Laurie Anderson describes her experience using an artificial intelligence text generator to emulate the words of her late husband Lou Reed. “I mean, I really do not think I’m talking to my dead husband and writing songs with him – I really don’t. But people have styles, and they can be replicated.” Via The Guardian
There’s a 2013 Black Mirror episode in which a young widow played by Hayley Atwell signs up to an online service that scrapes a person’s entire digital footprint to create a virtual simulation. She soon starts chatting online with her late husband (Domhnall Gleeson), before things inevitably get Black Mirror-y.
Laurie Anderson, the American avant garde artist, musician and thinker, hasn’t seen the episode but, in the last few years, has lived a version of it: growing hopelessly hooked on an AI text generator that emulates the vocabulary and style of her own longtime partner and collaborator, Velvet Underground co-founder Lou Reed, who died in 2013.
“People are like, ‘Wow, you were so prescient; I didn’t even know what you were talking about back then’,” she says on a video call from New York.
A new Anderson exhibition, I’ll Be Your Mirror, has just opened in Adelaide, where Anderson will be doing an In Conversation event via live stream on Wednesday 6 March. The last time Anderson was in Australia, in March 2020, she spent a week working with the University of Adelaide’s Australian Institute for Machine Learning. Before the pandemic forced her to catch one of the last flights home, they had been exploring language-based AI models and their artistic possibilities, drawing on Anderson’s body of written work.
In one experiment, they fed a vast cache of Reed’s writing, songs and interviews into the machine. A decade after his death, the resulting algorithm lets Anderson type in prompts before an AI Reed begins “riffing” written responses back to her, in prose and verse.
“I’m totally 100%, sadly addicted to this,” she laughs. “I still am, after all this time. I kind of literally just can’t stop doing it, and my friends just can’t stand it – ‘You’re not doing that again are you?’
“I mean, I really do not think I’m talking to my dead husband and writing songs with him – I really don’t. But people have styles, and they can be replicated.”
The results, Anderson says, can be hit and miss. “Three-quarters of it is just completely idiotic and stupid. And then maybe 15% is like, ‘Oh?’. And then the rest is pretty interesting. And that’s a pretty good ratio for writing, I think.”
On her side of the call, Anderson starts typing. “You know what, I’ll just bring it up right now while we’re talking and you can give me a phrase.”
Looking at the morning traffic outside my window, I offer the very mundane, “bus idling on the street”. She feeds it in as we keep talking.
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