Artificial Intelligence
In all my years of subscribing, I don’t think I’ve ever written into the editor before! Certainly never to criticize. But I have a gentle request: I don’t want to read text written by a computer. As they say, “If you couldn’t be bothered to write it, why should I be bothered to read it?”
This is important to me, and I would love to know Genii’s values/stance on machine generated text. Do you have a policy? If so, how is it enforced? What do you tell your columnists?
Thanks!
—Travis Bernhardt
For some time the editors’ views on the use of AI have been clear internally, but a public policy hadn’t yet got to the top of the to-do list. Your note helped move it there, and you will find it here, along with some of our reasoning.
Away from the pages of this magazine I wonder whether your letter nods toward a larger shift in how magic is experienced by the public. Through television, recorded video, and then the internet, magic as a mediated form of performance has exploded in the last half century, but perhaps AI will be the end of that. If anyone can use generative AI and a few prompting sentences to produce a video that appears to show an amazing magic trick, then the fundamental tenet that what you see on camera is what you would have seen in person had you been there when it was filmed is completely decimated. And without a mediated trick having any apparent correlation to a live experience, I wonder whether the audience for magic mediated by video will evaporate.
Perhaps people will say: “I don’t want to watch a magic trick that has only happened on a computer… if you couldn’t be bothered to perform it, why should I be bothered to watch it?” And maybe if people distrust magic on video to the point it no longer works then we might experience a renaissance in people seeking out the experience of live performance. It might not be an empty book, or a silent album, but perhaps a shift back toward experiencing magic live would be another way that AI could highlight an important aspect of an art form that can easily be forgotten.
Trick Submissions
First off, I just want to say how much I appreciate all the work everyone at Genii does for the magic community. I look forward to each new issue and greatly enjoy looking back at past issues to comb through for hidden gems.
I wanted to reach out to inquire whether the magazine accepts submissions for the Magicana section? It would be an honor to contribute an idea if that’s allowed.
Thank you for your time and I hope to hear from you soon!
—Ethan Smith
We absolutely do accept submissions for Magicana (which is curated by our magic editors, Benjamin Barnes and Lorenz Schär). If you have a routine, trick, or move that you would like to share then the first step is to get in touch via editors@geniimagazine.com. And while we are talking about submissions, we are also keen to use our reviews section to help spread the word about innovative products, so if you have something you think we should be talking about in the magazine then do get in touch via the same address.
📬 Have something to tell us?
We encourage your comments, suggestions, and prohibitions. Reach us with the speed of email at editors@geniimagazine.com. We are, as the original genie insisted, here to serve.