Today’s Sunday Rerun is a post that originally appeared on my old blog, Rough Type, at the end of 2021. Written about a year after OpenAI’s release of GPT-3 and a year before its unveiling of ChatGPT, it’s one of my first attempts to make sense of generative AI. (I would also work some of this material into the AI chapter of my book Superbloom .) The connection between AI and the Spiritualism movement of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries is something I hope to write more about soon.