Laurie Anderson on making an AI chatbot of Lou Reed

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/feb/28/laurie-anderson-ai-chatbot-lou-reed-ill-be-your-mirror-exhibition-adelaide-festival

by bryanrasmussen • 2 years ago

137 52 2 years ago

theguardian.com

bryanrasmussen2• 2 years ago

The title was 8 characters too long, I edited to make it fit, and then HN cut out "totally"

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

peutetre• 2 years ago

You can edit the title to put the "totally" back in. Hacker News doesn't know best.

Bend the machine to your will.

bryanrasmussen2• 2 years ago

I know, but I don't think it's that important, just thought it was funny.

boomboomsubban2• 2 years ago

So she finally found someone to hold her in their petrochemical electronic arms. Good for her.

nonrandomstring6• 2 years ago

Wherever I see self-loathing and nihilism passed off as an art-form, I know it's the industry speaking, not the artist.

SharkySharky• 2 years ago

I know plenty of self-loathing and nihilistic individuals and if they made music it would probably reflect that attitude. Therefore I'd be interested to learn why you think it's the "industry speaking" here instead of, let's say, sappy songs.

bregma• 2 years ago

I think the industry sounds more like Taylor Swift these days. Maybe it's the audience speaking.

tempodox• 2 years ago

Not petrochemical. That's only in “O Superman”. Chatbots don't launch missiles – yet.

boomboomsubban2• 2 years ago

I don't think petrochemicals necessarily mean missiles? They're chemicals derived from petroleum, I was thinking more plastics and I assume dozens of other things I know nothing about.

jzemeocala• 2 years ago

I thought for a second that the virtual Lou Reed was hooked on heroin.....lol

Turing_Machine• 2 years ago

Could you even have a persuasive simulated Lou Reed without his struggles with substance abuse being in there somewhere?

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).

cfr20232• 2 years ago

I don't think this sounds facetious. People and their life experiences are essentially inextricable. Nature vs. nurture stuff.

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.

xtiansimon• 2 years ago

For good reason. The colon directs your attention, typically to a list or quote.

“…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.

mentos• 2 years ago

What do you think was used to create this? A custom GPT or something more intensive?

JKCalhoun• 2 years ago

I love Laurie Anderson. The wife used to be afraid of her, ha ha.

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....

browningstreet• 2 years ago

Back in 2000 I was in Central Park for an afternoon summer stage event. The turn-out was low. Laurie Anderson and a friend sat on the grass next to me. We ended up doing that casual intermittent chat-about-the-show-and-crowd thing. I never acknowledged who she was but I knew who she was. It was like an afternoon of coffee shop bullshit, and it never got personal or meta-referential. She was a nice normal chatty person.

isoprophlex• 2 years ago

I went through a similar thing deepfaking my dead cat. It was nice to have a steady flow of desktop images generated by a cronjob of her doing cat things, as if she's still physically somewhere.

Also it made me feel like I was a deranged character in a Black Mirror episode, like Reed's wife in the article...

helsinkiandrew• 2 years ago

This is probably a nice thing todo a decade after the person has died but I wonder what it will do to how a person grieves if available immediately after they die?

My view - it probably won't be helpful.

andrepd• 2 years ago

Refer to Black Mirror's "Be Right Back".

pizzafeelsright• 2 years ago

This is sad. My AI wife wouldn't say the things my wife says. Why wait for her to die?

unrevelant• 2 years ago

A friend of mine called this back in 2019. Even wrote a short story about it; https://www.ectoplus.com/shorts/replacement/ - apparently I was the only person among the beta readers that figured it as a horror piece.

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.

cfr20232• 2 years ago

My god, this (very insightful) vision just gets more horrific with each line.

hyperdimension4• 2 years ago

Black Mirror keeps getting things depressingly correct. :/

HuShifang• 2 years ago

I think one further bit of horror is, it has the potential to erode your memory of the lost person, piece by piece regressing your recollection of them to the mean (so to speak) of the model's training set. At some point, will the bereaved -- to use the example given here -- just passively accept that the lost loved one actually was the sort of person to write about quilting, even when they never did in life?

tormeh• 2 years ago

That's the worst. This already happens in real life with dementia. Not sure why we would want to recreate it with computers...

toomuchtodo• 2 years ago

A plot point of a recent FBI’s Most Wanted episode “Ghost in the Machine.”

https://www.cbs.com/shows/video/QS8_lLDApWdwkawykAmsZMZqtvCD...

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt30746350/

BoorishBears• 2 years ago

I've seen this sentiment before and I think it misses the mark in a few ways.

- 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.

kromem• 2 years ago

It seems not enough people realize "Black Mirror" is science-fiction.

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.

jefurii• 2 years ago

Reminds me of the Dixie Flatline from Neuromancer.

Laurie Anderson on making an AI chatbot of Lou Reed

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