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 by writing novels, composing symphonies, and crafting videos with eerie human-like fluency.
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.
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.
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).
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 magic where questionable goals of control and manipulation are camouflaged into a ‘do good’ narrative for humanity. Practically, we should:
Like the best works of Borges, Márquez, or Murakami, AI makes us question what is real and what is magical. The task ahead isn’t just to harness AI’s power, but to ensure its magic improves reality, not that AI is governed by magical arguments that could be easily manipulated.
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.
