I’ve been having a lot of fun lately, watching AI generated videos based on pre-existing material. If you are not familiar with the “steamed hams” meme, here’s the original video:

and this is a meme version (one of the hundreds of versions being produced every year) of the same video, but reworked with AI:

One thing that struck me about it was how incredibly similar this video’s internal logic (or lack of it) is to the logic of dreams, especially of weird dreams. Everything flows into everything else, hanging together with it by thin threads of association.¹

Notice, for instance, how the two characters, Skinner and Superintendent Chalmers, start dancing a romantic dance out of the blue just because the AI interprets the two characters getting close to each other as them engaging in romantic behavior, in spite of the fact that one of them is actually rather pissed at the other in the actual scene, and the other actually would rather avoid being in his presence.

This reminds me of how clearly the tone of dreams seems to shift flowingly from fun to scary to dramatic, to fun again, to romantic and so on, based on cues that the brain interprets much more loosely than when governing our waking consciousness. As an example, I recently dreamt I was visiting an old friend back in Italy, and the tone of the dream was cheerful and whimsical. Then, my friend taps on my shoulder from behind, and this must have reminded my brain of some horror movie I watched, because upon turning, my friend’s face turned into a demonic one and I was jumpscared awake.

Interestingly, what AI seems to be lacking, at least at this point in time, is the faculty of judgment, which is exactly what we also lack when dreaming or inebriated.

What I’m saying doesn’t really have any direct magical application. Technically, from a purely magical standpoint, the ability to let the consciousness flow in a dreamlike state is only one of the first levels to be achieved,² as visionary work deals not only with a rigorous sculpting of the inner reality but also with the contacting of beings on different planes, which does require judgment (and sound judgment, possibly). On the other hand, the free flow of association, while it does have its artistic, psychological and even spiritual uses, is not immediately helpful in magic. In fact, it can lead to self-deception.

Still, I am left wondering if further progress can push AI in the same direction our consciousness moves toward in visionary work. It is a stretch, of course. After all, even the term ‘intelligence’ is used rather loosely when describing AI at this point. But what we thought was impossible yesterday is coming true today, so it is really hard to discern what AI will and won’t be able to achieve, and whether some kind of computer-generated magic or computer-fueled magic is possible.

MQS

Footnotes

1. It reminded me of what Paul Foster Case says about how the subconscious works, when describing his own version of the High Priestess tarot card ↩︎
2. Which is why so many self-styled visionaries who used or use drugs to fuel their trips are usually rather shallow, when the consistency of their vision is probed (and we should always probe the consistency of our visions) ↩︎