Drawing on historical and contemporary examples, this paper discusses relationships between humans and machines in creative co-production with generative AI. It distinguishes between generative systems as augmenting tools and autonomous collaborators, and adopts the term communion to describe the close degree of exchange that is possible when working with these systems. It draws on historical examples of surrealist and AI artworks, and more recent examples made with Large Language Models and GAN-based generation. It concludes with a discussion of the primacy of text as an entry point to the possibilities of creative AI.