Baby Blue Chick in the AI Machine
Acrylic on 8×10 canvas
CONTENT WARNING: I’ll only summarize this dream at the top because the full dream description contains upsetting content - especially for those of us who love animals. The summary: A baby blue chick is fed into a machine and is destroyed. A woman who is training another woman to use the machine examines the aftermath and decides that she doesn’t trust the results. The remains of the chick are discarded. The full dream description is at the end of the post.
After recovering from the initial shock of the dream, I immediately thought it was about AI imagery generation and the data scraping necessary to drive such technology. The woman who was using the machine was training another woman, which made me think of AI training. As for not trusting the results: I have been much less likely to trust any image I see on the internet, to the point where I have caught myself assuming that anything I see is AI generated until proven otherwise. It is a cynical and isolating way to live.
Given the dream content, I felt that creating this image called for physical materials - acrylic paint on canvas. I didn’t get a good look at the baby chick in my dream, other than seeing it disappear into the machine. It seemed to jump in willingly, being very trusting and not knowing what was waiting for it. It reminded me of sharing a creative work and how vulnerable and naive that can feel. I want creative things to have life in the world without being destroyed, scraped up and ground into something untrustworthy. I felt the best way of working with this dream would be to have the baby chick as my creativity proxy, paint it alive and well, and give it a nice sharp beak and claws for protection.
The full dream description:
I am at a mechanical machine made of silvery metal. A woman is there, she is training another woman how to use the machine. (This woman is my wife's colleague in waking life, I'll call her The Colleague here.) The silvery machine has a curved tube with an opening at both ends. It almost looks like a large piece of silver metal macaroni laying on its side, with both open ends facing us. There is a crank in the middle; the rest of the apparatus looks like an anvil that this is all set upon. There is a baby chick, which is dusky blue. I think The Colleague feeds it into the machine? Or it goes in there on its own? All I remember seeing is it willingly hop into the left hand opening of the metal macaroni tube, its little feet and blue fuzzy feathers disappearing into it. Then the crank is turned, and I hear the baby chick being destroyed. The remains come out the other end of the metal tube (I assume, I don’t remember seeing this either). I do see a tray full of the remains of this chick among other remains, possibly other baby birds. I remember being distressed about this in the dream, but not on the immediate level, more like an underlying unease. I don’t like that this is happening, but I don’t feel like I have the authority to protest or question it. I think I need to just observe and learn; maybe there is a reason for this that I don’t understand yet. The Colleague is inspecting the remains and training the woman with her to do so as well. They are trying to see if the remains are any good. The Colleague looks through it for a moment, then shakes her head and says “I don’t trust it. I don’t trust it.” Now her trainee is expected to scrape the remains off of the tray and throw them in the trash.
