Andrew Sage

They talk about similar things, but the point is, is that those texts talk about similar things.

And what's unique about Burroughs is that he's actually doing... He's a doer.

He's a doer.

This is fundamentally the difference between the Vita Activa and the Vita Contemplativa.

Like...

I'm thinking in terms of philosophers, and it took me half of this talk to be like, no, he's actually doing shit.

As soon as we get out to him actually standing out in front of the cafe and doing this, he's not just developing a method, but by virtue of the fact that he's inviting other artists, the slides upon slides that we saw of him working with new machines that he was creating and trying these things, he was actively involved in this practice, which again, makes him far more

magical than most occultists.

Don't come for me.

Absolutely.

AI.

Specifically, we'll be discussing debates and uses of generative AI in this conference.

Because the last Occulture conference was in 2023, as these large language models and image generation platforms were just starting to gain popularity.

And now they have a stranglehold over the stock market and many people's imagination.

The first, I guess, real debate around AI happened as the three of you stayed to listen to a panel after the William S. Burroughs panel, as well as an Austin Osmond Spare panel, a proto-chaos magician from the 20th century who's a contemporary of Aleister Crowley.

I left to go listen to a mathematical, thelemic ontology podcast.

talk, which was probably less interesting than the panel.

I'd like to hear you guys talk about the debates around AI and how they emerged in this panel, and then also juxtaposing that to the different forms of AI and discussions around AI that dominated a large part of the rest of the conference.

Well, and that was certainly a topic that was begged by the other two talks that we didn't really discuss.

The Austin-Osmond spare was about automatic drawing.