Alchemy and AI: When Translation Becomes Creation
From commercials to clients to clinicians, everyone knows about AI. Though to know about something and to know something are often two very different things.
The phrase “AI-generated” compresses a wide range of human–AI activity into a single category. That can be useful from a distance, but it hides the differences that matter up close. It can describe something produced with little thought, care, or effort, the connotation increasingly attached to “AI slop.” But it can also describe processes involving exploration, rejection, verification, revision, and judgment.
All of that looks at AI from the outside. It is a fair vantage point, but not the only one. It misses the more intimate side: what happens between a person and the thing they are making.
One metaphor I find helpful is that of a laboratory.
There is something fitting about that comparison because AI itself is often treated in strangely alchemical terms. From one angle, it can look foolish or fraudulent: a machine producing cheap imitations and synthetic sludge. From another, it is discussed almost mythically, as though one can place a few words into a mysterious apparatus and receive something extraordinary in return. Both views can make the process seem more magical, and more automatic, than it actually is.
Historically, alchemy was concerned with transformations of matter, most famously the attempt to turn base metals into gold. In Psychology and Alchemy, Jung reads many of its images and operations as a symbolic language for psychological transformation: material enters a vessel, undergoes separation, combination, pressure, and refinement, and emerges changed.
The material is not the only thing undergoing transformation. The operator changes too.
When Translation Becomes Creation
Some forms of creation begin as translation. Something is already there: an intuition, an experience, a distinction, a connection. But it is not yet in a form another person can encounter. The act of carrying it across changes it. Selection changes it. Clarification changes it. Rejection changes it. Rearrangement changes it.
At a certain point in that process, often a point difficult if not impossible to locate precisely, steering becomes shaping, and shaping becomes making. What began as an attempt to express something already present can produce something that did not quite exist before.
The act of finding a form for something can change the thing being expressed. The crossing itself becomes part of the making.
When Generation Becomes Abundant
AI makes this particularly visible because generation becomes abundant. When another plausible sentence, framing, analogy, or explanation can be produced in seconds, generation itself becomes less scarce. The difficult work moves elsewhere.
What increasingly matters is judgment: deciding what is true, what is useful, what is responsible, what is distinctive, what actually carries the meaning, and what should simply be discarded.
Which version actually says what I mean? Which phrase only sounds clever? Which connection survives scrutiny, and which collapses the moment it is examined?
Generating an idea and discovering one leave the same work undone. Something still has to be evaluated, judged, and decided on.
If I cannot explain why I believe something, defend it when challenged, or name what would count against it, fluency has outrun understanding. I know about the idea without understanding it.
That is where the alchemical analogy becomes useful again. The apparatus matters. What goes into it matters. What stays out matters. What gets combined, separated, exposed, contained, discarded, or carried forward matters.
The vessel gives the work a boundary. Pressure reveals what survives.
The Other Side of Abundance
But the same conditions that make AI generative can also make it difficult to stop. AI can create the feeling of progress without actual completion. Possibility can multiply faster than decisions. Refinement can continue long after refinement is useful.
AI is therefore not only a technological tool. It is also becoming a psychological object: something that can clarify, seduce, organize, flatter, frustrate, and overwhelm. It can make thought visible, but it can also make indecision productive-looking. It can help clarify a thought, but it cannot tell us whether we are becoming clearer or merely more convinced.
Most conversations about AI understandably focus on what the technology can produce, what it can do, or what it might do to us. As a therapist, my interest lies elsewhere: in what happens between a person and a system during the act of making something, and in how that making shapes the person doing it.
Jung once described the meeting of two personalities through another chemical image: “The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”
AI is not a personality in the sense Jung meant, and I do not think the comparison should be pushed that far. But the image captures something important about interaction itself: a consequential encounter need not leave the participant exactly as they entered it.
Creative translation works in both directions. The material changes because selection, rejection, clarification, and judgment leave their mark on it. But the person doing that work may also leave with a different understanding than the one they brought in: a distinction made clearer, an assumption exposed, a position strengthened or abandoned, a capacity for judgment exercised.
The gold is the changed operator.
References
Jung, C. G. (1933). Modern Man in Search of a Soul. Harcourt, Brace & Company.
Jung, C. G. (1968). Psychology and Alchemy (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). Collected Works of C. G. Jung (Vol. 12). Princeton University Press.
If you want the more practical side of this, I keep a collection of writing and resources on AI, ADHD, and neurodivergence on my website. I also maintain a free resource library
And if this way of thinking about neurodivergence, meaning, and human–AI interaction resonates with you, you can learn more about my work at WD Therapy.
