I can definitely see how the vast spaces "inside" of an AI model (more precisely, the space of every possible output for every possible input) are similar to the backrooms in that they are huge, related to human activity yet impossible for any human to fully comprehend, sort of "haunted" by humanity yet devoid of it, dreamlike, and so on.

The connection between AI and dreams is interesting in its own right. I am reminded of Google's DeepDream specifically, with its bizarre images that yet seem strongly reminiscent of how humans actually perceive things on some level.

I feel that generative AI is the culmination of Baudrillard and Mark Fisher's thesis.

The world we live in is already dead, and we are wandering with its ghosts. After capitalism strips everything off its materiality and leaves only with its symbols, only the nostalgia for a non-existent past remains.

That was good art criticism and insight into the cultural context of the liminal aesthetic.

This should be an essay.

> Call it a metaphor for how late capitalism swallows up every movement, trend, and icon [...] physical space

I'd like to put extra emphasis on this "swallows": It's not just that a location is generating eerie mimics, like the output hopper of an eldritch factory. The space uses mimicry to attract, surround, and swallow people. We are like insects who cannot quite comprehend the pitcher-plant. The terror and dread comes from an unhappy-medium of partial understanding.

Through that lens, we can see a lot of rather low-hanging-fruit for further comparisons to "late-stage capitalism" or other obtuse and soulless systems we can't avoid.

> It won't always make sense, but everything (or a plausible echo of everything) is in there, somewhere, mindlessly assembled

I've occasionally opined that claiming we've invented thinking-machines is hubris, but we may have made dreaming-machines.

I see parallels between prompt injection causing an LLM to jump the rails and start telling an entirely different story, and how dreams [0] often have discontinuities that only seem odd in hindsight.

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[0] Or at any rate, our after-the-fact memories of a dream, which may themselves be unreliable or fabricated rather than a true record of a past experience.