I recently had an argument in a pub with another magician who had a trick to show me. I won’t go into the trick, what you need to know is that it used a deck of cards with beautifully complex illustrations on them.
Oh wait did I say illustrations? I meant AI generated images. But this post isn’t about that. This post is about one of the things he said in the ensuing argument.
He said that without the AI he never would have been able to create 52 illustrated cards, that the art would have cost too much from a real artist¹, and so this wasn’t hindering any artists careers, since there was no version of this where he hired an artist. He either used AI or the trick never got made.
I said maybe if you can’t do something without the AI, you probably shouldn’t do it at all.
He didn’t like that.
Before I go on, its worth noting that this post brings together two sets of past posts into a single thread. It’s obviously more of the AI series but also ties into the end of the series I have now retagged as the Therapy series, focusing on the particular psychlogcal oddities, traumas and entitlements of magicians which set them aside from other creatives.
See in many ways my friend (I hope we are still friends after this argument) is completely correct. This particular prop probably would have been prohibitively expensive without AI generated images… You know, I can’t keep using such a long phrase over and over. This particular prop probably would have been prohibitively expensive without slop. But it wasn’t his first trick, he’s released several tricks through the years, all with specially printed cards, and almost entirely before slop was even a thing. Sure, this needs slop, but none of his past releases did. What happened was that the availability of slop pushed it’s way into his ambitions, and whereas circa 2021 he would have looked for tweakable public domain images² or found an affordable artist to do a non oil painting level image. But slop was there so he used it. I don’t want to be down on him though, because this is not an isolated occurrence. If anything I’d say he felt pressured into taking this route because so many other magic producers are doing it.
I’ve spoken before about Alakazam using slop on their product packaging, website, and now all their youtube thumbnails. Craig Petty’s video thumbnails have mostly gone back from his foray into slop toons to the old style of handmade photoshop montage, but his product trailers are still slopped to the hilt.
A recent sighting was Matthew Wrights trailer for The Noble Virtues². This is not something he made in his home office like my friend. This is a boxed trick with factory made precision metal props, and a set of five cards which have slop on both sides. It’s got me wondering if he also sent slop to the manufacturers as a reference for the ornate designs on the metal parts. Five cards and some simple relief work for a metal etching process… And he couldn’t pay an artist.
So maybe, with the world as it is, if you want to release a magic trick you need to have custom printed cards which look like brilliantly rendered oil paintings.
And maybe to make it as a professional magician, you need a really flashy poster.
And perhaps, in that vein, you need to fill your social media with pictures of you posing with energy crackling from your hands as you burst through a giant playing card³.
But do you need… A theme song? You know, to stand out from all the other magicians with professionally produced theme songs.
Quick! name your favourite magician with a professionally produced theme song!
Derren often ends his shows with a musical celebrity cameo but that’s not the same thing. Similarly David Copperfield has bespoke compositions for his illusions but thats not a theme song.
Paul Daniels TV shows had a theme song but that was the studios theme for the program. I saw him live twice and he had no such theme.
The only magicians I can name with a theme song are Penn and Teller, whom I saw live in vegas back in 2016 and did indeed have a theme song with their names in the show⁴.
But also, half the members of my local magic club have theme songs now, even the ones who don’t have a show. Because they used something called Suno, which can produce bland overproduced pop music in a variety of styles to fit given lyrics or themes. When a member of the club told me about this, I asked him to show me by generating a song called “I want to kill the President” in the hope that the app banned him and I could save his soul.
No luck so far.
This sort of fits in with the picture I’ve been building in my previous posts about the tendency for magicians to not really have much of an artistic vision other than reflections they’ve seen in the work of other magicians. What they primarily want is positive feedback from others, in the form of applause, praise, accolades, astonishment, all that. They want to feel powerful, and there aren’t many other ways to get Godhood in the mail.
Postcards from Melanesia
In the early 20th century, during World War II, a number of pacific islands became strategic temporary bases for American and European forces. These islands would have large supply airdrops for the troops housed there, and the indigenous people who observed this were led to beleive that these interlopers were somehow in touch with the Gods themselves and were essentially conjuring these goods, the like of which they had never seen before, from heaven. Mass manufactured food and clothing, mostly for the benefit of the military, was shared with the locals in order to placate them⁵.
When the troops left, we saw the modern emergence of what most people now consider to be the stereotypical cargo cult. The military told the islanders that it was their actions on the island which were summoning the shipments, and so the islanders attempted to replicate said actions. They carved radios and headsets from wood, mimicked the rituals of the military admin, all in the hope that this would summon more cargo from the Gods. Some even maintained runways for planes to land on, but they never came back.
I first heard of the term “cargo cult” in reference to Burberry. Yes, the fashion brand. Technically the way it was applied would work for any designer label but it was Burberry got the shitty and of the stick in my personal story. I asked my wife why there were so many people who were not particularly wealthy saving up to buy designer goods. At the time the trend was the specific Burberry plaid designs on hats seen atop the heads of teenagers with seemingly little else to their names. Where at their age I had been saving for electronic devices and media, things which I perceived as having some utility, these kids were buying ugly designer clothes.
The answer was that people associate designer brands with wealth, and while they are not themselves wealthy, they want to surround themselves with the trappings of wealth, in the hope that the lifestyle of the rich and famous will follow. It is, in short, a cargo cult.
Similarly magicians buy the tricks which they have seen more famous and successful magicians perform in the hope that it will make them famous and successful.
And the theme songs and posters and bespoke fancy cards are all part of that. Every magician who has not made it wants to, and this is the only path they see.
They Want You To Want To Be Big
This is my second attempt to write this post, and originally it started with the part I’m writing now, culminating with the phrase “I’m in my giving up era”. This sequence of words lodged in my brain and made me depressed for a fortnight, which is why I’m coming at it now from a different angle.
In my previous post I focused on the fact that there was so much of a push for people to make their magic (and other hobbies) fit into ever smaller gaps in their lives. The companion post was about the flipside, how anything larger than this was sold with the promise that it would be the thing that could break you out of this constrained life. Props that cost hundreds or even thousands of pounds, but it worth it because with this prop… You can become famous, and never have to worry about fitting magic into your tiny life ever again.
There is a very strong messaging coming from the culture of magicians, that expensive tricks and fancy props make you a better magician. This is because a large amount of that culture comes from magic shops, who have colonised social media for magicians with product launches, product trailers, product reviews, product recommendations, and lots of other things which start with product.
It’s not hard to draw a line from this to the idea that other trappings, logos, posters, cartoon avatars, and even theme songs, could contain the special sauce for fame and fortune.
So trick producers, like my argumentative friend, also want this apparent mark of quality which will lure in the cargo cultists who see these new expensive looking props⁶.
I remember when the best selling tricks had nothing but stick figures.
There is another side to this but I want to separate it off into its own post. My next post will be about a concept I have not mentioned outside of footnotes since 2021.
Fascism.
¹ For reference the art was more like detailed oil paintings than the usual cartoon illustrations. The pictures simultaneously reminded me of the character work of Paul Kidby without the exaggerated features and the surreal settings of Robert Gonsalves, without the ambiguity illusions. So essentially it was like the work of 2 great artists minus all the intentional choices that make their work special. AI, everybody.
² Now you have to at least admire the irony of releasing an age old trick with a new prop designed with slop and calling it Noble Virtues.
³ I haven’t seen one of these since I stopped using Facebook. Arguably the best decision I’ve made in 2026.
⁴ So this is where my memory faulters slightly, I distinctly recall reading somewhere in the programme or on a poster that the theme tune was sung by one time teeny bopper heartthrob Aaron Carter, but I cannot find any information about this online. Indeed the only only time Aaron Carter and Penn & Teller have ever been recorded in collaboration was his appearance in their Off The Deep End special. All their other musical credits, such as themes for their TV shows and the Lift Off For Love song are credited to Gary Stockdale, who has collaborated with them extensively. If you can shed light on why I remember this, find a way to psychically contact me.
⁵ This technically started in the 19th century, when these islands were used as part of the slave trade shipping routes and the locals thought the goods arriving on boats were an answer to their own prophecies. They assumed the white traders had in fact intercepted a bounty meant for the island, which caused a lot of tension. Foreknowledge of this fact is why the WWII arrivals were quick to establish themselves as the harbingers of fortune rather than plunderers… But its still colonialism and control at the end of the day. Its just morr Aldus Huxley than George Orwell.
⁶ The great irony is that now the expensive looking props, made with slop, are probably cheaper to produce than the props of old with simplistic cartoon art that someone was actually paid to draw.