People are using ChatGPT to improve their manifestation practices

Manifestation is the belief that you can create your own reality by directing your thoughts and intentions toward your desires. The concept began trending on social media during the pandemic — and TikTokers seem to have found a new way to spice up the practice.

Users share how AI has helped them improve their traditional manifestation practices such as visualizations, vision boards, positive affirmations, mantras, and reprogramming negative beliefs.

Chloe DeChelle, 32, works as an empowerment coach and teaches manifestation. She told Business Insider that she was looking for new ways to teach manifestation skills and techniques to “different types 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 books. The community inspired her to create personalized stories for her customers based on their aspirations — but she didn’t have the time to write one for every customer.

That’s why she turned to ChatGPT and now tells her clients to use a fill-in-the-blank prompt to help them with creative visualization.

“The more detailed you are, the better,” DeChelle said.

DeChelle said people have experienced the chatbot correctly guessing details about them, leading some to believe the AI was communicating with them spiritually. DeChelle said this could also be due to the 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 manifestation tool for creating vision boards and story prompts.

“For me, that was the first time I felt the feeling so strongly. It was so detailed,” Van Meurs said.

Van Meurs said that before using ChatGPT, her goals changed every few months. It became too time-consuming to manually rewrite the story every time her desires changed.

Another TikToker, 29-year-old Britta Stevenson, told BI that she uses ChatGPT during her daily hour-long meditation and journaling sessions. Stevenson uses the chatbot to provide on-demand help for a number of manifestation and therapy practices, including reprogramming limiting beliefs, which are opinions about your life or yourself that can block your ability to manifest your desires.

Stevenson said she asks ChatGPT to analyze her written visions and identify themes and obstacles in her writing. She then asks ChatGPT to help her reprogram her thinking patterns by giving her counterexamples to her fears. She said the practice has helped her overcome her fear of creating content.

Stevenson and other TikTok users call the chatbot their “best friend” or “mentor.” She said the cool thing about ChatGPT is that if you don’t like the advice it’s giving you, you can ask it to focus on a different outcome or tell it to change its tone.

Clinical psychologist and manifestation expert Anna Kress said AI could be an “incredible tool to enhance manifestation practices” and help people “break through psychological barriers.”

“I can imagine it could be very helpful 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 both ethical and mental health implications,” Kress said. “By focusing too much 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 for inner work and personal insight. For example, you can use ChatGPT to create journal questions, but you should reflect on your answers independently, she said.