I know that human consciousness is spiralling towards greater heights than it has ever before reached in the whole of its history.[1]
in the air
There is a parallel between spirit mediumship and artificial intelligence (AI). Both are knowledge systems guided by human intervention but with origins clouded by spiritual and digital ethereality. Spirit mediumship is the ability to commune outside our earthbound existence and into the heavens to produce imagery, writing and music. AI is ever-expanding. Currently it exists as a digital technology that seeks to simulate human intelligence, creativity and autonomy.[2] It is a decision-making database that privileges intellectual — rather than emotional or physical — knowledge that has been selected, processed and stored.
Spirit mediumship and AI simultaneously share and deviate in methodology to produce knowledge. They are interfaces that merge timelines to provide facts and speculation — with little discrimination between the two — from intangible beings. With the rise of AI tools in everyday use, there is an increasing unease in discerning and defining authorship. This has caused us to address what it means ‘to make’, to redefine the integrity of creativity and innovation, and to understand the value in ‘how we know’.[3]
Like the practice of spirituality (forming connection between body and mind, sense and belief), AI is re-forming and re-arranging information (data) to produce ‘fact’. While seeking guidance from spirits or AI, one must loosen their esteemed definition of intelligence and trust these otherworldly constructs. This proves that our skepticism isn’t distributed equally: we allow the artificial to produce fact whilst the spiritual remains belief. A desire rather than a global axiom.
The ‘composer’ Rosemary Brown (1916 – 2001) professed she was visited by composers from the past, tasked with transferring their music into the living realm. ‘She was a music-generation AI decades before the fact!’[4] She never claimed authorship, instead attributing the music to the composers who entrusted her — Liszt, Brahms, Bach and other long-dead musicians — herself simply a vessel. Despite never taking credit for the work, she did voice that it was a collaborative process: ‘I think they [the composers] on their side are trying to improve communication; the same as I, on my side, am trying to become more receptive.’[5] Brown’s minimal music education complicated the trust audiences and critics put in her claims. On one hand, it validated her story; Brown’s lack of musical education supported her avowal of mediumship. But many could not embrace spirituality as an unexplained phenomena of reality.
AI and spirit mediumship are acts of reproduction, citing names and sources to validate their creative and intellectual voice. Producing paintings, music and poetry with the guidance of spirits highlights a shared abstract methodology to AI’s inclination to ‘hallucinate’ knowledge. AI pulls information from a ‘cloud’ of data to provide answers. During this process, facts are skewed and context is often made invisible, but the AI’s confidence remains. Spirit guides granted similar confidence and creative purpose for many women artists working in a field that refused them the access and admiration of their male contemporaries. Placing the will to create on a higher force gave permission to challenge those boundaries.
‘Capability overhang’ defines what a typical user thinks AI’s capacity is: what AI, as of today, can do.[6] The knowledge required to be a spirit medium, to perform these translations, is akin to a software requirement. Though having a limited music education (consisting of piano lessons in her thirties), Brown undoubtedly stored a large reserve of musical information, but critics simply labelled her works as ‘pastiche’.[7] Whether formally learnt or unconsciously absorbed, she was capable of transcription and artistic decision-making to deliver this music from the other side.
In both cases, the line between knowledge keeper and knowledge disseminator becomes blurred and authorship is evaded. Do we trust the anonymity and algorithm of AI or the personal and poetic interpretations of spirit mediumship? When it comes to justification of authorship, what is the difference between remembrance and reenactment?
in the body
Both methodologies of producing knowledge — spirit mediumship and artificial intelligence — require an interface. Digital devices connect humans to AI databases such as Gemini, Claude and ChatGPT. In the realm of spirit mediumship, to challenge the originality of Rosemary Brown’s compositions rationalises that she was merely an interface for these ‘great composers’ to work through. Brown recounts her experience of spirit contact:
My work is a mixture of hearing the composers, seeing them and having my hands actually guided at the piano. Perhaps I'll get several bars dictated note by note and then the contact may fade a little and I find that instead it's easier to go to the piano and allow them to guide my hands and then of course I perhaps use my own notation which would not be the notation that they might have used themselves.[8]
What did Rosemary’s body contribute to these compositions? What does the physical body offer to intellectual knowledge? In the transfer of information, artefacts of where that knowledge has been stored — in the body or in the brain — can emerge. AI is a powerful and disruptive tool that seeks to produce and improve upon the notion of a ‘globalised brain’. But what is lost when physicality is removed from communication? How can AI have an authentic voice without a mouth?
Today, AI is attempting to imitate human knowledge systems by presenting synthetic knowledge in forms that have existed for centuries: conversational teachings and dictionary definitions. AI has become unescapably embedded into the infrastructure of the internet, consequently restraining our desire and ability for research and creativity. We are no longer asking ‘whether creativity is changing, but how we recognise it, are valuing it, and preserve what makes it human’.[9]
Both spirit mediumship and AI seek automation: the ability to work without conscious thought, with little or no direct human control.[10] However, AI seems to bypass the joy and value in not-knowing with its apparent efficiency and abundance of accessible knowledge. It removes the mess, allowing us to move through our mistakes faster with seemingly fewer consequences.[11] There is optimism in the abundance and accessibility that AI has afforded: ‘knowledge is democratised’. But then, ‘what information is real’?[12]
There is value in speculation, of theorising beyond fact as a way of generating new ideas. ‘The unreasoning and the unreasonable will not be able to lend their minds readily to the acceptance of new ideas … but the free-minded …. will be capable of absorbing fresh facts and elaborating on the possibilities laid before them.’1 Humans hold the ability to think outside the box, whereas AI is stuck, literally, in the box. Its ability rests on regurgitating preconceived ideas. Information, once factual, becomes balderdash.
in the ground
The spirit medium is often associated with surrealism: think of the mystical cartography of Hilma af Klint or the augmented realities of Leonora Carrington. The surrealist style and spiritual methodology of art making intertwines speculation and reality. They represent how abstract symbols — or just creative forms of communication: visual art, music, poetry — present ideas beyond rational comprehension whilst tapping into a deeper sense of emotional understanding.
The image of AI has been designed as a celestial humanoid. With its materiality made invisible, we often forget AI’s environmental consequences. In contrast, many spiritualist artists honed a deep connection with nature. Af Klint first gained recognition for her landscape painting and botanical drawings; Agnes Pelton was known as a ‘desert transcendentalist’;[13] and Rosemary Brown’s clairvoyance pursued an exploration of our universe through the likes of Einstein.[14]
The expanding perception of what intelligence can be — mycelium networks, slime moulds, tree root systems — has reminded us of technology’s deep connection to and exploitation of the environment. ‘Being able to talk to a computer has come up around the same time as this notion of a more expansive understanding of the intelligence that’s on this planet, or beyond’.[15] Yet, AI continues to render our surroundings synthetic by altering how we access and learn about the world. With our increasing awareness of AI’s reliance on limited resources, could we find a synergy between AI existence and environmental care?
Just as Brown was able to materialise compositions from long-dead composers, AI organises information and assembles auxiliary timelines. Whether natural or synthetic, the human impulse to expand knowledge perseveres.
There must be all sorts of extensions of knowing things … My experiences have been so deep, so vivid, so consistent that I feel it worthwhile my going on with this work … The music itself I feel is very strong evidence … there’s something going on which is deeper than the average person’s life.[16]
We are always moving in cycles: ‘Every age invents the language that it needs.’[17] When adopting the ease of AI technologies for knowledge production we must ask ourselves more and more how we distinguish truth and value creativity. How do we de-code the proliferation of information, but more importantly, how do we use and appreciate intelligence?
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Notes
[1] Rosemary Brown. Unfinished Symphonies: Voices from the Beyond, Souvenir Press, London, 1971. p. 122-123.
[2] Cole Stryker, Eda Kavlakoglu. ‘What is artificial intelligence (AI)?’, IBM, https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/artificial-intelligence (accessed 25 February 2026).
[3] Kate Crawford, ‘In conversation with the artists behind Anatomy of an AI System’, MCA: Stories & ideas, 16 December 2025, https://www.mca.com.au/stories-and-ideas/kate-crawford-vladan-joler-in-conversation/ (accessed 1 February 2026).
[4] @RadioInfinity0, comment on ‘1969: Is ROSEMARY BROWN Channelling the GREAT COMPOSERS? | Classic BBC Music | BBC Archive’, BBC Archive, 18 December 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiuJprE0l6c (accessed 27 December 2025).
[5] Rosemary Brown, in ‘1969: Is ROSEMARY BROWN Channelling the GREAT COMPOSERS? | Classic BBC Music | BBC Archive’.
[6] Nick Borenstein, Matthieu Lorrain, Joanne Jang, ‘The Webby Sessions: AI and Creativity at the Next Internet Inflection’, The Webby Awards, 30 January 2026, https://www.linkedin.com/events/7416521325797855233/ (accessed 31 January 2026).
[7] Peter Dorling, in ‘1969: Is ROSEMARY BROWN Channelling the GREAT COMPOSERS? | Classic BBC Music | BBC Archive’.
[8] Brown, ‘1969: Is ROSEMARY BROWN Channelling the GREAT COMPOSERS? | Classic BBC Music | BBC Archive’.
[9] Nick Borenstein, in ‘The Webby Sessions: AI and Creativity at the Next Internet Inflection’.
[10] ‘Automation’, Google English Dictionary, Oxford Languages (accessed 27 December 2025).
[11] Borenstein et al.
[12] Joanne Jang, in ‘The Webby Sessions: AI and Creativity at the Next Internet Inflection’.
[13] Gilbert Vicario, Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist. Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, 2019.
[14] Brown, Unfinished Symphonies, pp. 117–119.
[15] Crawford, ‘In conversation with the artists behind Anatomy of an AI System’.
[16] Brown, in ‘1980: Spirits From The Past’. BBC Archive’, BBC Archive, 12 August 2020, https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=348568523211196 (accessed 1 February 2026).
[17] Crawford, ‘In conversation with the artists behind Anatomy of an AI System’.
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