AI-generated videos as psychedelic experiences

Plus, responses to my NYT op-ed

Ari Kuschnir is an LA-based creative media producer with an interest in psychedelic spirituality (among other topics). He bought and renovated a house in the Palisades and finally moved in to his dream home, only to see it severely damaged in the LA fires earlier this year. He tells me: ‘I had 30 minutes to pack one suitcase. It was interesting how little I actually needed.’ He also saw how quickly things can fall apart: ‘10am was a normal day in LA. 10.30 it was like the apocalypse - people leaving their cars and running to the school to grab their kids, people screaming.’ He and his family have had to leave LA, for the time being, and see if insurance will pay for the repair of his home. But while his physical reality has been disrupted, Ari’s work in the metaverse has taken off.

He tells me he started playing around with AI generated videos a year ago, making funny cat animations for his daughter. Then, in August, he made a video of Donald Trump drinking ayahuasca and becoming a shaman. He says:

When Grok first came out, it would let you do new things, because Elon is such a free speech absolutist and took the guard rails off AI. So you could do things like Trump puking and it wouldn’t censor you like on Mid Journey. You started to see weird AI videos. And I thought ‘Trump doing ayahuasca’.

The video imagines Trump going through a dark night of the soul and emerging a better, wiser and more authentic self. It went viral - Ari thinks it’s been seen something like 50 million times. He made similar videos of Elon Musk drinking ayahuasca, RFK finding wisdom from an indigenous bruja, Netanyahu going on a vision quest to the desert. Ari calls them ‘stories of transformation’.

Some, like Conspirituality author Derek Beres, have criticized the videos for selling a sort of magical thinking - if only the leaders of the world did psychedelics, everything would be better. RFK and Elon Musk have taken psychedelics, Musk perhaps many times, there’s no fairy-tale ending.

But Ari says his aim with his AI videos is to offer glimpses of alternative, more hopeful realities: ‘and if enough of us watch it and believe that there is a chance for the world to take an alternate path for it, then maybe it's helping in some subtle way’. He gives the example of an AI video he made of Trump and Biden meeting after the election and going on a road-trip - another video which went viral, which he released after the election to give a glimpse of a less polarised America; or a video he made of Trump and Zelensky regretting their bust-up in the White House. This makes me think of AI videos as similar to psychedelic trips - dreaming out loud, a glimpse of an alternate reality, a playful space where you can imagine ‘what if?’

Of course, any new technology can be used for all sorts of moral purposes, and Ari was dismayed when one group made a video satirising Trump’s vision for the ‘Gaza Riviera’, except Trump retweeted it and it went round the world, causing a huge amount of offence among Muslims. Ari says:

A lot of people sent it to me asking if I made it, including you! It was so poorly thought out I felt almost violated. If satire is used as propaganda you’ve failed. This was against everything I’m trying to do.

Since then, other governments have started to use AI videos for propaganda - China has been releasing a steady stream of AI videos mocking Trump and a heavily eye-linered JD Vance. We’re in the global meme war era of AI.

Meanwhile, Ari has been making a series of ‘time-traveller’ videos, bringing to life interesting scenes from the past. He made a wonderful video re-animating Gurdjieff’s commune from the 1920s (his partner Schuyler Brown is writing a book about Gurdjieff) and another re-animating Esalen in its golden age. He says: ‘My theory is you can realistically recreate any era if film existed, otherwise it looks like historical reenactment’. He also recently made a video for the TED conference, imagining an alien visiting Earth and giving a TED talk.

Amazingly, considering he gets tens of millions of views for some of these videos, he says they can take just a few hours to make. He’s right at the cutting edge of a technology that will soon become widely used, saturated, and probably exhausted. But for now, it’s a lot of fun.

After the paywall, I wrote an op-ed in the New York Times on psychedelics and safety. How did the field react? Plus articles on the rise of alternative and somatic therapies, on IFS, ketamine addiction, and a brilliant podcast on the 30th anniversary of the Oklahoma bombing.