Ai magician
Paul David Carpenter is an AI Magician who blends magic, mentalism, and artificial intelligence to create experiences that reveal how belief forms, and how easily it can be guided.
Paul David Carpenter
AI Magician
What Is an AI Magician?
An AI Magician is not a technologist performing tricks, but a performer exploring artificial intelligence as a force of perception, belief, and misdirection.
Where traditional magic revealed the limits of human attention, AI magic reveals the limits of human understanding—especially when machines are treated as authorities.
Paul David Carpenter’s Work
Paul David Carpenter’s work as an AI Magician sits at the intersection of performance, artificial intelligence, and human belief systems. Rather than presenting AI as a tool or spectacle, his work treats it as a black box authority—something audiences already trust, fear, and misunderstand.
Through live performance, writing, music, and visual art, Carpenter uses artificial intelligence as misdirection, allowing audiences to project meaning onto systems they do not fully understand. The real subject of the work is not the machine, but the human impulse to surrender judgment to perceived intelligence.
His practice spans multiple mediums, each reinforcing the same core idea:
Belief precedes truth.
Live AI Magic & Mentalism
In performance, Carpenter integrates artificial intelligence into magic and mentalism not as a method, but as a narrative force. AI systems function as oracles, authorities, or unreliable narrators—revealing how easily audiences defer agency when a machine appears confident or intelligent.
Performance with the use of AI as a way to show the wonder and pitfalls. From 15 min talks to Full 1.5 hour performances.
Writing on Artificial Intelligence & Culture
Carpenter is the author of multiple books exploring artificial intelligence, perception, and emerging cultural risks. His long-form writing examines how AI reshapes authorship, trust, creativity, and power—often years before these conversations enter mainstream discourse. In addition to books, he maintains an extensive writing archive with hundreds of published essays and articles.
Paul David Carpenter’s work exists across multiple disciplines, unified by a single inquiry:
How do humans assign authority, meaning, and trust to systems they do not understand?
Artificial intelligence is not treated as a novelty or shortcut, but as a medium through which belief itself can be examined. Rather than separating performance from art or technology from narrative, Carpenter’s work intentionally collapses these boundaries. Each discipline reinforces the others.
Performance, Art, and Artificial Intelligence
Writing as a Parallel System
Carpenter’s long-form writing operates in parallel with his performance and art practice. Essays, books, and published articles examine artificial intelligence not as a technical subject, but as a cultural and psychological force.
Recurring themes include:
The illusion of machine objectivity
The aesthetics of intelligence
Belief formation in algorithmic systems
Creativity under probabilistic authorship
Writing serves as the theoretical backbone to the experiential work, allowing ideas explored on stage or in art to be examined explicitly.
