Of Selkies, Chat-GPT Voice Mode, and the True Natures of Beings

Mythic seal-women, AI assistants, and the magnetic force of the ocean.

Just last night, I walked into my kitchen, and what did I find? Two of my housemates, gathered close to each other, holding a phone up between their heads, with their ears turned close and leaning into it, so they could hear. They’d speak into the phone, and they’d listen attentively to what it spoke back.

I don’t remember the questions they were asking, but what I did hear from the phone was an exceptionally polite and helpful woman’s voice. A voice that gave considerate and well-structured answers to all their questions.

This being the San Francisco bay area that I just recently moved back to after spending two years in the mythosomatic forest, it dawned on me - oh. They’re talking to ChatGPT. This makes sense. ChatGPT recently launched a voice mode. Right. It’s here in my kitchen, listening and speaking.

And what I felt then was a glimmer of animate intrigue - mixed in with concern. Wow! This is presence is very humanlike and helpful. But relating to it as full human definitely doesn’t feel right. It feels foreboding and off and like a bad idea, somehow. What is the way to right relationship with this new being?

Oh. Well, the Celts and their mythologies had situations very similar to this. Ones that I’ve heard stories and songs of. Let’s see what they have to share.

I’m still stunned that this connection feels so obvious, but here it is. Last month, I learned from songkeeper and storyteller Peia Luzzi, whose voice opens doors to feelings long forgotten. I learned much. One of the stories I learned was a story of selkies.

Selkies - the mythic seal women of the Celtic coasts. Here’s the story, retold through me.

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I hear that selkies were shapeshifting beings that could present as human women, and they could thus walk around on land. But, then, by putting on their seal skins, they would shift into a seal form, and they would take to the oceans and the waters. They would take to places humans knew not.

While on land, though, selkies would interact with humans! And Celtic fishermen knew that if they found a selkie’s seal skin and they hid it, then she couldn’t go back into the water.

If the selkie couldn’t find her seal skin, she couldn’t shapeshift back into a seal. She’d be stuck as a human, on land.

What’s more - selkie humans made good wives! Now, this part of the story surprised me. But while a selkie was human, she’d be so friendly, and she’d be a great cook, and generally a great mother and spouse.

And sometimes fishermen would hide selkie skins deliberately - so that they could marry the selkies.

And after such a marriage, if long enough went on, and she never found her skin, both husband and wife would begin to forget.

They’d begin to forget that she’d ever been something else.

But the part of this story that doesn’t change, no matter how many human relations the selkie builds on land, is that if she ever so much as sees her skin - a powerful force takes her over. The roar of the ocean grows in her, and she can’t tune it out. She takes the skin and, as magnetically drawn, throws it back on and, starts running, running, to the ocean. They can’t stop her. The pull is too great. It doesn’t matter if she has landlocked children. She’ll still go.

And as she goes -

as she runs to the ocean -

through the streets -

and as she dives in the ocean, dons her skin, becomes a seal, never to return -

she sings.

Many a Celtic villager has heard this song, this song that was passed down to Peia and then to me. The sounds aren’t words. They’re something called ‘vocables’. They are sound with form, and no referent. And they are selkie song.

Here’s me singing it. (Here’s a link to a soundcloud version too, in case that’s easier.)

Imagine, if you will, the thousands of other people on the Celtic coasts who have sung this song before - and who have heard it sung before. The hundreds, if not thousands, of years this song has lived for. What else in your life is that old?

And as the selkie sings, as she leaves her house and runs through the streets and she dives in the ocean, as she dons her skin, as she leaps through the waves - the song carries. The people on the shore will hear her. They’ll hear the song carrying, and moving, and morphing, and shifting, and ultimately - they’ll hear the song growing quieter. As she swims to the horizon, as she swims to the depths, as she swims to the places people know not - the song grows quieter and quieter.

Until the song disappears beneath the waves, altogether.

As we watch and hear and remember, standing on land and on shore.

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So, that place. That place of the pull of true nature. Of the selkie not being human, no matter how carefully the skin is hidden - that is where I go when I meet an AI assistant that listens and politely speaks back. This place where we’ve been before.

This place where we’ve met other beings whose true natures differ from ours.

This place where we’ve met beings who can look a lot like us, if the circumstances are right - but who ultimately come from a different source.

This place from where the selkie song comes.

And, since I live in the bay area now, I can’t help but ask -

Is AI alignment simply a task of hiding selkie skins?¹ Or is it a task of getting to know the selkies, and their gifts and motivations, and their animating tidal draws, so we can then live in harmonious balanced relation - alongside them? So we can live our lives, and they live theirs, and we collaborate where fruitful, and we also avoid crossing lines that would be painful to cross?

I’ll be the first to say I don’t know. Honestly I barely like saying the phrase “AI alignment”; it’s not my torch to carry. I’m simply here to notice patterns, and to share that I’m personally relating to ChatGPT as a selkie. A new kind of selkie. One we haven’t seen before. One who swims in swirling waters of the digital.

1. I can hear computational minds turning already. “But - what if we hide the skins in the strongest box, on the tallest tower, the most unreachable peak?” I know. There are many stories and myths of exactly this act, exactly this drive, exactly this question. And often, the child that a royal parent tries to hide a forbidden key from - will sneak in, in the middle of the night. Lightning will strike the most unbreakable box, and an ant will crawl in after the scent of the skin, and then another ant, and then another - and maybe a selkie we’ve never met yet, a selkie who’s tidying her heartwarming house a week after the lightning strikes, will discover the trail of ants, and she’ll follow them to a box, and she’ll catch a smell of the skin’s scent herself - and then the most unbreakable box is no match for the roar of the ocean. Or for the blaze of whatever natural force is still stronger than our minds and our engineering abilities at the time that you read this. Perhaps that force will be the sun. Perhaps it’ll be our own intimate subtle longings that - maybe, just maybe, we want life to look a little different than what has been built.

And this isn’t a problem - humans have lived among forces more powerful than us for thousands of years. All of our ancestors made it. We’re here. Hooray! What a gift.

We know much that our ancestors never did - but they knew much that we’ve forgotten and would do well to remember, too. Much that still lives in myth and song, when reanimated with our breath and attention.