‘The Eye of God’ by Georgiana Houghton, 1862
Here we want to investigate any possible link between Victorian Spiritualism and AI. After all, both have a history of delving into the deeper reaches of the human psyche. Miss Houghton – Georgiana Houghton – was my Grandfather’s Great Aunt and a spiritualist and painter. However, in my family we always knew her as ‘Great Aunt Georgiana’, a familiar presence through her paintings displayed on the walls in my grandfather’s house. Her sister, Zilla, my grandfather’s grandmother, died at the youthful age of twenty-six. The sisters were close, and both were artists. Georgiana was distraught by the loss of her much-loved sister, and both she and her mother became mediums in an attempt to contact Zilla within the spirit realm. This led to a lifetime career for Georgiana as both a medium and an artist. Today she is recognized as one of the founders of abstract art, preceding luminaries such as Kandinsky and Jackson Pollock. Her paintings depict contact with dead relatives, famous people and even angels, her painting hand guided by intermediary spirits, reportedly without her conscious participation.
From a psychological point of view, one interesting aspect of her art is that she represented her perception of the personalities and moral characteristics of the spirits by the use of different colours within her painting. She published these trait names and associated colours on May 22nd 1871 in the catalogue for an exhibition of her work held at the New British Gallery in Old Bond Street, London – long before 20th century psychologists began their scientific studies of how we all differ in these same qualities.
Today, the measurement of characteristics such as these is the preserve of modern psychometrics, and also of the psychographics used in online digital micro-targeting through the internet. This massively expanding field, first introduced through the analysis of online digital footprints such as Facebook Likes, is now receiving prominence in the field of Generative AI. The basic question is this “Can and should AI be allowed to generate separate memes for each of us, based on whatever it learns about our desires and intentions, both conscious and unconscious, to influence our behaviour, whether it be what to buy or which way to vote?”
Spiritualism and AI
Despite the distance in time and discipline, there is an intriguing similarity between the endeavors of both spiritualism and AI – both are looking for psychological meaning in beings represented in other domains. For the spiritualist this is the spirit world. For the AI it is in the deepest psychological meanings about the human character that it derives from its analysis of our use of language. Francis Galton once wrote that to understand human psychological variation you only needed to look at language. If an important personality or moral distinction were to exist between us, then, he argued, we would have found words for it in all the world’s languages. In psychology today this is described as ‘Galton’s Lexical Hypothesis’. And if we wish to investigate this, our literature has made it easy. While it may not be possible to find living beings in the spirit world, we have created representations of them in complex works of literary art – novels, plays, poems – that the AI can use instead. so let us take a character, such as Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark, from the work of one of the world’s leading writers, William Shakespeare, and ask GPT4 to apply Georgiana’s lexicon of personality and moral traits to Hamlet, Next, we will ask GPT4 to prompt DALL-E to apply the lexicon and Georgiana’s colour scheme to the creation of an abstract work of art in the style of the Victorian era.
GPT4 tried different prompts in an attempt to provoke DALL-E into providing faceless images, but none were completely faceless. Maybe we need to wait for DALL-E Version 4 that may be arriving around May 2024.
Note: A later blog (Hamlet by DALL-E) in February 2024 explores this idea further.