A post about how I became interested in AI-generated art.
I used to think that AI art had no meaning. It seemed like a hollow remixing of internet fragments—a technically impressive, but ultimately soulless, act of collage. There was no intention, emotion, or story behind it—just noise shaped into images.
However, that changed while I was experimenting with AI hallucinations for my safe machine learning research, specifically using empty string prompting in the Stable Diffusion image generator. As I worked, my thoughts drifted back to a past trip to Brussels, where we had visited the Magritte Museum. The surrealist imagery had stayed with me—those quiet, paradoxical scenes that seemed to exist just outside the bounds of logic. Something in them reminded me of these AI hallucinations: vivid, disjointed, and often lacking clear coherence.
Around the same time, I had been reading Carl Jung. His theory of the collective unconscious—an inherited layer of the psyche filled with universal symbols and archetypes—began to resonate in a new way, something I would call AI surrealism.
Surrealism, born in the early 20th century from the ferment of Freudian psychoanalysis, intends to liberate the human mind from the constraints of logic, reason, and social convention. At its core, surrealism aims to access the unconscious mind, often through automatic writing, dream analysis, or chance operations.
Artists like René Magritte, Salvador Dalí, and Max Ernst gave surrealism its visual language, combining precision with paradox, and clarity with dreamlike distortion. Across their work, certain traits emerged: unexpected juxtapositions, symbolic imagery, and a dislocation of reality that aimed to bypass reason and tap directly into the unconscious.
To simulate the surrealist technique in an AI system, we need to do something similar. This involves removing as many constraints from the system as possible. Instead of providing a carefully constructed prompt, we give it nothing at all: an empty string. In response, the AI generates content by drawing from the statistical patterns in its training data, producing unexpected forms, combinations, and associations from deep within its learned representation space.
Now, one might argue that this is simply the AI’s version of an unconscious generative process. But since these models lack consciousness altogether—no intention, no awareness, no inner life—calling it “unconscious” is likely a misnomer, or at best, metaphorical. Overall, this process may appear meaningless by itself: just probabilistic noise filtered through a vast data structure.
However, things shift when we consider what AI has been trained on. These models are built on human-generated content—our languages, our stories, our images, our symbols. They are shaped by our experiences, emotions, and the cultural artifacts we leave behind.
This is where Carl Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious becomes relevant. According to Jung, beneath our individual psyches lies a shared layer of the mind, inherited and universal, filled with archetypes—symbols and motifs that recur across myths, dreams, and cultures. AI may not experience things, but it is trained on our experiences. In doing so, it may accidentally surface these same archetypes because we keep embedding them in the data it learns from.
So, when we look at AI surrealism, we are not exploring the inner life of a single AI artist, but something closer to a shared inner landscape—reflections of our collective patterns. The surrealist process allows these common threads to surface in perhaps the most “natural” way machines can offer: through chance, ambiguity, and the absence of control.
This gives AI-generated surrealist imagery a unique quality—something no individual human artist could fully replicate. It is not the vision of a single mind but a wild collage of influences pulled from us all—our cultures, symbols, experiences, ourselves—woven together by a system that does not understand any of it yet somehow conjures something uncannily familiar.