AI and Magical Realism: When technology blurs the line between wonder and reality

The challenges of governing artificial intelligence often feel like something out of a Gabriel García Márquez novel, where the extraordinary blends seamlessly with the everyday, and the line between the possible and the impossible grows faint. This week (22-27 June 2025) at the 20th Internet Governance Forum (IGF), I proposed using magical realism as a lens to understand AI’s complexities. Here’s why this literary tradition might offer a useful tool for the AI debates ahead.

Throughout history, technologies have been ‘magical’ in helping us overcome physical and cognitive limitations—flight defied gravity, medicine conquered disease, and the internet collapsed distance. But AI is different. It doesn’t just extend our abilities; it mimics and ‘hacks’ them from writing novels and composing symphonies, to crafting videos with eerie human-like fluency. Yet, unlike pure fantasy, AI is deeply embedded in our daily reality – chatbots answer customer service calls, algorithms curate our news, and deepfakes warp political discourse.

This interplay between the magical and the real is at the heart of AI governance. How do we regulate something that feels both wondrous and mundane? How do we balance its promises with its perils? To navigate this, we might turn to the literary tradition of magical realism, where the impossible coexists seamlessly with the ordinary, and where the supernatural serves not as an escape but as a lens to examine deeper truths.

AI as a magical realist force

Like the floating grandmothers and prophetic dreams in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, AI’s capabilities are astonishing yet accepted without much astonishment. We casually ask chatbots for advice, let algorithms predict our desires, and watch AI-generated art win competitions—all without fully pausing to question how strange this is. Just as magical realism presents the extraordinary as ordinary, AI has normalised what should feel miraculous.

Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children explores how supernatural abilities intertwine with historical and political realities. Similarly, AI doesn’t exist in a vacuum—it shapes economies (automating jobs), politics (spreading disinformation), and even intimacy (chatbots as companions). The “magic” isn’t just a spectacle; it has real consequences, forcing us to confront questions about labour, creativity, and truth.

The dangers of unquestioned magic

In Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits, clairvoyance and ghosts are woven into a family’s saga, but the true focus is on power, love, and oppression. Likewise, AI’s most pressing issues aren’t technical – they’re human. When AI writes a novel, who owns it? When it replicates a voice, whose consent matters? When it predicts crime, does it reinforce bias?

Like the constant rain in One Hundred Years of Solitude – a symbol of unending sorrow – AI’s risks linger in the background: job displacement, loss of privacy, and the erosion of human agency. Magical realism teaches us that the supernatural is never neutral – it reflects society’s fears and desires. AI, too, mirrors our hopes (medical breakthroughs, creative collaboration) and our fears (surveillance, deception).

Governing AI between ‘black’ and ‘white’ magic

The challenge of AI governance is akin to navigating a magical realist narrative – how do we impose rules on something that often defies conventional logic? García Márquez’s Macondo is a town where miracles happen, but they don’t prevent exploitation or violence. Similarly, AI’s ‘magic’ doesn’t absolve us of ethical responsibility.

AI governance should navigate between ‘black’ and ‘white’ magic and, in particular, identify ‘grey’ ones where questionable goals of control and manipulation are camouflaged into a ‘do good’ narrative for humanity. Practically, we should:

• Avoid using ‘magical argument’ for practical governance – e.g. framing current policy solutions on market, human rights, and knowledge control in the context of the future, sometimes ‘magical’ developments.
• Acknowledge the magic without being seduced by it – regulate AI’s risks without stifling innovation.
• Ground policies in realism – address immediate risks of labour impacts, content manipulation, and security. misinformation, not just speculative doomsday scenarios.
• Learn from stories – just as magical realism uses the impossible to reveal human truths, AI should enhance, not replace, our humanity.

AI magical realism echoes as I close in, staying at the 20th IGF in Oslo. AI is not science fiction – it’s magical realism. It’s both extraordinary and mundane, both hopeful and unsettling.

Like the best works of Borges, Márquez, or Murakami, it forces us to question what’s real, what’s human, and what we’re willing to accept. The task ahead isn’t just to harness AI’s power, but to ensure its magic serves reality, not the other way around.

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Chat with the Major of AI Macondo

Step into the shimmering heat of Macondo, the legendary town from Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude—now resurrected in the AI age. Chat with the Mayor, where prophecies are written in code and the ghosts of the Buendía family whisper through neural networks. Ask about forgotten histories, algorithmic rainstorms, or the ethics of machines that dream – just don’t be surprised if the answers blur the line between enchantment and engineering. After all, in Macondo, the impossible has always been ordinary.