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Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).

The Trickster Emerges

David Lane's Late-Stage Playfulness with AI

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

For decades, David Lane has been known as a fierce and clear-eyed skeptic—an academic with a scalpel, dissecting pseudoscience, religious claims, and mystical overreach with the tools of critical thinking and evolutionary biology. His work has long provided ballast for those who value reason over revelation, and he has served as an important voice in the effort to defend empirical standards in an age of ideological confusion.

But something curious is happening.

Lane's recent forays into AI-enhanced storytelling, particularly through ChatGPT Pro, reveal an unexpected turn: a new embrace of imaginative, even whimsical, modes of inquiry. His latest output doesn't abandon skepticism, but it does complicate it. These stories often read like thought experiments wrapped in parable, laced with irony, ambiguity, or outright surrealism. What's going on here?

Rather than a retreat from skepticism, Lane appears to be widening its expressive range. The rationalist remains, but now walks in tandem with a shadow twin—the trickster, the satirist, the speculative storyteller. This is not a contradiction but an evolution. The skeptic is no longer just a debunker; he is a dramatist of ideas.

Across more than 30 such AI-assisted stories, certain themes recur with striking consistency. Lane is fascinated by the limits of perception and the unreliability of belief. Many stories depict characters trapped in simulations, alternate realities, or self-deceptions—highlighting how easily our minds can manufacture meaning or mistake illusion for insight. Others feature cosmic or post-human beings grappling with questions of mortality, ethics, and the nature of consciousness, often in ways that echo Lane's lifelong interest in science fiction as a philosophical playground. Humor, paradox, and irony are frequent devices, but so is empathy—these tales don't just mock the gullible; they also explore why we long for something more than the material world appears to offer.

This creative turn is all the more intriguing when viewed in the light of Lane's personal history. Raised in a devout Catholic household, Lane was immersed early on in a world of ritual, metaphysics, and moral absolutism. Catholicism offers no shortage of vivid imagery and powerful myths—suffering saints, divine judgment, holy mysteries—all of which leave an imprint on the psyche whether one remains within the tradition or not. Though Lane ultimately rejected its theological claims, the symbolic architecture of his early formation seems to echo through his later work.

Could his recent storytelling be a way of coming to terms with that religious inheritance? Not by returning to belief, but by recovering the imaginative depth and narrative archetypes that Catholicism, like many traditions, once supplied. The sacraments are gone, but something like sacramental imagination remains—transmuted through science fiction, irony, and AI. Rather than preaching or proselytizing, Lane now plays with these old structures from a critical, often comic distance.

In this light, his use of generative AI is not just a novelty, but a meta-commentary on the nature of authorship and myth-making. What better tool for a skeptic-storyteller than a machine designed to simulate meaning, improvise logic, and echo cultural tropes? ChatGPT becomes both medium and mirror—an ideal partner for exploring how stories, beliefs, and identities are constructed.

There may also be a psychological or developmental trajectory at play. In the early and middle stages of a career, intellectuals often feel the need to draw sharp lines, claim authority, and defend boundaries. But later in life, with fewer institutional battles to fight, some thinkers begin to loosen their grip on formality. Play returns. The inner child or poet or mystic, long buried beneath arguments and footnotes, begins to speak again—sometimes with a knowing smile. This doesn't signal a lapse in rigor, but a shift in orientation: less toward control, more toward exploration.

Lane's embrace of this shift suggests a deepening rather than a departure. His skepticism has matured into something more multidimensional: still committed to reason, but curious about paradox; still wary of dogma, but open to mystery as metaphor. His stories allow contradictions to stand unresolved, or turn back on themselves like Möbius strips. Instead of seeking final answers, they dramatize the longing for answers—and the strange beauty of their absence.

And perhaps this, more than anything, is what distinguishes Lane's late-stage work. He is not just asking what is true, but how truth appears, how we chase it, and how easily we are led astray by our own projections. In that sense, these stories are not departures from skepticism but its deepening—into the psychological, the literary, even the absurd. They are meditations on epistemological humility.

If his earlier writings often felt like arguments in a courtroom, these new stories feel like riddles whispered in a dream. The tone has shifted from confrontational to contemplative, from didactic to dialectical. The skeptic hasn't disappeared. But the storyteller—perhaps shaped long ago in Catholic school pews—is now fully awake, and perhaps having the most fun of all.

In the end, Lane's recent evolution may reflect something that transcends biography and methodology. It may reflect an existential insight: that while the universe may be indifferent, humans are not—and our need for meaning, connection, and awe will always outpace what science alone can deliver. The stories don't fill that gap with metaphysics. They simply show us what it's like to live with the gap.

The result is a genre uniquely his own: call it sci-philosophical auto-mythology—skepticism in the form of speculative fiction, animated by AI and illuminated by a lifelong tension between reason and reverence. A fitting legacy for someone who has never stopped asking questions, but now lets those questions echo in more dimensions than one.