Patch #8: AI dream machines, exponential communication, and magic realism for all
John Henry Fuseli, “The Shepherd’s Dream” via Wikimedia Commons
What if we were ten times better at communicating with each other? For all of our recent advancements in communications technology — all the bandwidth and reach and raw compute at our fingertips — expressing ourselves remains difficult to say the least. We have untold ways to connect, but the quality of our communications has, if anything, deteriorated. As someone who tries to hold on to a writing practice, it can be a little humbling to read through the letters of minor 19th century clerks or, say, inconsequential 18th century courtiers and realize they not only produced reams of daily correspondence, but could write circles around me with both hands tucked in the pockets of their waistcoats (or petticoats). With new AI super-tools promising to revolutionize expression, is it possible that our ability to communicate — visually, verbally, or other — might finally improve?
While many jump to the idea that we could create movies, novels, stories, high school english essays, or code, I’ve been thinking a lot about the ability to narrate dreams. Why dreams? As Carl Jung wrote in Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, “Nights through dreams tell the myths forgotten by the day.” Jung’s idea that dreams show reality as it really is has always intrigued me, but capturing and communicating this reality remains a challenge. Imagine a world where we could more easily communicate and package our dreamscapes. For me, it would look something like the following:
I wake up from an especially visceral dream, the kind that feels so real it takes a a few beats to transition back to reality. Before I can forget the dream, I speak every detail of it into the room, where it’s recorded by my digital personal assistant. Here’s what I say:
I was participating in a series of competitions on elementary school stages, but I was an adult, and the rules of the competition weren’t clear. There was a host in a tweed jacket sweating in the spotlight. The lights flashed on the lenses of his glasses and on the pate of his bald head. He had a stack of index cards, and he read each prompt with practiced gravity, but it was never clear how you were supposed to respond. The host said things like, ‘The consideration is meant to suggest a physical location, but watch out for traps.’
We were all up there on the stage behind tables, arranged like high school debate teams, and the whole thing felt like it was in a gym in Indiana, but from an earlier time…the late seventies, maybe. And we were supposed to confer with our partners and hit a large red buzzer when we had the answer. My partner on the stage was Dawn…I’ve forgotten her last name…from elementary school. The thing I remember most about her was she made an interactive science fair project about corn in the fourth grade. You could hit a button and hear her singing songs she’d written about corn and recorded on the tapes. One memorable line: corn, corn, it’s so good for you and me. Even though she still had braids, Dawn was about ten years older than the last time I saw her. We were clearly an established team. People had homemade banners that said things like: Dawn and David Forever!
Everyone in the audience watched us, rapt with attention, waiting for our answer. No one was even talking; they clenched their fists and closed their eyes, trembling with anticipation. But why? The gravity of it…it felt like they were going to give the winners a billion dollars and execute the losers, but the consequences of winning or losing were never explicitly stated. The moments ticked by, but the prompt never made any sense.
Did I lose you? I did my best, but lord knows writing is an imperfect medium when it comes to narrating the content of our dreams, especially if the dreams are real ones. Bad as it is, it’s still a lot better than the torturous process of narrating our dreams in conversation. While our own dreams may be interesting to us — and maybe those we love most — the dreams of most others are, forgive me past party-goers I’ve encountered, interminable trials to endure.
The problem with these tellings, my own included, is that there’s neither narrative logic nor rules to provide any sort of structure. It all just lapses into surrealist nonsense: then I’m on the beach, then I’m in a hallway, then I’m drinking tea with a grizzly bear in Stockholm. Only in the hands of the masters can the stuff of dreams turn into stories that earn our empathy and pathos. I’m thinking of the loss I felt the first time I heard Caliban say that when he waked, he “cried to dream again.”
But what if it could be different? What if we could condense and shape the visuals and vignettes into powerful snapshots of our respective realities so that we could not only find a better map to our own inner lives, but those we love and collaborate with? What if I could not only narrate my dream to my digital personal assistant, but instruct it to turn it into a two-minute animated short in the style of Miyazaki, or perhaps a photo-realistic trailer of a movie set in the suburban wasteland of the 1979 film Over The Edge? What if I could then share and tweak and collage and shape these disparate parts into narratives and expressions of self? In such a world, it’s tempting to think we might all get better at communicating reality as it really is.
There’s an insanely talented designer I used to work with at IDEO named Jerry O’Leary. Jerry could take post-it notes, rough sketches, and a few snippets of description and, like an alchemist, turn this half-baked drivel into photo-realistic, 3d renderings that dripped with the textured solidity of the real.
Recently, I’ve been following along on Instagram as Jerry combines his deep design chops with additional horsepower from Midjourney, an AI-powered image generator. It’s fascinating to see what a master like Jerry can do with these tools, and I’ve been watching as he makes some of his favorite cars “off-roady,” conjures sneakers in minutes, or, entertainingly, imagines a series of vignettes about stormtroopers in “mundane locations outside of the Star Wars Universe.” Among other tableaus, we see these troopers swimming in pools, visiting family in England, and having sad drinks in lonely, neon-soaked night clubs.
Images courtesy of Jerry O’Leary on Instagram
Jerry has long had the ability make ideas real. What’s different now is the speed with which he’s able iterate and refine. The emphasis moves from the raw technical skill of commanding the software to the ability to narrate and imagine (which Jerry also possesses in spades, of course). While I’ve dialed up the fun Jerry’s having on his Instagram, he told me he’s also using Midjourney it to generate abstract art and design variations for a product. As he puts it, “It’s like having a very dumb but super-talented friend visualizing whatever dumb idea that comes across your mind.”
So if this is what we gain from these tools, it’s worth asking what we might lose. A twitter thread from artist and writer Molly Crabapple attacks the “anti-human logic” of those championing the potential of AI.
Crabapple’s argument is an ethical one, of course, but it’s also about the direct relationship between the act of making and the quality and uniqueness of one’s output. Along similar lines, this essay by Kevin Buist speaks to the relationship between creator and viewer: “When we look at AI images, we’re unable to match our subjectivity as viewers with the artist’s subjectivity as a creator. Instead of a particular human experience, we’re shown only averages.”
This debate is everywhere right now. These tools are still in in their relative infancy, and there are extensive ethical and critical conversations to be had about what they mean — not only to art and commerce, but to society at large. We won’t resolve it here. What I started this essay about, however, was a question as to whether these tools might enable better communication generally, and — putting the grand considerations of art, commerce, and society momentarily aside — I do see new possibilities emerging.
In trying to reconcile the promise and perils of these new tools, it’s telling how often one comes across creators, enthusiasts, and casual experimenters using the word “magic” as a descriptor. For example, in his trippy, maximalist video on the potential of generative AI art, futurist Jason Silva makes multiple references to magic, including his memorable statement that in this new world “words become incantations.”
On parallel lines, I’ve been thinking about the literary genre of magic realism, which David Lodge defines as “when marvelous and impossible events occur in what otherwise purports to be a realistic narrative.” When done well, magic realism proves a more efficient route to Elizabeth Bishop’s timeless cri de coure, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” In magic realism, the familiar trappings of reality provide narrative tension, allowing us a more immersive infrastructure for stories to find their footing. An angel falls into a courtyard; Gregor Sampson wakes up as an ungeheueren ungeziefer; but the world around them remains recognizable. Suddenly, something new is revealed about the felt experience of reality in spaces where straight truths can sometimes come up short.
Perhaps we’re entering an age when more of us can employ these tools to find slant truths — to go spelunking in the deepest caverns of our imaginations and weave what we find into realistic narratives to entertain and communicate. As with my former colleague Jerry, craft doesn’t disappear, but the emphasis shifts to the iteration, selection, and piecing together of elements. For those of us trying to improve our ability to communicate with others, there is potential for far greater access to the forgotten myths of our inner worlds, as well as greater ability to render them instantly. We’re suddenly invited to experiment with multiple ways of communicating an idea, to marry the fantastical and the familiar, and build a new kind of narrative infrastructure that democratizes our deepest truths.
It’s not just dreams, of course. Any aspect of our inner lives that we can narrate can potentially be delivered in a more slanted and accessible form. For those with storytelling mastery, the potential is practically limitless. If we think through the logical implications of this, it isn’t long before we get to an exponential communication revolution. Should it happen, the inner lives of others will no longer be a foreign territory you hear about in snatches of conversation. You’ll actually go there, traverse through dreamscapes, and experience inner monologues of feeling, despair, and hope in the shortest and most engaging form for the task. You’ll understand, with far greater precision, what it is to be someone other than yourself.
This week’s recommendations:
Reading: Stay True: A Memoir, by Hua Hsu
Listening: Protector, by Aoife Nessa Frances
Music credits for article audio:
Opening Theme: “Friendly Evil Gangsta Synth Hip Hop” by mesostic via Wikimedia Commons
Dream Music: “Dream Fade” by Joseph El-Khouri via Wikimedia Commons.
Closing Theme: “Hopes” by Kevin MacLeod via Wikimedia Commons