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AI bro discovering imagination
(piefedimages.s3.eu-central-003.backblazeb2.com)
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this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2025
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(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.
👋 (have aphantasia)
Well imagine that.
As a person who CAN imagine and hear my mind speak... I can't imagine that.
That sucks. How do you handle / have you handled art projects in school?
That was just trial and error. Just because i can't visualize stuff in my head doesn't mean i can't evaluate concepts and how they might be together. If you have the ability to imagine stuff in your head you might think "oh yeah that is a terrible idea to put these two concepts together" whereas me i can't tell that unless i have seen it before and internalized it in a non-visual way. Like say you wanted to draw a bouquet of flowers, if you looked at different flowers you could start placing them in your mind together. For me i would have to had to see it before and remember "x and y flowers together don't look good". But if i haven't seen them before then id either have to try drawing them together for the project, or if we're talking about flowers maybe i could make a bouquet and see it that way before putting it to paper
Edit: also i don't think it's really that bad. I never knew it was any different than how other people did stuff until the past decade or two when more people started talking about it. One of my friends shared his experiences with it and i was just like "that's normal, isn't it?"
That is insanely fascinating! And it's super cool to me that you found ways to work with it, to the point where you didn't even notice you had it! Ever since I learned about this a few years ago, I've been wondering if a childhood friend had it. She always had to draw or find pictures of things before she could decide if she liked how they look. One time we had to pick a flower that we liked from a provided list of flowers. We'd all seen them before (common flowers to our residence), but she had to look up each one in a book, before she knew which one she liked. I was describing them to her, so she wouldn't have to look them up, and she knew that this was the red one that grows outside the school and that one was the blue one that grows in the park and so on, and she still had to look them up. After your comment, I'm almost positive she had it and no one knew. The human mind is fascinating!
Yeah definitely possible. When i learned about it i ran to my wife of over a decade and asked her if she can see things in her head. She thought it was a silly question and goes on to tell me when she reads books it's like a whole movie in her head and i told her for me it's just words in a book lol.
How did that change the way you view the world, in general or specifically on something?
You know what's funny? Even though I can visualize things internally, I imagine it being better than I can make it in real life. Especially woodworking, I end up making mistakes at the design level. When two pieces of wood don't sit flush because I bungled the proportions in my mind, oh it's the worst.
Same!
Me too!
Yeah. People who have that in my job tend not to do well.
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
I think I've slightly frustrated people when they asked me something like "how do you think this chair will look in the corner of the living room?" and all I really could say was "yeah it's a nice chair, has about the same colour as the sofa"