‘Very small and a bit flat?' Generative AI as miracle and magic trick

Abstract

This article addresses the question of the ‘magic of AI’ from two interrelated perspectives: first, as a form of belief in the seemingly magical or miraculous ability of AI to replicate human-like knowledge, intelligence and creativity; and second, as a kind of magic trick used by the tech companies to make users believe in AI's extraordinary powers. By reframing AI as both a system of belief and a ritualistic marketing practice, the article argues for a shift of focus away from abstract philosophical debates about AI's existential risks towards a more ethnographically grounded analysis of how such illusions of magic – of AI's intelligence and creativity – are produced and sustained in the first place. Drawing on an ethnographic case study of how text-to-image (TTI) AI models represent controversial historical events such as the 1984 Ethiopian famine, the article shows how AI systems work by recycling a narrow set of visual tropes in their training data that have very little to do with human notions of intelligence or creativity. Underpinning the popular discourse of AI as magic we can thus find an emerging system of power in which tech companies sell the ‘miracle’ version of AI, while users receive only the ‘magic trick’.