Artificial Imagination, and What We Lose
In the past, a fear would arise, and our brains would create its shape. It was unique to each of us and unsettled us in our own special way. That personalization made it powerful—it got into the grooves of you because you conjured the monster yourself. He was yours alone.
These visions, playing out inside our eyelids, are a fast track to primal emotion. It opens a straight line to your deepest physical emotions—a black tube, slippery and matte, with no grip. It’s immediate. That vanta black gives up nothing.
Now, we outsource our imagination.
Fear is broadcast on Fox News; Murdoch tells us what to fear. We all share the same anxieties from Channel 5, instead of the individual, unique fears that once lived at the base of our brains. What does this outsourcing of imagination do to us? Not just to our fears, but to our entire beings?
For imagination is beyond our fears – it also opens up our dreams. In our imagination is our capacity for more and better. It’s how we come up with new ideas and turn them from an eyelid vision into reality. Without imagination, where will ideas come from?
We are often afraid of what is contained within us. When we tap into our imaginations it can be frightening. “I thought that?” This is why we say we unleash our imaginations, because normally they’re held in check, muzzled like a fearsome dog who is scarpering to get free. We work hard as we grow up to learn to like the muzzle, to heel, to parade around the ring with our tails held high to get our treats. The unleashed dog will never get the treat from our masters, win the prize from the judges. We learn how to fit the shape society wants us to be.
We tame that beast and make him serve us, or so we think. But we are starving him. He isn’t tame, just weak from thirst and hunger, failure to thrive. We see the beast as something to be beaten, when really, we should be in communion with him. He isn’t a beast but our wild selves, the spark within that lights us, part of our animating force.
We’re duller now with that lack, having traded it for the big IMAX. Other people’s visions – their fears, their dreams – flicker in front of our eyes now. Imagination is what drove humanity—good and bad. It brought possibility, drove creation. Imagination drives us forward. Yet our culture treats imagination as worthless unless it’s monetized.
Our culture teaches that art and music are the playthings of children. Daydreaming is a waste of time is entirely normalized in our productivity-driven culture. Science knows that fields need to be fallow at times to be most productive long-term. Yet our culture has forgotten this, sees the fallow as weak and wasted. We too need to be fallow. We need to let our seeds settle, take root and grow. Let our imaginations take over, run wild, for that is where creation occurs.
We need imagination to solve problems. And boy, do we have problems.
The ability to imagine, to see things that aren’t there yet, to connect ideas that seem unrelated – this is where creation comes from. We need this everywhere, and even more so in today’s era of uncertainty. The old ways will not serve us now. We are in a seachange and need visionaries to see the way forward. I do not trust the rich to lead us. Their imagination ends in more zeroes in their bank account, more watches in a drawer, an even bigger bunker to hide out in.
Imagination has been packed away, like an heirloom quilt. Saved for the future, who will look at it years gone by and wonder why it’s here, what’s it for, who would have ever used this old thing?
This era of uncertainty must be met with imagination. I see Greta Thunberg as a well of imagination – she is able to imagine a different way, and take steps to create it. Somehow, the serpentine chute society sets us on to become Respectable Citizens shot her out, she found the exit ramp and elided imagination’s slaughterhouse. We need more people like this, who can think outside the boundaries that others have set for us. Boundaries that define our financial structures, our political world, our roles in society. To imagine different ways, new solutions.
Our light will dim without imagination. Daydreaming seems to be outsourced to scrolling, letting another’s images populate your mind instead of letting your own bubble up. This isn’t new; we had channel 48 streaming technicolor daydreams into our minds in decades past. But there were times when it all turned into dully lurid soap operas or news coverage. We had to turn inward to find something to amuse ourselves, explore the back stairways of our minds.
And yet, there still are people creating those images we scroll. Creation and imagination aren’t gone entirely. But unfortunately they are often yoked to stats, to money, to views and popularity. Is it becoming the purview of the few, those that have already staked out their claim on our eyeballs? Every movie franchise, every remake, every formulaic piece shuts off a light in our imaginations, like a Broadway marquee blinking out to darkness. We outsource to autotune, to AI. What will we lose?
More and different – that’s what we lose when we outsource imagination. Not just in what’s created, but within ourselves – we find more and different inside our own minds when we imagine.
The endless churn of ‘content’ to fill the media industry’s machine feels made to order. It passes through me, leaving no discernable trace behind. But when I find that piece that smacks me, makes me sit up and pay attention – in the good way, not the this is so bad I can’t stop watching it way – it leaves its mark on me. Its fingers reached in, wrapped themselves around part of me and every now and then give a squeeze, so I think about it, long after it’s over. Their act of creation leads me to imagining more and different, to my own imaginings and creation.
If we endlessly rely on AI to imagine for us, we won’t be able to do it on our own. Losing that would be devastating for people. We become the machine we built to free us up from the drudge work we wanted to escape, and now are only able to perform that work, as we no longer have the capacity to imagine new things.
Imagination gives us limitless expanse. If we can imagine it, it doesn’t mean we can accomplish it. But imagining things opens up our minds, lets us make connections that we may otherwise never make. Imagine not being able to imagine. Imagine losing that ability. Imagine the narrowness that we’re left with.
I wonder when we began to shrink down our imaginations, to be too afraid of the beast to let him run wild in the fields of our minds. Or when we just stopped noticing the fences that held him were getting smaller and smaller.
What we lose when we outsource imagination is our selves. What are we, but the magical world inside our heads? That makes us us, that’s what connects with other people. Not our accomplishments, our bank accounts, our clothes, our productivity levels. What are we without that? It’s like when someone you love dies and you see the body, and you can see that what made them Them is no longer there.
Where does that part of a person go, when they die? Where will our creativity go if we lose imagination? Imagination is something that you can cultivate, but if the environment isn’t welcoming, if there is no reason to build it, will it just die out of humanity? Imagine.