AI, Magic and Enchantment

22 June 2025

Everyone seems to be talking about generative AI these days, at least in the circles I run in.[1] In my networks this is primarily a discourse of negativity, that AI is ruining academia as students use it as a means to cheat on their exams and to cheat themselves from learning, while bosses force it on staff even as it is of little practical value. This extends beyond academia. Accounts of the job market, teeming with artificial applications, gumming up the works of the allocation of employment, likewise present a dispiriting account. The role of AI in shaping our already cursed algorithmic social media through more annoying bots. The public adoption of AI as an agentic search engine, which it isn’t, and the accompanying insistence on ‘hallucinations’ and misinformation seems to be a real social problem.

Generative AI doesn’t have much appeal for me and, after playing about with the image generation in the early wave of DALL-E, I have avoided the stuff wholesale. But this does feel like a minority position, and one of the challenges for the social networks I am within is the sense of disempowerment as society, economy and government unite around a technology that is ultimately counterproductive. It is bizarre to see tech executives and key government decision-makers not only talking about how AI must be embraced as the future but also seeming to imbibe the hype – anthropomorphising a chatbot and according it with agency.

One of the things that struck me about the adoption of generative AI is the lack of curiosity from its users. For users, AI seems to be a way to automate away learning and research, framed as tedious wastes of time, where getting the answer is more important than finding it. For many critics, it is their curiosity and interest in information and learning that makes AI so unconvincing and unsatisfying. This is a difference in instrumentality but it seems to be indicative of something else.

I was then reminded of one of Arthur C. Clarke’s eponymous laws of technology. Namely that ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’.[2] This seemed to be clarifying for thinking about AI. There is a critical discourse on AI that focuses on its technical limitations, that it is has no repository of knowledge but is rather a sentence forming machine, designed to perform the impression of knowledge.[3] However, so many people who engage with AI seem utterly uninterested in how it actually operates and entirely credulous about the marketing and hype about generative AI genuinely being a form of intelligence.

The link there is that my experience with stage magic and magic shows is that at least half the experience is trying to figure out how the magic is being done. One looks for wire or mirrors or sleights of hand. This curiosity and disbelief in magic is what makes the successful trick enjoyable, that although one is expecting to be tricked, it is done in a way that surprises. We live in a society where we have spent a good decade or more leaning into the idea of ‘switching off your brain’ or ‘letting people enjoy things’, but it still seems surprising to see people encounter something that appears magical but with none of the curiosity to try to demystify it.

I thought then about the discourse about the end of the good days of the internet. This decries the contemporary state of the internet ecosystem and more specifically its culture compared to a nostalgic account of the late 1990s and early 2000s. I have bad memory in general and so vague recollections of this period, I was very young and not hyper-online, but I have some memory of an infrastructure structured less around the platforms that mark out contemporary culture.[4] Here there is more emphasis on creation, self-expression and the possibility of the internet before it was captured by capitalist exploitation, standardisation and crisis after crisis after crisis. There’s some link here between a period of techno-optimism that was premised on technological exploration and tinkering and the current moment of use of technology without familiarity or criticality.

These thoughts led me to the notion of ‘disenchantment’, which we commonly associate with Weber. The terminology and its Weberian context are worthy of engagement in their own right but there’s some ideas to play with here.[5] There’s a narrative of modernity as disenchantment, that we replace the belief in magic and religion with rationality and science. This functions dialectically as monotheism emerges as re-enchantment after the disenchantment of polytheism with the disenchantment of monotheism leading to science and disempowerment.

I’m not exactly sure where I’m going with this comparison, but it seems to drive at an epistemic cleavage in society that may also have some normative content.[6] The break between those who emphasise curiosity and knowledge against those who defer to the magic of it all. One of the interesting elements of this cleavage is that those who represent curiosity and to an extent science, are also those who for the longest were criticised for their relativism and postmodernism. The need to defend that which was once criticised, seems to be recurrent these days as the left defends free trade, the rule of law and prosecutions - defending liberalism against fascism to maintain a 'reasonable' agonal rival. There’s a temptation to jump to that idea of the critiques of relativism coming to home to roost, but it’s perhaps better characterised as the invocation of ideas without attempting mastery of their arts of application. I’m thinking here of conspiracists who ‘do their own research’. 

Is this a new enchantment in our disenchanted world? I think it's worth finishing this account of the conjuncture with a note about religion. There seems to be a wave of a new religiosity in society. This is visibly present in the far right movements, especially in the US, but also their nat con manifestations in the wider transnational network. Religion and conservatism in this weird form also seems to be resurgent in culture more broadly.[7] From the trad wives, to trad Caths, to country music, to comp het and normative gender roles, a constructed traditional and often religious conservatism keeps appearing.[8] This coincides with the AI epidemic and these don't seem entirely coincidental. AI art is the aesthetic both of the tech bro and the overcredulous evangelical. The reactionary return to prejudice is not legitimated through Burkean logic but through the appeals to blind faith in charismatic leaders and unthinking Id. Maybe thinking about magic helps understand this better than thinking about these as people being under a spell.

[1] I try to consistently use this terminology of ‘generative AI’ both to distinguish from the more practical adoptions of LLMs and ML and to focus on this as a limited technology rather than social revolution

[2] I had a whole phase as a young person of reading Clarke’s novels from the classic that is 2001 to the obsessiveness over space elevators

[3] I did want to write at one point about how this appeals to ‘knowledge’, conceived of by people who fetishise Oxbridge tutorials, management consulting and strategic leadership – but that’s not this post

[4] This often also gets associated with the age of the blogs, which I don’t think I was ever really aware of let alone involved in

[5] I found this article interesting and the idea of distinguishing between Entzauberung, Entmagisierung, Entsacralisierung, and Enttranszendentalisierung – not to mention Sekulärisierung. See also this.

[6] I’m happy to be corrected on my terminology

[7] This video essay was amusing on a manifestation in contemporary music

[8] I am inclined to make some comment on how the Marvel films seem to correspond to particular accounts of American identity and masculinity, which correspond to some of the views of key cast members, and also intersect with an aesthetic reliant on CGI, but I'm not really a cinephile and don't really want to comment too much on celebrity gossip.