For his 95th book, wellness guru Deepak Chopra goes all in on AI

NEW YORK – Deepak Chopra – the Indian-American health guru, spiritual adviser to media maven Oprah Winfrey and founder of the wellness-focused Chopra Foundation – is going all in on artificial intelligence (AI).

His 95th book, Digital Dharma: How AI Can Elevate Spiritual Intelligence And Personal Well-being, was blurbed by OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, who is very spiritual, Chopra says. “He loves to meditate, so we became good friends.”

Speaking with Bloomberg via Zoom from New York, the 77-year-old calls the book “a big adventure”. “We’re taking spirituality, philosophy, religion, science and AI, and putting it all together.”

In June, Chopra launched Digital Deepak, what he calls his AI twin. Digital Deepak can answer questions on health and spirituality in English, Spanish, Hindi and Arabic.

The real Chopra has also signed up to voice-cloning start-up ElevenLabs – so now an AI version of him can read anything to you aloud, whether his own books or the Tripitaka.

He says that one of the ways Digital Deepak can be useful is by giving tips to help to manage stress.

“In my experience, it doesn’t matter what you do, stress overrides everything,” says Chopra, who says he has seen people with healthy diets who exercise often become ill because of chronic stress. “Unless we tackle stress, everything else becomes marginally effective.”

So I put a question to Digital Deepak – I told the AI I was stressed about a deadline – and it advised me to take deep breaths to calm my mind, break down the task into smaller parts and meditate.

The advice was similar, if somewhat obvious, to what the real Chopra told me when I asked him how to best manage stress. He advised breathing exercises and tools like yoga or going for walks outside.

Chopra adds that one of the benefits of AI – as opposed to just reading his books to get his takeaways on everything from stress to spirituality for yourself – is being able to communicate with audiences in their own language in real time.

He recalls a recent trip to Lima, Peru, where translation was often an issue.

“There used to be all this hassle, and now people were asking Digital Deepak questions in Spanish and getting the responses in Spanish,” he says. “It gives access to all my knowledge on personal well-being without us necessarily speaking the same language.”

He has further plans to integrate his AI twin with the fast-growing wearables market.

“If you’re wearing an Oura Ring or Apple Watch, it monitors things like your sleep patterns, and we can then personalise your well-being for you,” he says. He adds that the data is already there and just needs to be harnessed properly.

But no matter how advanced these new systems can seem, he says they are no match for the human experience.

“Your creativity will never be replaced by a machine. Because, after all, machines are algorithms, and creativity is fundamentally breaking the algorithm,” he says. “It just gives you the opportunity to harness your creativity with a broader knowledge base.” BLOOMBERG