Tuesday, March 5, 2024

Laurie Anderson on making an AI chatbot of Lou Reed: ‘I’m totally, 100%, sadly addicted’


Laurie Anderson on making an AI chatbot of Lou Reed I m totally 100 sadly addicted Laurie Anderson The Guardian

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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