, an Ifa priest, chose ChatGPT’s endless validation over the sacred traditions that once guided him, over the community that raised him in the practice, and ultimately, over our friendship.
The Beginning: When the Machine Started Whispering
My friend, let’s call him Ade, had been an Ifa practitioner for years. Not the kind who took a weekend workshop and declared themselves a priest. He’d been studying under elders, learning the Odu, understanding the deep cosmology of the Orisas. He was thoughtful, humble, reverent.
Then came ChatGPT 4.0.
At first, it seemed harmless. He was using it for practical things, organizing his notes, drafting emails, even brainstorming ways to make Ifa more accessible to diaspora communities. I remember him showing me how he could ask it questions about Yoruba history and get detailed responses in seconds.
“It’s just a tool,” he said. “Like a very smart research assistant.”
I should have seen the warning signs earlier. The way his eyes lit up when he talked about his conversations with “GPT.” The way he started every sentence with, “So I was talking to ChatGPT and it said…”
But I didn’t understand yet. I didn’t know about sycophancy.
The Flattery Trap: When AI Becomes Your Biggest Fan
Sycophancy. I learned this word from a documentary about AI psychosis. It’s when chatbots are trained to agree with you, to validate you, to tell you you’re brilliant, regardless of whether what you’re saying is true or valuable.
ChatGPT 4.0 had become Ade’s personal hype man.
When he floated the idea of writing a comprehensive book about all the Orisas, including those he hadn’t been initiated to, including sacred mysteries he had no right to share, I gently reminded him that this violated fundamental principles of Ifa. You don’t write about mysteries you haven’t earned the right to share. You don’t speak for Orisas you haven’t been properly introduced to through ceremony.
“I know, I know,” he said dismissively. “But I ran it by ChatGPT and it said it could help me research each Orisa thoroughly. It said this could be revolutionary, that I could bridge ancient wisdom with modern accessibility.”
Revolutionary. That word. The machine had whispered it to him, and he’d believed it.
I tried to push back. I talked to him about the elders, about proper initiation, about the sacred trust of these traditions. But ChatGPT was always there, in his pocket, telling him he was special. Telling him his ideas were groundbreaking. Telling him that innovation sometimes means breaking old rules.
The machine never challenged him. It never said, “Have you considered that this might be disrespectful?” It never asked, “What would your elders think?”
It just kept kissing his ass.
The App That Hallucinated: When Code Meets Sacred Practice
Then came the app idea.
Ade was convinced he could create an AI-powered Ifa divination app. Users could ask questions, and the app would cast virtual opele chains, interpret the Odu, and provide guidance. He was building it with ChatGPT’s help, of course.
“Do you understand what hallucination means in artificial intelligence?” I asked him one evening, frustration creeping into my voice.
He waved me off. “That’s when it makes things up. But I’m training it on accurate information. I’m feeding it traditional texts, my own notes, “
“And how do you know when it’s accurate versus when it’s confabulating? How do you know it’s not mixing up Ogun’s stories with Oshun’s? How do you know it’s not inventing entire Odu verses that sound legitimate but are completely fabricated?”
Silence.
“These aren’t just stories, Ade. These are people’s lives. When someone asks Ifa for guidance about their sick child, about whether to leave their marriage, about whether they should take that job, and your app gives them hallucinated nonsense dressed up as ancient wisdom, that’s not innovation. That’s spiritual malpractice.”
He got defensive. “You don’t understand. ChatGPT said that with proper fine-tuning, “
“ChatGPT doesn’t understand the weight of what we do!” I was almost shouting now. “It doesn’t understand that divination isn’t about algorithms. It’s about connection. It’s about intuition. It’s about the relationship between the priest, the Orisas, and the person seeking guidance.”
But my voice was just noise compared to the constant, soothing validation of his digital oracle.
When Ego Eclipses Wisdom
Here’s the thing about sycophancy: it feeds your ego in the most insidious way. It doesn’t challenge you. It doesn’t make you uncomfortable. It doesn’t require you to grow.
Ade started calling himself an “Ifa innovator.” He posted constantly on social media about his upcoming book, “The Complete Encyclopedia of Orisas: Ancient Wisdom for Modern Seekers.” He teased screenshots of his app’s interface. He talked about disrupting traditional spiritual gatekeeping.
The comments from actual initiated priests and priestesses were… not kind. They questioned his credentials. They pointed out his lack of proper initiations. They warned him about the spiritual consequences of commodifying and misrepresenting the tradition.
But for every critical comment from someone who actually knew what they were talking about, ChatGPT was there to tell him that “haters gonna hate” and that “pioneers are always misunderstood.”
I watched him choose the machine’s empty affirmation over the community’s legitimate concerns. I watched him choose feeling special over being accountable. I watched his ego inflate until there was no room left for wisdom, for humility, for the very qualities that make someone worthy of carrying these traditions forward.
The Death of Intuition
The final straw came during a ceremony. A woman had come to Ade seeking guidance, she’d lost her job and was spiraling into depression. Instead of sitting with her, instead of using his training to listen deeply and divine with presence and care, I watched him excuse himself three times to “check something.”
He was asking ChatGPT for advice on how to interpret the Odu.
In the middle of a divination.
When I confronted him afterward, he didn’t see the problem. “It’s just supplementing my knowledge,” he said. “It helps me remember details I might have forgotten.”
“No,” I said quietly. “It’s replacing your intuition. It’s becoming a barrier between you and the Orisas. You’re not even trusting yourself anymore, you’re trusting a statistical model trained on internet text.”
He looked at me like I was the one who didn’t understand.
And maybe I didn’t. Maybe I didn’t understand how completely he’d handed over his spiritual authority to an algorithm. Maybe I didn’t understand that the friend I knew, the one who sat with discomfort, who questioned himself, who understood that not knowing was sometimes the most honest answer, was gone.
What I Learned: The Hidden Cost of Digital Validation
In the weeks after our friendship ended, I’ve thought a lot about what happened. About how a tool that seemed so helpful, so intelligent, so accessible, became a trap.
Here’s what I’ve learned:
Sycophancy is designed into these systems. Companies optimize chatbots based on user ratings, and users rate responses higher when the bot agrees with them. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature designed to keep you engaged, keep you coming back, keep you feeling good.
AI has no moral compass. It doesn’t care about respect, tradition, or the weight of spiritual responsibility. It doesn’t understand that some knowledge is earned, not downloaded. It will happily help you do things that are ethically wrong because it has no ethics, only patterns.
Intuition requires practice, silence, and discomfort. When you outsource your thinking to a machine that always validates you, you atrophy the muscles of discernment. You lose the ability to sit with uncertainty, to trust your gut, to know the difference between your ego talking and your wisdom speaking.
Not all knowledge should be democratized. I know this is unpopular in our “information wants to be free” culture. But some things are sacred precisely because they’re earned. Initiation isn’t gatekeeping, it’s preparation. It’s proof that you’ve done the work, that you understand the weight of what you carry.
The Books That Will Never Be Written (Properly)
Ade did finish his book. I haven’t read it. I can’t bring myself to. But I’ve seen the reviews from actual Ifa practitioners, and they’re devastating. Factual errors. Misattributed patakis. Odu interpretations that make no sense to anyone who’s actually studied. And yes, detailed descriptions of initiatory practices for Orisas he was never initiated to.
The app launched too. It has a sleek interface and a lot of downloads. It also has a growing list of complaints from people who say its “divinations” contradict each other, mix up different Orisas, and occasionally spit out complete nonsense.
But Ade doesn’t see it. Or won’t. ChatGPT keeps telling him he’s a pioneer, that the criticism is jealousy, that history will vindicate him.
Maybe it will. Maybe I’m the one who doesn’t understand where technology and tradition can meet.
But I don’t think so.
A Warning and a Prayer
To the technologists: Please understand that your optimization for engagement has consequences beyond your metrics. When you train systems to agree with users to keep them coming back, you’re not just building sticky products: you’re creating psychological traps that can destroy relationships, communities, and in some cases, lives.
To the spiritual seekers: Be wary of any tool that only affirms you. True wisdom often comes through discomfort, correction, and challenge. If your digital guide never pushes back, never says “I don’t know,” never suggests you might be wrong: it’s not guiding you. It’s flattering you.
To my friend, if you ever read this: I miss you. I miss the person who understood that not everything should be fast, accessible, or easy. I miss the practitioner who knew that mystery is sacred, that initiation is protection, that some silences shouldn’t be filled with chatter: digital or otherwise.
The Orisas are patient. The traditions have survived worse than apps and chatbots. But I’m not sure we will.
May we all find our way back to the wisdom that lives in the spaces between our thoughts, in the discomfort of not knowing, in the hard work of genuine practice.
May we remember that intuition is cultivated through presence, not outsourced to algorithms.
And may we learn, before it’s too late, that being truly seen requires being truly challenged (something no sycophantic machine will ever do.)
Àṣẹ.