The AIllucinations Issue: let’s Hallucinate

🌊 🧠 Who hasn’t hallucinated at some point?

From sleep-deprived visions to sugar highs and laser-focused daydreams, the mind drifts, blurs, invents. Machines do it too. AI hallucinates not because it's broken, but because it's trying to make sense of our weird, beautiful world.

So here we go: Issue #14 🪩 As creatives, we’ve got two choices:

1. Panic, and try to tame the beast.

2. Or float with it. Embrace the glitch. Ride the wave.

Because sometimes, in these shimmering moments of distorted perception, we find unexpected sparks: aha moments, poetic misfires, serendipitous weirdness that fuels the next idea. This issue doesn’t correct the hallucinations. It swims in them. 👁️✨ So bring back the six-fingered hands, the glitchy dreams, the surreal stitches, and let’s hallucinate.

Jump into:

👨🏿‍🎤 Artist  | 🔭 Tools | 🐠 Catch of the week | 🤖 AI Hallucinations | 🌊 Ripple Effect  

👨🏿‍🎤 Artist spotlight: Azra Akšamija: Hallucinating Traditions, Rewriting Memory

Azra Akšamija is an artist, architect, and professor at MIT who stitches together histories, futures, and identities, one pattern at a time. Her work is a vibrant tide between tradition and transformation, often exploring how cultural memory survives conflict and displacement.

In Hallucinating Traditions, she invites AI to co-dream with her, remixing Bosnian textile motifs through machine learning. The result? A hypnotic dance between ancestral craft and algorithmic interpretation, where the past is not just preserved, but reimagined into new waves of meaning.

🛠️ Top Tool

We now have 536 tools in our repository focusing on Creative tooling.

🌿 This week, no new tools, but don’t worry…

…we’re busy behind the scenes updating the Catalog.
Next week? A fresh wave of revamped tools is coming your way. 🌊
Stay tuned: it’s worth the wait.

🐠 This week’s AI catch

🤖 AI Hallucinations: When Creativity glitches brilliantly

What is an AI Hallucination? It is a generative model confidently delivering something that looks real, but isn’t: a detail invented in the gaps, untethered from fact or sense. Yet in creative seas, these “glitches” can become luminous currents, sparks that rethread tradition and reimagine reality.

❌ Not just errors, Creative catalysts!

In art and design, hallucinatory outputs are often transformed into new aesthetics:

• Surreal visuals: weird folds, extra fingers, dreamlike landscapes.

• Textual verse: invented citations, poetic nonsense with uncanny charm.

• Cultural remixing: traditional motifs meet futuristic AI misreads.

• Immersive data dreams: machines visualizing memory and place.

🪲 Types of AI Hallucinations (...or creative chaos modes)

• Visual Hallucinations: Extra limbs, warped objects, dreamlike spaces

• Textual Hallucinations: Confident nonsense, invented citations, poetry disguised as truth

• Audio Hallucinations: AI generating non-existent sounds, accents, or ambient moods

• Cultural Hallucinations: Misinterpretations of heritage, remixing of traditional symbols, reimagined rituals

• Behavioral Hallucinations: Unexpected AI decisions in games, agents, or simulations

💥 Hallucinations Worth Keeping

DeepDream’s psychedelic style. Google’s DeepDream algorithm amplifies patterns into hypnotic, surreal visuals that feel both uncanny and beautiful.

Six-fingered humans & creature mashups. AI models frequently generate extra digits or bizarre animal fusions, hallucinations that have become meme-worthy art pieces.

Fabricated idioms from Google. AI sometimes invents entirely new idioms, like “Never put a tiger in a Michelin star kitchen”, delivering phrases that sound poetic but are completely made-up.

😂 AIllucinations Edition: I told my AI to visualize my dream home…

🐚 That’s All, Folks. The ripple effect 🌊

AI4C is riding a mission to uncover fresh patterns & dive deep into research!
Next time, we might go deeper into “AI x folklore,” or “AI zines that slap.” Let us know what you want more of.

📥 Wanna share your work or someone else’s magic?
Just reply or whisper to [email protected]

Till then, stay fluid.
The AI4C crew 🌴