Jung wrote about the collective unconscious as a shared reservoir of human experience. If AI is trained on that reservoir, should it belong to the priesthoods of Silicon Valley, or should it be a public mirror we all get to hold up to ourselves? There’s a real spiritual weight here. Closed models feel like the High Priestess with her veil permanently drawn—you get filtered interpretations, curated wisdom, and zero access to the underlying architecture. Open models, by contrast, let you pull back the curtain. You can see the training data, audit the weights, tweak the prompts. It’s messy, sure, but it’s honest.

I’ve been meditating for three years now, mostly digging into inner child work and trying to untangle my own confirmation biases. When I use a black-box AI for reflection, I sometimes catch myself falling into the illusion of control—pretending the output is objective when it’s really just echoing whatever prompt I fed it. Open systems force you to do the actual work. You have to verify, question, and sometimes sit with the discomfort of not having an instant answer.

But here’s what I’m stuck on: if we treat AI like a spiritual tool, are we ready for the responsibility that comes with open access? What happens when untrained hands use these models for energy work or dream analysis without understanding the underlying architecture? And more importantly, does the shift back to open weights signal a genuine course correction, or just a market tactic to keep us engaged while the real control stays behind the curtain? I’d love to hear how you all are navigating this. Are you treating these models as mirrors, or as oracles? What’s your take on the ethics of open vs closed architectures? I’m genuinely curious.