# How AI is Shaping Perception, How Deception is Sculpting Our Reality with Artist TREVOR PAGLEN

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Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/tech-innovation-and-society/how-ai-is-shaping-perception-how-deception-is-sculpting-our-reality-with-artist-trevor-paglen.md
Podcast: [Tech, Innovation & Society - The Creative Process: Technology, AI, Software, Future, Economy, Science, Engineering & Robotics Interviews](https://stenobird.com/podcast/tech-innovation-and-society)
Published: 2025-08-02T12:16:57+00:00
Episode link: https://www.creativeprocess.info/technology-innovation-society/trevor-paglen-mia-funk-e54p4
Audio file: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5745d9f137013b9d0a627c60/t/688e017f8e17a261e023096b/1754136994211/TREVOR-PAGLEN-FULL.mp3
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Duration seconds: 3326

## Resource

Artist Trevor Paglen explores how AI and surveillance technologies are transitioning from passive recording tools to active sculptors of human reality. He examines the erosion of critical thinking as cognitive labor is offloaded to automated systems.

## Highlights
- Main idea: Generative AI functions like a modern magic trick, tricking our brains into attributing intelligence to non-human entities
- Failure mode: Offloading cognitive labor to AI risks 'brain rot,' reducing our capacity for creativity, reason, and critical resistance
- Practical takeaway: Maintaining high-level craft and expertise is essential to effectively direct AI and detect its errors
- Main idea: Surveillance systems are no longer just observing us; they are actively shaping our experience of the world through data extraction
- Main idea: The distinction between consumer technology and military technology is rapidly collapsing, blurring the lines of modern warfare and daily life

## Topics

Artificial Intelligence, Surveillance Capitalism, Visual Culture, Computer Vision, Generative Media, Perception, Disinformation, Media Theory

## Chapters
- 1:00 — The Magic of Generative Media: How the sudden appearance of AI-generated text and images mimics magic by defying our historical expectation of human authorship.
- 5:10 — Two Technological Revolutions: A look at the shift from the era of computer vision to the current era of generative intelligence.
- 9:00 — Images as Conjuring: Comparing modern digital media to ancient forms of magic and symbolic manipulation.
- 17:20 — The Ambiguity of UFO Photography: How certain types of imagery carry immense weight and promise while remaining fundamentally unprovable.
- 21:30 — Investigating Disinformation: Exploring the mechanics of how disinformation is used as a tool in modern power structures.
- 25:50 — AI and the Supernatural: The psychological experience of using AI as a form of interacting with the seemingly supernatural.
- 34:10 — The Economics of Mass Surveillance: How the falling cost of data collection has enabled the rise of pervasive, inescapable monitoring.

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## Transcript

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