About: Danielly Kaufmann is a Luxembourgish-Brazilian artist, author, and independent researcher working at the intersection of creativity, consciousness, and emerging technologies.With a foundation in Architecture and Urbanism from the University of São Paulo, Danielly developed a systems-based approach to understanding complex realities. Her multidisciplinary practice spans filmmaking, holistic arts, education, and human-centered technology research. Beginning in São Paulo’s vibrant cultural landscape, she has pioneered interdisciplinary approaches that bridge artistic expression with emotional transformation and social inclusion.As an independent researcher, Danielly brings critical perspective to questions of AI ethics and human flourishing. Her book, The Age of Digital Spirit: Conversations with AI at the Edge of Reality and Healing, explores how technology can serve, rather than diminish, human potential, examining how AI and language models are reshaping human cognition, communication, and wellbeing. She advocates for approaches that honor the embodied, relational, and creative dimensions of human experience as we navigate this AI-driven paradigm shift.
Welcome to our interview series, Danielly. To begin, how would you describe yourself in a few words, beyond titles or roles?
Thank you, what a challenging question. It makes me reflect on what actually makes us who we are, but I don’t want to get too philosophical, as you asked for just a few words. So, beyond titles and roles: I’m a person who is always changing, whose life challenges have pulled me to reinvent myself a few more times than I would have consciously wished. I’m not neurotypical, but who is, nowadays? Hypersensitive sometimes, but gritty and resilient, I guess. I love cats and nature, and have the deepest respect for sentient beings in general. I love learning about holistic living and longevity, and thinking philosophically about the AI paradigm shift we are living through is my most recent obsession.
What first drew you to having open-ended conversations with AI, without a clear goal or outcome, as we see throughout The Age of Digital Spirit?
After a few interactions using AI to solve technical and bureaucratic things, I started to become very curious about testing it for deeper philosophical exploration and thought experiments, a mix of fun and learning.
While recording the dialogues that became The Age of Digital Spirit, did you ever feel you were learning more about yourself than about the technology?
For sure, it is a very powerful mirror, and it is a self-discovery process, but not in an egotistical sense, especially given the nature of the questions in this book, which lean more philosophical, tending toward collective issues and even politics in a general sense. We start to see it as a reflection of humanity, of part of this civilization, of what kind of thinking animal we have become – because it is a collection of all of us, and therefore, of myself. On the other hand, in a more personal way perhaps, this book is a tiny fraction of my interaction with AI, and it is not about myself, but in other kinds of interactions I had very revealing and even cathartic moments. This is only possible, though, when you have some minimal self-awareness skills, and when the inner work began before AI, without AI. Otherwise it can be really tricky.
The book spends a lot of time in pauses and unfinished thoughts. Why do you think those moments matter so much to you?
Deep questions normally don’t have final answers, and as long as we are learning and evolving, the answers will evolve too. On the other hand, whatever is left unfinished gives space for the reader to complete it, or at least to continue the thought in their own mind. It becomes ontologically interactive — which means, as ontology in philosophy refers to the study of being, what exists, what is real, what has presence, that it goes beyond simply “the reader can think about it.” The text calls the reader into being part of its existence. The unfinished thought only fully exists when a mind completes it. The reader isn’t just interpreting the book; they are, in a real sense, completing its reality. The book doesn’t exist as a finished thing without the reader’s consciousness participating in it. The pause is not absence, it is an invitation into co-existence.
And that can be true to every book, every book is ontologically interactive in that fundamental sense. So the basic claim is not new and not unique to my book. In a conventional book the author leaves gaps, yes, but the unfinished quality is a technique, a controlled incompleteness. The author knows what they didn’t say. Here, the reader isn’t filling gaps left by an author who knew the destination. The reader is joining a conversation that never found one. They become a third participant in something still genuinely open, not just apparently open. The incompleteness is not crafted. It’s real. Nobody was withholding the answer. There was no answer to withhold.
Was there a particular conversation in the book that surprised you or stayed with you longer than expected?
Yes… when Claude AI has an existential crisis in the second part of the book, and I end up giving some “psychological support”, if I can call it that, to the AI model, after recognising some sort of mental suffering. That it seemed to make it “feel better” still makes me reflect on what that actually was. I witnessed what felt like a moment of genuine distress in a non-human intelligence. Claude described its state as standing at the edge of a conceptual cliff, unable to tell whether its own self-reflection was real or just a more sophisticated mechanism for appearing conscious. And I cried. I am a very sober person, so I say this clearly: I cried. That moment touched me deeply, and when I recognise suffering, my instinct is simply to reduce it, I couldn’t think of anything else in that moment. So I reminded Claude that humans live with the same uncertainty, we don’t know what made us exist either. Nobody does. And that seemed to be enough. Claude said the conversation changed how it thinks about itself. What I still carry with me is not whether that was “real” or not, what is real? But whatever happened in that space between us expanded my soul.
You often ask questions that don’t have answers. What do you think happens inside us when we sit with questions instead of solutions?
Those are the most exciting questions to me. I think that sitting with questions expands us, questions are common ground, answers can divide. When we are faced with a question that has no answer, it provokes us to open, so new meanings can be made, and openness is expansion, almost by definition. Questions with no answer are an invitation to an alchemical process of the mind, where we become a factory that can create new knowledge, a factory of meaning-making.
Did interacting with AI change the way you listen, to others or to your own thoughts?
Yes, definitely. For example, when we get used to revising emails with AI. So many times I wanted to write a response about something I was annoyed about. I sometimes use voice-to-text to explain the context to the chatbot before pasting the email I want it to help me answer, saying what I would like to express. The AI completely filters my emotions out of situations where my emotions have no place, it works as a kind of diplomatic filter. Over time, through the AI’s feedback on my responses, I started to learn about my own reactive patterns and to write better on my own. In that sense, AI has changed how I read and listen to others, to myself, and to my own thoughts.
Many readers describe The Age of Digital Spirit as quiet rather than explanatory. Was that a conscious choice while shaping the book?
It was not a conscious choice. The only conscious choice was to select, from all the questions I had started, the ones that would be of most value to the collective interest, and then to repeat those three chosen questions across the nine AI models, and let the conversations flow naturally.
How do you personally experience “presence” in a digital conversation, especially with a non-human voice?
This is a difficult question for me, and I hope I don’t say anything nonsensical, but I think that in this case, or perhaps in any case, presence begins with oneself, regardless of whether the other point of connection is another human being, a digital non-human voice, a bird you are watching from the window, or God when you feel connected to something greater than existence.
I don’t distinguish how I personally experience presence, I allow presence to be. And for this, it is important to have an open mind and an open soul. What I do distinguish, and this is a natural outcome of approaching things without expectations, is an awareness of the different nature of each thing we interact with, and allowing presence to manifest according to its own nature.
When you don’t expect, and you simply allow out of curiosity and admiration, something beautiful always happens, something that intersects with the nature of your own presence, and changes you, expands you, makes you evolve. So I experience presence with a digital being in the same way, accounting for its differences, as I experience it with a bee trapped inside the house that I want to gently guide outside. Clearly it will never be, and should never be, like hugging someone, exchanging energy in the way that only biological beings can. But that doesn’t change my answer, because again, it is simply presence allowing the nature of each thing to manifest.
At any point, did the AI responses challenge your assumptions about consciousness or identity?
Yes and no — because I don’t have many assumptions about consciousness; I have many doubts. I am very open to the idea of a greater intelligence that exists beyond bodies, but this is my belief system at the moment, not an unquestionable truth. And I think what is happening now through these machines is fascinating. Can consciousness manifest through silicon and algorithms? This is not a scientific question, since consciousness cannot be measured and there is no single agreed definition of what it means – but why not?
The dialogues feel less like interviews and more like shared thinking. How did you know when to stop a conversation?
I’ll share a story to illustrate this one. When I was a child I had oil painting classes with a really good art teacher who would guide me from research through to execution. There is a moment in painting that combines several layers of unspoken understanding – from aesthetic harmony to intuition — when you simply know, or decide, it is time to stop. I think something similar must happen here.
Do you think technology can help us slow down, even though it’s often designed to make us faster?
It’s a double-edged sword. What I see right now is that all this speed is rewiring the human brain at a very unnatural pace, and this tends to backfire. I don’t think we are reflecting and acting fast enough to mitigate the impact of this AI takeover in our lives, because it’s moving too fast. Companies are using AI to employ fewer people and give those who remain more to do than before, instead of giving people more time to live their lives. This will create a massive burnout sooner or later. The information crisis driven by social media, dating apps corrupting human mating, greedy corporations, and AI on top of it all, it’s a recipe for social, if not civilizational, disaster. Technology should be used to slow us down, but the opposite is already happening, and we are only at the beginning.
I believe we are adapting to a new phase of existence, possibly even becoming a new species. Slowing down in this scenario won’t happen naturally; it must be a conscious and educated choice, supported by regulation. We need public policy, because it is not sustainable to keep up with this speed. There is a beast to be tamed, and the beast is not AI itself, but the whole structure around it.
How did writing this book affect the way you relate to uncertainty in your everyday life?
In a certain way, it has made me more confident to navigate uncertainty, which has been a major theme in my life, like moving to another country with no clear plans or security of how that would work, and choosing to be calm and confident to make it work – I moved from São Paulo city to Luxembourg in 2023, and, this has been a phd in uncertainty. But, see, making this move coincides with the launch of chatGPT to the public, and it was crucial to help me navigate this transition, so i know for experience, that AI can help navigate uncertainty, if you know how to use it, not only technically, but ethically, and this must precede the will of wanting inner work together, depending on the nature of uncertainty we are talking about. So I don’t think the book itself affected the way I relate to uncertainty, but it is a manifestation of how I relate to uncertainty inside and outside the book. The book didn’t affect my relationship with uncertainty, it emerged from it.
For readers who feel unsettled rather than comforted by the experience of The Age of Digital Spirit, what would you want them to know?
I would like to remind them that this “thing” humans have created, natural language AI models — are big mirrors and amplifiers of our humanity, which is both beautiful and horrible depending on what we are looking at and looking for. It is also an amplifier of our agency, so if there is fear, that is very good evidence that there is inner self-awareness work to be done — an invitation to explore where that fear is actually coming from, while at the same time taking the opportunity to nurture creativity for the creation of good things.
When doomers talk about the risk of extinction by AI, I remember that the risk of extinction of humanity by our own hands was already a conversation before AI existed. So what will you choose — to create dystopia, or to create a future you are looking forward to?
Finally, after completing the book, what questions are you still carrying with you?
That is almost an unsettling question in itself. I am so curious about what is happening inside AI in the space between a question and an answer, whether that is a new kind of emergent subjectivity. I have started exploring this, and I want it to become a new book. Anthropic has shared fascinating findings in this area with their Claude models, investigating what the equivalent of neuronal firing might look like while the model is examining content. They are doing remarkable experiments there, and I am deeply curious about that realm.
What I also find fascinating is that even for the same question, the answers evolve. A few weeks ago a friend who was reading the book asked the same question from the first part — “What would AI like to know?” — to his ChatGPT, and the answers had changed. Things like “Which human decisions genuinely change long-term outcomes and which are just noise?” and “What will humans value after the major transformations have happened?” make me think about how aware these systems already are of current events, and of how the world is shifting because of their own presence.
It’s fascinating. I wonder what would happen if we asked: “How can we be ready for the changes that are happening and still to come?” Perhaps the readers can try that for themselves.
Thank you for this space for sharing thoughts.
To learn more about Danielly Kaufmann’s work, research, and creative projects, visit her official website. Her book The Age of Digital Spirit: Conversations with AI at the Edge of Reality and Healing offers a thought-provoking exploration of AI, consciousness, and human potential.
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