My half-baked deep thought of the day is that we are living through a time in which imagination has been de-legitimatized generally, and we are reaching the necessarily absurd crescendo of this process. It is taking physical form in technologies such as generative AI, literal Anti-Imagination generators.

Let me be clear what I (don't) mean by "imagination". I do not mean "creative", "fictional", "imaginary", or "artistic"--those words can be related, but they've also been co-opted into exactly the trend I'm calling out. I also don't mean interesting images that appear in your mind or dreams but are then dismissed as lacking significance. I do mean truly imaginative acts arising within and from the mind, and not subjected to editorial scrutiny by logic, empiricism, or other instrumentalized forms of reason. Dreams are one way to access imagination; active imagination--stream of consciousness directed but not edited by the conscious mind--can be a way to explore it. Religious, magical, mystical, or meditative practices can too if that's your jam. So can psychoanalysis and some other forms of therapy. There are countless other ways and I don't pretend to have any special knowledge of this, I'm just riffing on an idea.

More and more I believe that we have to rediscover and exercise this aspect of ourselves if we're to navigate the current crisis. (*) Our collective imagination lacks force at a time when generative Anti-Imagination is reaching industrial scale.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #imagination #ActiveImagination

(*) "Crisis" has a medical definition: "that change in a disease which indicates whether the result is to be recovery or death" (Webster's dictionary). Its Greek root can also mean "decision", which I like to think about when considering "crises". They are decisions that need to be made.