[Opinion] AI tarot decks

[borbponderer]

I've never used an AI generated deck, but I've used generative AI as an oracle of sorts. Dalle-2 was especially good for that as the outputs could be so weird and random. It was like having a secondary visual cortex.

Been playing with Gemini recently which has a very different character. It's less weird and less random. I suspect with anything like this the results are only as good as the practitioner.

For me the biggest ethical sticking points with AI are the environmental costs, and the way it's being weaponised is altogether terrifying. But it's out there now and part of the world now, so...

 

[Grigorij]

I mean, I think technically you can just take a bunch of cards and draw the names/numbers of the arcana and it would work. But AI art tends to be ugly

 

[Nightgrowler]

As a lifetime artist which dedicated almost 7 years of my life to making a Tarot deck I can say that all AI can do for you in production of the Tarot deck is basically robbery of the whole experience. Making your own deck is a journey of initiation and attempts to rush it can ruin you or said initiation. There is no way I could come up with such synchronicity stacks if all the work would be done for me by an AI. And utilizing such tools is a clear mark of Western psyche which is all about productivity and matching numbers.
Yves Klein Quote: “My paintings are only the ashes of my art.”
This quite clearly illustrates the nature of the art itself and how AI has nothing to do with it.
AI will not give you the magick behind the process of making one's own Tarot deck which btw was part on initiation process in the Order of the Golden Dawn and several others.

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[Morell]

As a lifetime artist which dedicated almost 7 years of my life to making a Tarot deck I can say that all AI can do for you in production of the Tarot deck is basically robbery of the whole experience. Making your own deck is a journey of initiation and attempts to rush it can ruin you or said initiation. There is no way I could come up with such synchronicity stacks if all the work would be done for me by an AI. And utilizing such tools is a clear mark of Western psyche which is all about productivity and matching numbers.
Yves Klein Quote: “My paintings are only the ashes of my art.”
This quite clearly illustrates the nature of the art itself and how AI has nothing to do with it.
AI will not give you the magick behind the process of making one's own Tarot deck which btw was part on initiation process in the Order of the Golden Dawn and several others.

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That's sone stunning work. Love your mention of initiatory process. Definitely part of it.

 

[diana_i_gusarova]

I think that in any kind of artistic creation (and especially related to esotericism), AI can only be a tool of the human creator, but not the creator.

 

[Thebes]

Yves Klein Quote: “My paintings are only the ashes of my art.”

I love this quote and your work. Extending the metaphor, this does make AI art the probabilistic ashes of other people's work.

Hearing from others who have made decks, it is intensely personal. Losing the process of creation by turning it over to an algorithm is probably taking something from us.

 

[Nightgrowler]

Losing the process of creation by turning it over to an algorithm is probably taking something from us.

I would say it takes everything. Some symbols you can see only when the work is finished, and your subconscious put them there, some are result of a sudden insight (as an example I had one when I decided to draw scepter of the Emperor with an Aries glyph on the top of it and recognized in its geometry a double sided fishing hook which is a meaning of the letter Tzaddi - one of the major changes Crowley did in Thoth Tarot is attributing Tzaddi to the Emperor due to the line from the Book of the Law “All these old letters of my Book are aright; but [Tzaddi] is not the Star.”, the way it “clicked” is inexpressible experience and whole journey of making one’s deck is full of such moments. AI generation is full of random hallucinations and good luck to make just right specific details when you have something concrete in mind. I had need to work on specific project of making corporate comics with ai generated images and for me it is much easier to draw most of specific details by myself than negotiate with an AI for hours about minor things which is stubbornly gets wrong.