Laurie Anderson on making an AI chatbot of Lou Reed
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
It'll be a damned seductive business model. Reach out to people in their moment of greatest grief, offer a customized service with a subscription attached, and they never have to let go. Receive photos, videos, phone calls with an AI model of their partner. Why grieve at all? It's just like switching to a long distance relationship. Worse, unsubscribing would be like letting your loved one die all over again. The potential for abuse is... astronomical.
https://www.cbs.com/shows/video/QS8_lLDApWdwkawykAmsZMZqtvCD...
- People often value specific memories with a person. We can give AI memories but that takes recording them down. Stuff like Rewind.ai can close the gap, but anything that records you in enough fidelity to serve this function is going to need your cooperation.
- People aren't the same person to everyone. You need to intimately know the person who you're communicating with to correctly emulate a person. Lou Reed wasn't the same person to a random stranger asking that chatbot a question as he was to family. It's not enough to just record the person replicated at that point, you suddenly need an intimate understanding of the person interacting with the replica.
- As AI gets more advanced, why bother with lossy replications of people you knew? If grief is the underlying problem, why does an LLM so advanced it can replicate an entire human not just as readily help address the underlying mental health/social needs that are driving you to replicate a human?
Even for nefarious goals: why bother trying to copy your grandma, this hyper-intelligent AI that can replicate grandma can probably look at your social media and invent a new persona that's able to manipulate you pretty readily...
In a way fidelity is the biggest hurdle for "AI as a person", and you can generally do better on that by abandoning copying real people, and instead inventing people who fill the same underlying gap that the real person was supposed to. Equally dystopian, but not quite as bothersome when it comes to worrying about our own likenesses.
Also it made me feel like I was a deranged character in a Black Mirror episode, like Reed's wife in the article...
My view - it probably won't be helpful.
When when the science becomes possible, its imagined social constructs around the science remain fictional.
I'd encourage talking with grief counselors or grievers before deciding on their behalf what's healthy or not based on a TV show.
A recent (Feb 22, 2024) public radio interview on the topic has some more nuanced discussions around this than are being discussed here: https://www.wunc.org/podcast/embodied-podcast/2024-02-23/imm...
Worth looking into a bit for anyone interested in the topic.
Ever heard of the 27 club [0]?
On the night Amy Winehouse died, within an hour of her passing the media was inundated with wailing retrospectives. All of them had obviously been produced months or years in advance as often is done for Royals in expectation of a "celebrity death".
Amy's career always had the last chapter already written.
I watched the whole agonising show on television. Between each carefully arranged segment were advertisements for Gordon's Gin, Smirnov Ice and product placements for all manner of alcohol, gambling and drug paraphernalia.
The entertainments media literally led her to the Wicker Man [1,2] and lit the fire.
Edit: good taste requires I add original Edward Woodward version of Wicker Man
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/27_Club
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wicker_Man_(2006_film)
Let's clear something up first, the "addiction" in the title refers to Laurie Anderson's (age 76, not dead yet) "addiction" to using the Lou Reed chatbot she created using her deceased husbands (died liver disease following cancer, aged 71) extensive archive of interviews, prose and song lyrics, etc.
She's aware it's not him, she thinks it's mostly produces silly content but is occasionally on the mark, she's been an avante guarde technologist and performance artist most of her life.
Here's the pair of them on the one track: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zG5tG1McLzk
Laurie Anderson - Zero And One (Home of the Brave 1985) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTYEVabkoDM
> Wherever I see self-loathing and nihilism passed off as an art-form,
refers to, and how this:
> Because nothing sells quite like the spectacle of self-immolation
ties into the content linked. As it stands it appears as though you've just riffed off the word addiction in the title, which naturally leads to pointing out why it was used.
That covered, it's like what my painter friend said to me: https://youtu.be/xTlsSXNT2bg?t=203
over to you.
I won't claim to know what the rest of GPs point is though :)
Also "Perfect Day", some might say is a lullaby to drugs.
(Can't believe some comments are just sooooooo tone deaf thanking I'm expressing dislike for these amazing artists rather than criticising the industry that feeds on them).
Because it's an over-dramatization. Lou wrote those songs and put them out for commercial sale. No one made him. They aren't being doubly exploited in his death.
This is part of the tension that lead to Lou kicking John Cale out (experimental rhythms and screeching viola were never going to take them to the heights of rock and roll stardom) and eventual breakup of the band.
If anything, I could see Bowie and Warhol dragging Lou into the smoky, off-color limelight of the underground and alternative arts scene, away from the pop stardom he was fixated on. He certainly left Warhol behind abruptly and unceremoniously when he felt he was being pinned down. Immediately after was when the Underground produced their most poppy, mass appeal songs like Rock and Roll, Sweet Jane, Who Loves the Sun, and Oh! Sweet Nothin' (some of my personal favorites).
People will glamorize anything that someone famous or iconic (both in Lou's case) put out into the world. That doesn't mean the artists themselves have glamorized the subject.. This would be like accusing Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk of glamorizing incel culture and alt-right violence, when he was in fact intending to do the opposite.
And let's not be obtuse and ignore the fact that you replied to GP's claim that Lou did not intend to glamourize addiction with "Heroin was his most famous song. What the hell are you talking about already?" You haven't outright stated much of anything of substance, but your argumentative tone has invited discussion anyway so here we are.
>"That doesn't mean the artists themselves have glamorized the subject.. "
>And let's not be obtuse and ignore the fact that you replied to GP's claim that Lou did not intend to glamourize addiction with "Heroin was his most famous song. What the hell are you talking about already?" You haven't outright stated much of anything of substance, but your argumentative tone has invited discussion anyway so here we are.
OP's claim? Did you just jump in on that one post? Did I quote something that led you to this conclusion?
He wrote Perfect Day as a solo artist, so this would have been long after his experimentations with heroin, based on what I've gathered 2nd and 3rd hand. I think the association is so strong due to it playing through the iconic overdose scene in Trainspotting. Lou actually wrote a lot of genuine love songs in his later days with the Underground as well as in his solo career.
It is a melancholy, bittersweet love song, but that's just Lou, not necessarily anything (directly) to do with drugs. IMO there's no reason to assume he was thinking of heroin while writing this song. The fact that it is evocative of heroin use is perhaps coincidence, perhaps something more.
See now that is interesting because I've never seen that movie, but I guess it's not just me who can see the connection after all.
I agree with you though, it definitely fits into Lou's general theme, so it could just be a coincidence after all.
"We currently have nearly 1,700 advances on file" - https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/times-insider/20...
She is living the life she imagined.
When we saw her put on a show with some material she was working on it didn't seem to make my wife (girlfriend then) feel any warmer toward her. But after the show Laurie sat on the edge of the stage and just chatted with the audience and my wife saw the "non performer" side of her and she was no longer scary.
Artists....
That might sound facetious, but I'm serious. It might not be explicitly stated, but IMO it'd have to be at least tacitly present.
If you took out the drug/alcohol abuse, the result would be a simulation of a different person, not Lou Reed as we know him (same with, say, Keith Richards, or any number of others one could name).
Separating/abstracting person from their experiences is as you say, a representation of a different, non-existent person - a mutant. Or worse still, some kind of dissection.
Disliking peanuts and being allergic to them each motivate abstaining from eating peanuts, an imitation of that person that abstained from eating peanuts without insight into why would be a rather pale imitation indeed.
“…chatbot of Lou Reed: 100%, sadly addicted”
I read this as directing our attention to the punchline of a bad joke or deeply strange project manifesting a deceased person in a chatbot which generated text somehow emblematic of addiction.
original title: Laurie Anderson on making an AI chatbot of Lou Reed: ‘I’m totally, 100%, sadly addicted’
Bend the machine to your will.