Dreams, AI and Belief Modification

[shut pollen]

I have noticed that AI generated video has had an odd quality that I want to describe as dreamlike. Some examples are too uncanny and don't quite achieve this quality. This clip here is an example of one which achieves the dreamlike quality.

https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxRi-6BpMVGf0kR8MaHEnPNenTPd70JCAV?si=4aDkufbEj6HrMwSD

A 2009 article presenting the results of 6 studies on dreams found that dreams can affect people's judgement and behavior.

(https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2009/02/dreaming-behavior)

Dr. Vervaeke has spoken on the effects of profound experiences under the influence of hallucinogens and other altered states, with subjects reporting these experiences as being more real than their baseline lived experience.

There seems to be some common mechanism in all of this which is able to bypass our epistemic filtering and modify some of our deep priors. I think that AI generated content could possibly also generate this quality and thereby (by design or by accident) modify deep priors using this same channel or pathway.

I would be very interested to hear others' thoughts on this.

[shut pollen]

One additional helpful term: epistemic vulnerability.

John has used this term in the past and again in his recent discussion with Tom Bilyeu which brought this back to my awareness.

https://youtu.be/uXKihth7wo4?t=3945&si=yHjhZ46g-seg7WLy

[wintry wing]

yea i think surrealism and even comedy can bypass our epistemic defenses. Comedy is often presented as "not serious" and therefore not threatening. Surrealism in contrast shows up as "not real". Both opens our mind to the "weird" and that which does not fit into our clean, coherent worldview. Perhaps ai can be utilized to help us embrace the weird and absurd. It can also be utilized for deception and opening us up to bullshit.

[tidal pelican]

I would put it the other way around. Dreams and the dreamlike qualities of AI content seem to be the result of trained deep priors running off in the absence of a higher order supervisory process.

That is, dreams appear when consciousness is shut off or the supervised training of a model is over but dreams are not the cause of sleep.