AI bro discovering imagination

I'm having a hard time telling if this is trolling or idiocy.

Like all good satire it is rooted in reality
Poe's law struck again.

As someone with aphantasia: I wish it did.

Maybe spending hours upon hours producing AI slop is the cure?
- Well I guess I will never be cured then.
Do you get the Tetris effect where after playing you dream of Tetris?
I wonder if this guy ai slopped the same thing
- When I first got the game Factorio, for the first week, I was having full on hallucinations of the little conveyor belt arrows twisting and snaking all over my vision when I closed my eyes. Even when I blinked, id get a flash of some grotesque squirming abomination. Scared the shit outta me because I'd never experienced that before nor even heard of it. I was relieved when I learned it was a known thing but it was still distracting as all hell.
- I wouldn't know, it's extremely rare that I remembrer my dreams.

I know a guy who has aphantasia and is using AI image generation to actually see what he’s thinking about. He explained that his imagination is more like an itemized list.
- That's exactly how my imagination is.
  I can imagine an apple
  It's red It's round It has stem and sticker
  I can't see it at all
Yeah, ngl I was like shoot, do I need to start doing some ai image shit?
Phantasia, at least to a certain point, can be trained. During all the constant busing to my college, whenever I couldn't use my laptop from the person seating on the side of me, imagined things, then tried to create mental images of them.
Another weird thing is, that I found out, my dyspraxia could be made much less worse, almost on par with the average person at least, by using a better pen. Probably in my case it's a mixture of having a weird skin that makes things hurt that shouldn't, and people really wanting me to learn dexterity with "ball games" (read: football, played on hot asphalt) as a kid.
if that's true, that would be an interesting development, and help understanding and treating it
just like some people (Austin danger Powers included) don't have an inner monologue.
"condition" makes it sound like it's a problem lol, it's just a variation of thought
- Aphantasia haver here. Full detail controllable movie in my head sounds cool. I also don't really care that much, though.
- It appears to be a functional lack with no upside its a disability
We need gen-AI to be perfected first, right now its makes humans with 7 fingers and it gives me the heebie jeebies, nah, gotta wait like 10 years
- Not really anymore. I mean it cant do backflips but it has been passing tests like will Smith eating soaghetti
Just listened to this episode about aphantasia yesterday Third eye blind

Imagination was discovered by John Imagine in 2023 when he tried to run a genAI prompt but forgot to turn on the computer

Pretty sure it was actually discovered by John Lennon in 1971 when he took some drugs but forgot to take some drugs.
- You're actually both right, Lennon actually took so many drugs that he astral projected to the 2020s. He tried to use chat gpt while he was projecting into the future, but he didn't know what a computer was so he didn't turn it on
Wrong. It was created by the Imagi people before John Imagine appropriated it.

So, I heard of aphantasia (the lack of a 'mind's eye' or ability to visualize) after I noticed a pattern in my customers at the job shop: The creative types that needed something made that was out of their wheelhouse (the musician who wanted to design an accessory for their instrument, the sculptor who needed a water hose...thing for their studio, the carpenter who needed a duct attachment for his saw) I could describe what I was going to do in words to them and they got it.

The business school BMW driving golf shorts Karens who had an idea they wanted to "invent?" If I showed them a CAD model, it had to be correctly colored. The wood part had better be brown or it was outside their capacity to comprehend. Absolutely no ability to think abstractly. I wonder if this had been pounded out of them by whatever caused the rest of their personality. Or, if the inability to visualize just pipes people into business school.

Having Aphantasia (no minds eye) or Anendophasia (no inner voice) is just a different way of perceiving the world.
Here is an article that show that even though peops have these (I know because I am both) it does not need to affect their lives. I did not even know I had these until my late 50’s. Below is an article that shows this. A quote from the article.
“Surprisingly, within fields as varied as science, art, politics, and sports, some of the most innovative and successful figures openly acknowledge having Aphantasia.”
https://www.discoverwalks.com/blog/world/20-famous-people-with-aphantasia/
- My brother has aphantasia but is a better artist than me. And I spend most my day in my minds eye. I have to explain to people that half the time Im looking at something I’m not actually even seeing through my eyes anymore. I completely check out like I’m dreaming
This reminds me of the time I showed a design mockup with lorem ipsum text and a couple of people got really confused by it and were still confused even after I explained it's just filler text.
Your understanding of Aphantasia is a bit off, I think the folks in the second group are just stupid. I have complete Aphantasia, and if it was explained to me, I can understand what your plans for something would be. If I was shown a CAD model, it would be extremely clear. The things I can't do is see my wife's face in my head, or picture the last place I left something. However, that doesn't mean I couldn't describe to you what my wife looked like, or that I can't remember where I left something. Also, thinking abstractly is what people with Aphantasia are best at. I can't remember the specifics, but they are significantly more likely to end up in a STEM field where all they do is abstract thought (myself included)
I understand though, it's easy for me to think about how someone who can picture things in their mind would experience things, because I can see things with my eyes. But someone who has a mind's eye can't really understand what it would be like to not have one. Most things that people would think are issues for me aren't, I've just got different ways of remembering and thinking about things that doesn't require needing to see them in my head.
- I do have a mind's eye, and quite a capable one apparently. I've seen some people say they imagine in flat shades or even in black and white, I can imagine and remember things as clearly as I can see. I can imagine the cross section of an engine running. I can't vouch that my mind correctly models firing order and timing of an engine of more than two cylinders but if I focus on one cylinder the details are right.
  I also have quite a capable mind's ear. Pretty much all day I hear my thoughts in my head as if they're being spoken, I can also imagine music. I just tried it out by imagining the Top Gun anthem as played on the SNES' sound chip with that orchestra sound that was used on the console quite a lot. Not a problem.
  It utterly fascinates me that some people outright can't do that.
The BMW driving golf shorts Karen probably suffered from bike shedding. A lot of faux leadership types often feel the need to contribute something, even if it's something mundane, into "complex" (in their eyes) projects.
Honestly you want them to be picky about the color because they might be picky about something else that would be harder to control.
- Drop the “the”! It’s cleaner!
  (a memorable line dropped by Justin Timberlakes character in the Social Network. It sums up this phenomenon pretty well.)
Makes me wonder if it's good for our society to allow such creativity challenged people to obtain such positions of power.
We need more people with imagination
Yeah that wasn't aphantasia (someone with aphantasia would have no problem understanding your model; probably even less than someone without it, in fact); that was them having their heads so far up their own arse they weren't able to see and think properly (and lack of experience doing the latter).

This has to be satire please God

Could also be part of a significant portion of people have undiagnosed aphantasia.
Learning that some people can't mentally visualize anything, but pictures of memories that they can't modify since they have no imagination felt wild.
- Aphant here! I would actually love your theory to be true but unfortunately no amount of training or practicing makes me better or even able to visualise. Believe me, I spent many years trying and practicing art before I heard about aphantasia and realised thats what I have.
  If I looked at 10k slop pictures and their corresponding prompts I wouldn't be able to imagine the outputs any more than I already can (which is not at all).
  Likewise I can't do meditation or self-hypnosis where the guide says stuff like "imagine you're lying on a beach" etc. At least it makes me immune to those stage hypnotists who try to get someone suggestible up on stage.
- My wife is like this, and she keeps trying to find her people, but everyone can picture an apple on a table that isn't there.
  But like you described with the memory she can do that but cant edit it, so she has a really good memory.
- When I learned that there are humans out there who can't picture even simple things within their minds, I felt confused.
  I was able to create entire worlds before going to bed when I was a kid, fantasy worlds to explore.
  I thought all humans could picture things in their minds.
- Ive only recently been able to visualise things, but only when im close to sleeping. My wife got annoyed at me when I first discovered it because I couldnt stop laughing at the amount of detail I was able to make on a fence. Only problem is now when im awake and unable to do it, im more aware of the ability I dont have.
  Also, people who can just make shit up and see it in their heads, how do they get anything done? I feel like id just be imagining stuff all day long
God is dead in this timeline

It blows my mind that some people can't visualize things in their mind. I can see anything I'd like to in remarkable detail, and often explore old places or properties from my childhood when I'm trying to fall asleep. I would be kind of crushed if I suddenly couldn't.

see the thing is I can't even tell if I can do this or not
like I can think of something and know the shape and quality of it, but I don't see it in my mind
I'm a mechanical designer, I design tooling and machines all day, and my hobbies include woodworking and 3D printing functional stuff. right now I'm thinking of the design of a kumiko lamp, and the grid pattern I want to use, but I just don't see it. it's the same with the essentially lego tooling I design at work, I know this block has this shape and connects to this other one with this surface, and the assembly of 10 parts looks like whatever, but I do not see that shape when I think about it. it's more that I know the description of it
I can lucid dream, though, so that's pretty sweet
- Yeah, pretty much the same here. I can imagine shapes, smells, textures, whatever, but it's entirely different from seeing, smelling, or touching. Concepts, not images. Feels like the same part of the brain I'd use to, for instance, write a computer program. No issues visualising and designing 3D models either, or imagining what something in a book looks like.
  Same when dreaming; I could describe everything in my dreams (if I had time during the few seconds after waking up when I still remember them) as if I had seen, heard, and felt it... but it was a completely different experience from actually seeing, hearing, or feeling it. Which means I can never mistake a dream for reality (which I suppose means I lucid dream too), because it's immediately obviously different (and I'm on the bed, with my eyes closed).
- I used to have the same question. What finally convinced me was imagining an apple sitting on a table. When I try to imagine specific parts (e.g. the stem, or the specular shine on its skin, or water beads on its side) I can actually see that part of the apple in my head, and the images change when I change the color, form etc.
I suspect that I am someone who has aphantasia (inability to visualise stuff) and it's weird, because I only relatively recently realised that it was a thing that I likely had. I knew it was a thing in general much before this, but it didn't occur to me that it could apply to me, because surely that isn't just something you can just not notice about yourself. It turns out that yeah, actually, it can be something you don't notice, because if you've lived that way your entire life, you have nothing to compare against.
As a comparison, I am autistic and struggle with sensory hypersensitivity, as many autistic people do. Loud sounds and bright lights literally hurt me, and for a large chunk of my life, I didn't realise that I was literally experiencing the world differently to other people; I thought that everyone felt this discomfort, but I was the only one making a fuss out of it. It really blew my mind when I was diagnosed as a teenager and realised that not only was I experiencing stuff that most people weren't, that there may well be countless other ways in which my fundamental perceptions and cognition could be different, and I'd have no way of knowing.
Shit's trippy as hell.
- That reminds me of a thought I already had as a teenager. We perceive the world through our senses. But there could be countless other "things" happening around us which we simply aren't able to perceive with our limited senses.
For me, the best way I can describe what it feels like for me is: I can imagine an apple and I get a feeling as if I was seeing it, but I don't actually see it. I don't see an image in front of me. I only feel like I'm seeing an image, and I have to focus pretty hard to see anything in detail, but I can still use it to, for example, try and manipulate something in 3D, or try to remember what I was doing on a given day by trying to walk back through a place. I don't know under what category that makes me fall under.
- That's regular.
- Hrm, AFAIK that is the norm. I'm not sure people can actually create their own augmented reality.
Same. I genuinely don't understand what life is like without this. If I need to remember that there's a specific thing in the basement, I'm visualizing what's in the basement and looking at each thing. Do these people just like have an actual list in their head for this?
if I'm not at home and need to walk my spouse through something like checking for a tripped breaker, I'm visualizing the whole process so I can explain it in detail. How does the other side do this? No judgement, I'm genuinely curious how it works.
- I don't know for sure that I'm on the other side
  that said...
  I can visualize processes just fine. let's say I want to instruct someone on how to chisel out a feature on a piece of wood. I can give them exact instructions on how to do that, because I know where the tool needs to be and where their hands need to be and what material needs to be removed. but I don't really picture any of that in 3D, I just... know it as a description of the 3D. if that makes sense
- Since aphantasia is a bit of a spectrum, I have it to a decent degree as I can only imagine blurry images in my head. I only learned about it doing some psychological testing when it was a test my psychologist wanted me to take. I can only speak for myself as I don't know anyone else with the same kind of condition IRL, but in general I just sort of memorize task order for repetitive things. I imagine you do the same, but you have visual cues memorized in the same way I just know the steps to do something. It's not like I don't recognize what I'm looking at when it's in front of me. I tend to think of it as having to be very analytical when doing one of those "spot the difference" image puzzles. I know both images have a potted plant, but it's easier if I have them side by side to know that one was a succulent and the other was a fern. I don't know if that analogy helps you. I don't know what it's like to have a vivid visual imagination, so it's the best metaphor I can think of at the moment.
  I have done remote tech support for software that I wrote which was pretty difficult if I couldn't look at it myself locally. At least for me, I can know the properties of something such as a friend having long, red hair, but I couldn't just visualize their face. I would still recognize them immediately when I see them. If it's something like a tripped breaker, I just know to tell the person which room to go into and what a tripped breaker will look like so they can identify it themselves. It's not like you don't have a memory, but for me the visual parts of those memories are just too blurry to describe that way.
  I can read fiction just fine, but it helps if the characters are illustrated in some kind of way so I know what I'm supposed to imagine while the action is happening. That could even just be a single picture of cover art. At least for me, I can still picture a cobblestone street, but I sort of just see a lot of beige or gray things in my mind with almost no definition. From reading online of the 1-5 scale of aphantasia and comparing it to the test results I got back in percentages, I think I'm somewhere between a 3 and a 4 for levels of intensity if that helps to clarify my perspective at all.
  Apologies for the essay response, but I hope it helps to understand! If it's any consolation, I find it kind of ironically hilarious that I can't imagine having a vivid imagination.
  ETA: It looks like the original test used 1 as completely unable to imagine things and 5 to a vivid imagination. That scale was flipped for the second version of the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire. My scale of 1-5 is based on the second edition, I am on the lower end of the spectrum of vividness, but I can still sort of imagine things to a certain degree.
- I just can't visualize a process to walk you through it. Like on the PC I have to just do it myself or do it at the same time so I can tell you what to do. There is no list, I just remember (or don't) if something is there kinda intuitively. I think my memory is pretty good. I can picture absolutely nothing. It's just all black. It's not even all that bad. To me it's just normal.
- Open the breaker.
  It's on the left side (if I remember that much due to it happening a lot)
  It will look like it's not aligned with everything else, find it and flip it back on.
  Not that hard.
- The fact that someone could “look at a memory” and spot new things in it is astonishing to me. I didn’t think it went that far, I thought everyone would remember the list, and could recreate the picture from the list… remembering the picture independently or instead of the list… wow.
I wonder if those people read fiction. How could you possibly read for fun if you can't picture what's happening? For me, a book is as good as a movie.
- How could you possibly read for fun if you can't picture what's happening?
  Probably better than people who need to visualise stuff.
  There's much more in books than just the visuals. There's the story, there's the characters' thoughts and personality, there's the author's style, and influences... they're infinitely more detailed and nuanced than film or TV.
  Limiting them to the visual aspect seems like a disservice to both reader and author.
  And, anyway, I know what's happening, it's written right there on the page, why would I need to visualise it?
  And what if I imagined it a certain way, and later the author describes it differently than I imagined it, or adds some new detail that was missing in my mental image? Personally (if I experienced books like I do films) that kind of thing would completely pull me off from the story...
  And what if the book is set somewhere alien to our senses? How do you visualise Flatland? Or the other universe in Asimov's The God's Themselves?
  Frankly, needing to visualise books seems more like a handicap to me.
- Funnily enough, I feel like I imagine generic things a little blurry in my mind (like, pick up the red apple and rotate it to face the bottom) when people talk about this topic, but books/fanfic is perfectly clear and expressive and everything. Like I curse my inability to draw and animate cause I can see that stuff vividly in my head. I guess I just need extra word pizazz and a love for the topic to really manipulate it into whatever I want in my mind. Weeabo curse I guess.
- Super descriptive books turn me off.
  Less description, more things actually happening, and dialog make for a fine book.
  Tolkien taking a whole chapter to describe a mountain range, not so much. I gave up on it pretty quickly before I even knew.

This...this is satire, right?

(not so) fun fact: some people have a condition, which inhibits their ability to visualize/imagine visually.

It's Twitter, so there's an excellent chance this is manipulative engagement bait. But it would be really, really interesting if heavy usage of AI image gen proved to be an effective kind of visualization "exposure therapy" for people with aphantasia. We've never before had the ability to so quickly and reliably convert words to images, so maybe experiencing that connection on demand a few thousand times is enough to activate those mental pathways for people who lack them? The closest we've had up to now is a Google Image search, and those results are much more varied, not as precisely tailored to the search term, and not something that people generally do over and over again for leisure.
- Well imagine that.
- That sucks. How do you handle / have you handled art projects in school?
- Same!
- Always wanted to ask, do you read fiction? It's like watching a movie for me, can't imagine reading would be any fun otherwise.
- Yeah. People who have that in my job tend not to do well.
People with aphantasia may not realize that most people can “see” images they generate in their minds. Some with aphantasia say they thought using the word “see” in that context was a metaphor.
The evidence just keeps stacking for me
- What killed me is when people say like "picture yourself on a beach" and people are actually just doing that. My whole life it was a metaphor

It's blatant satire, doesn't pass the sniff test - it's too obvious. Funny tho!

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1053810021001690

Its a thing. Many people simply dont have a minds eye or have a very weak/undeveloped one. Maybe someone should check and see if this is helping people a bit.

You ate the onion.

That guy IS the onion

ratlimit is a well known shitpost account btw

What does it mean to hit 50k image prompts?

Are people like recording how many prompts they’ve used and then bragging about it?

Yes, this is their life now.
Yes. Let me tell you a story about a time when imagegen was even worse bullshit like it is today. Back in the day we had to replace every single subject with ‘Danny Devito’ because that was the fashion at the time and you could never be sure if the model is hallucinating in a way that you wanted. Thus I had thousand of images with danny devito and call it my devito-phase. At that point your brain is trained to recognize Danny Devito in the fraction of a second, and he will appear in your dreams. That person made 49990 shitty images instead of idk baking bread or doing anything with their life. Pathetic

this guy has to be trolling. I mean I suppose it's possible he could be that stupid...knowing what I know about some people I've seen in public spaces. But come on, how could anyone be that brain dead?

'think about the average person; half of them are dumber than that'
(or something like that, it's 2am and I'm exhausted)
- No it's not, it's 4am and I'm exhausted
- Not quite. Think of the median intelligent person; half of them are dumber than that. There's no guarantee, that the average equates to roughly 'the middle of the population'.
  With average also 33% might be dumber that that. Or 60% or...
I'd prefer to believe this is a genius troll rather than a moron, but I'm willing to admit I'm an optimist.