Comment by meerita
15 hours ago
I've really enjoyed using AI to generate images. For example, Long time ago, I read an amazing five-book saga called Riverworld, and I used AI to recreate many scenes, places, and ideas from the story. Seeing the books come to life through hundreds of images was a great experience. Definitely one of the coolest things to enjoy in 2026. Try it with your favorite books.
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I just finished the 2nd book of the Stormlight Chronicles by Brandon Sanderson. Sadly I have had aphantasia all my life and therefore I can not visually imagine things - I do have a very loud inner monologue though and can imagine the voices of the characters.
I just tried out the new version of ChatGPT to generate images for the main characters in a concept art style and for me it makes the story come to life a bit more.
I also run a Pathfinder Campaign every other week and have found great pleasure visualizing scenes in this way for myself. Sometimes I share them with the players and so far the feedback on that has been very positive.
I wish I could picture things in my mind but at least now I have something that can help me with my handicap!
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If it’s a good film then those are works of art and interpretation in themselves, but I suspect you have something which is more the product of a mechanical bureaucracy in mind than works of art: maybe like a production of Harry Potter or The Hunger Games.
If those are the kinds of books you have in mind I can see why you get confused/frustrated by how others feel about slop, since you’ve been shoulder deep in it for your whole life!
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Then reading a book is outsourcing imagination or enjoying it's illustrations by someone else, as you rely on the others for imagining stories
We’ve outsourced everything else.
Why is that such a bad thing? Imagination is not truly useful for anything without skills to complement it, at least not in my experience.
>Imagination is not truly useful for anything without skills to complement it
techbro final boss
About 300 million people literally can't imagine.
Outsourcing re-imagination.
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I wish I could do it better. There seems to be a lot of variability. This episode of radiolab on the topic is fascinating: https://radiolab.org/podcast/aphantasia/transcript?utm_sourc...
The apple scale:
https://www.reddit.com/r/HelloInternet/comments/f0wuej/are_y...
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I feel like the reason I dislike reading or find reading boring is because I can't. But it's just a theory. Meanwhile I absolutely love movies.
FWIW, there’s a famous(-ish) fantasy author with aphantasia (Mark Lawrence), and I also have aphantasia, yet I absolutely love reading and if I would have to choose only one entertainment for the rest of my live, it’d be reading.
But I can’t stand elaborate descriptions (it’s almost always landscapes, rarely do authors feel the need to describe anything in as excruciating details as landscapes), which might be related to those descriptions not building up to some kind of image in my head.
This is quite common if you have full on aphantasia.
I have a friend who only reads fiction for which he's seen the accompanying show first because he otherwise has no visual reference for the characters and environments.
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Not all people can!
I did it as well. But it was fun to imagine it through another type of eyes.
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