What is the meaning of the white swan in the famous Bohemian Rhapsody music video

You read the title and thought: “What kind of nonsense is this?” But it’s actually not nonsense at all.

This is one of the topics I quite seriously discussed with ChatGPT not long ago. Look.

Explain the symboisim of the song “Bohemian Rhapsody”

Bohemian Rhapsody is famous mostly because nobody can agree what it’s about. That’s not a bug. That’s the point…

Why is the white swan in the music video then?

Bohemian Rhapsody didn’t originally have a proper narrative music video. What people usually mean is the later visualizations and stage imagery that borrow the white swan motif. And yes, it’s there on purpose. No, it’s not random “artsy nonsense.” Unfortunately.

The white swan is a blunt symbol pretending to be subtle.

In Western symbolism, the white swan is purity, innocence, idealized self, the version of you that is acceptable to society. Think Swan Lake: Odette, the cursed innocent, graceful, fragile, doomed unless loved correctly. That’s the key. The white swan is not power. It’s vulnerability dressed as beauty.

…

So no, the swan isn’t decoration. It’s the lie the narrator is trying to preserve while everything falls apart. And the fact that it’s a white swan, not a triumphant one, tells you how that attempt ends.

I also discussed why Michael Jackson, in the “Thriller” music video, is supposedly walking along the ocean shore and staring thoughtfully into the distance (no, he isn’t walking there, and he isn’t staring). And many similar things.

So how did this happen?

What is now commonly called Artificial Intelligence is, in practice, so-called Large Language Models (LLMs). And despite all their complexity, the explanation of how they work fits into a single sentence:

They take some text and simply continue it in the most plausible way.

There is no mind there. No intelligence. No doubt or reflection. There is only a statistically nice continuation of a phrase. It is literally a big black box that is fed some letters and produces other letters. The model will never say “I don’t know” or “I’m not sure.” It will just keep adding words to the text.

Of course, to avoid creating a planet-scale nonsense generator, the models have lots of checks and constraints. If you ask directly about the white swan, it will, of course, answer that there is no swan there. But if you shift from discussing the symbolism of the song to the music video, it will start flapping its wings quite literally after the second message, as if it had always been there. Even with less popular works, you can catch such glitches almost immediately.

And if you think about it just a little, it stops being funny.

The white swan example is good because anyone who has seen the video even once will say that there are no swans there. But imagine you are discussing a new problem, where there are no ready-made answers. No proven solutions. The model confidently proposes an option. It is logical. Coherent. Sounds good. And at the same time, it is completely made up. And you don’t see the boundary between knowledge and hallucination. Because they have the same form and are very logically intertwined.

And literally every message that goes beyond what the neural network was trained on can be such a “white swan.” Or its feather. Or a footprint.

Now imagine how many quite serious decisions are made based on such “white swans.” About money. About health. About relationships. About careers. By you personally. By the people around you.

Have you imagined the scale?