Welcome to Hallucinatory Realism

A new aesthetic

Welcome to this update from New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.

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This is now Sam Altman’s profile picture on X:

I’m guessing the backstory is already familiar to you.

But just in case: last week OpenAI integrated a new image generator into its 4o model, available inside ChatGPT. Pretty soon mania had broken out, centred around the ability of the model to recreate any image in the iconic hand-drawn style of Hayao Miyazaki and his Studio Ghibli.

Cue a tsunami of faux-Ghibli:

And cue, also, a wave of outrage. These images, said critics, constitute a form of cultural theft.

They’re also, they said, an insult to Miyazaki, a traditionalist who believes in the sacred nature of art. There’s even a video of him, apparently made some years ago, sternly rebuking a group of junior animators who’d spun up an earlier AI that could half-imitate the Ghibli style: ‘I am utterly disgusted…I strongly feel this is an insult to life itself.’

I’m sympathetic to these critics. It can’t be right that an AI model can hoover up a living creator’s work — work still under copyright — as training material, and then turn out endless slop-versions of that work. All without permission, or payment. Miyazaki’s words make it clear what he’d think of what’s happened.

But my principal thought lies elsewhere. The explosion of faux-Ghibli is another instance of a phenomenon — let’s call it a new aesthetic — that I’ve been tracking for a while now. I call it hallucinatory realism.

Hallucinatory realism is characterised by the wild, almost deranged mashing together of the real and the imagined or dreamlike. Remember this last year, from OpenAI’s video model, Sora:

Also this:

The mashing together of the real and culturally iconic artistic styles is another key characteristic of hallucinatory realism.

Trump and Vance ambush Zelensky; this time as Muppets.

In 2025, every meme can be a Simpsons meme:

Hallucinatory realism coheres as a style, and speaks to me so powerfully, because it taps into deep structural forces that have long been at work inside our culture. Forces that have reshaped reshaped the way we experience the world, and the very nature of our consciousness.

Ever since the rise of the photograph early in the 20th-century — followed by cinema, and then TV — we’ve become increasingly lost in a hall of mirrors. A world in which the boundaries between reality and images of reality have become blurred.

We’ve moved from an age in which the written word was the dominant cultural form to the age of real-as-representation; the age of hyperreality. And this has had profound consequences.

Text encourages a mode of thought that proceeds as it does: linearly, from one thought to the next — and consequent — thought. But the hyperreal world of images isn’t like that. Is is associative, a constantly shifting network of relations. Its grammar is not that of rational, step-by-step thought. Instead it obeys the associative grammar of dreams, of a neverland in which, for example, to think of something is for it suddenly to appear beside you, as though it had been there all along.

This accounts, in my view, for the strange, dreamlike nature of the 20th-century. The rise of fascism and descent into war, the first steps on the Moon, the assault of pop culture; all of it was filtered through, and shaped by, the hyperreality matrix. Via ever-more powerful technologies of representation — photographs, cinema, TV, hyperlinks, TikTok, and on and on — we’ve come to experience history not as as linear, ordered waking life, but as something else: as a kind of shared waking dream.

And there’s a name for a waking dream. It’s a hallucination.

The AI models arising now, it seems to me, are the terminal station in this long journey. They’ve scooped up all of human culture and smashed it together. Now they’re serving it back to us in ever-more unhinged, associative waves. When they make factual mistakes we say they’re ‘hallucinating’. But those mistakes aren’t really mistakes; free association is just what these models do. They are hallucination machines. A new part of the hyperreality matrix, but orders of magnitude more powerful, and more strange, than anything we’ve seen before.

As they flood the zone with their outputs, they’re abstracting us even further from any foundational reality. They’re plunging us deeper, then, into history as waking dream (some would say nightmare). These images, whatever their ethical and legal status — whatever their artistic merit — capture something of the chaotic unreality of whatever it is that is unfolding around us in 2025.

Keep watching for instances of hallucinatory realism. I’ll be writing more about it soon.

I’ll be back next week. Until then, be well,

David.

This was #11 in the series Postcards from the New World, from NWSH.

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