A notepad note discussing how Midjourney reveals the gap between language and experience, and how AI-generated images relate to human perception, cognition, and embodiment. It argues that words are representations, not the direct experience of reality, and cautions against dehumanizing when reasoning about AI.

<h2>What Midjourney reveals about language, ambiguity, and the gap between human experience and AI-generated images.</h2><img src="https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1120/format:webp/1*kq6deIl1JfGvQh6PLXzfwg.png" alt="Halfjourney Lab, Midjourney, prompts, best prompts, hyperrealistic" data-mime-type="image/*" data-version="0.0.1" />Technical difficulty level of the articleI’ve recently realized there’s a lot of confusion around generative AI. I’m not talking about hallucinations, I’m talking about human confusion. We’re so identified with language that without realizing it we assume words describe the experience of reality. But the map is not the territory. A word is a symbol, a representation, a bridge. Reality is much bigger.Perception, categorization and language influence each other, but they’re not the same thing.We can represent in a simplified way how an experience becomes a word:<blockquote>World / Stimulus → Perception → Representation / Conceptualization → Cat…</blockquote>