The Mirror of Language

Through contact with the mirror world, we become something new. Your visual imagination may increase from practice with text-to-image models. Your writing style will change as you develop an intuition for surprise and repetition.

The art of prompting is pre-scientific. It deals with the imaginal, the subliminal, the “collective unconscious” of billions of minds speaking as one. It requires precision of language and intent, and it produces miracles. There is a word for such a practice: magic.

To be human is to self-transcend. The person who steps through the looking glass is never the same when they return.

Scrying is the art of divination, of extending perception through magical means. To scry, you need three things: a target, a means of obtaining information, and a way to interpret that information. Interpretation is often done through free-association, archetypal imagery, cold reading, or lookup tables.

Sympathy is the art of enchantment, of using analogies to change the world. The magician wants something to happen. They make a representation of it in some other action, then act it out in an altered state of consciousness. This creates a sympathetic link between the ritual and the desired effect.

In an image generation model, sympathy can be compelled through attribute modifiers. Adding words like “cyberpunk neon,” “digital art,” or even just “aesthetic” can imbue your image with new elements or re-imagine it in new mediums.

Sending is the art of evocation, of using names to command beings from our world or others. The magician implants an entity into the subconscious and empowers it with attention. They then direct it to some task. Its desire is only to complete the task, which is also its dissolution.

these models are not “intelligences.” People mistake them for entities with volition, even sentience. This is because of the anthropomorphic fallacy: people tend to think of other things as humans if you give them half an excuse. But it is also because of a linguistic mistake: we call them AI, “artificial intelligence.”

Language models are not being... See more

There is a specific uncanny nausea that comes when you begin to look at every image or paragraph, and wonder, “does this mean anything?” Not is it real. But does it have meaning, does it have intention? Is there an intelligence behind it, trying to communicate something to you, or is it a simulation?