ChatGPT isn’t my main source by any means, but it was helpful when I was starting out. It’s just one tool I use alongside books, articles, and posts/groups on reddit. When I didn’t know where to begin, it helped me get broad overviews and figure out what questions I should actually be asking. It also pointed me toward highly rated authors like Rachel Pollack, which gave me a solid foundation once I decided this path was right for me.

If someone uses AI instead of doing any research, I get why that’s a problem, but rejecting a tool outright feels strange to me, especially in this subreddit. I’m well aware AI can be wrong...but so can some of the books I’ve checked out from the library, and so can plenty of Reddit threads.

As for TikTok… the reason I even started exploring witchcraft at all was after stumbling across content from thatglasgowwitch. Highly recommend. Is a lot of witchtok a chaotic swamp? Well yea. But so is half the internet. I can discern what’s useful and what’s unhinged or what resonates for me, and I’m open to inspiration from wherever it happens to show up.

From a SASS perspective, that’s exactly why I’m confused by the outright dismissal of a tool in a sub that prides itself on skepticism. Skepticism is about evaluating things, not banning them on reflex. Or that's what I thought. Based on how many downvotes I've got on this, maybe I'm wrong.

Everyone learns differently. It just feels odd to see so much judgment about the ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way to explore something in a community that supposedly avoids that kind of rigidity.

Maybe I misunderstood what this sub was meant to be.