<
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/feb/28/laurie-anderson-ai-chatbot-lou-reed-ill-be-your-mirror-exhibition-adelaide-festival>
"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.”"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
