Laurie Anderson’s exhibition “I’ll Be Your Mirror” about the relationship between man and artificial intelligence is taking place in Australia.

The State Library of South Australia in Adelaide is hosting an exhibition by Laurie Anderson, renowned contemporary artist and songwriter, entitled I’ll Be Your Mirror. She talks about how one of our most progressive contemporaries sees the relationship between man and artificial intelligence. Igor Gavrilov.

The exhibition “I’ll Be Your Mirror” includes works created by digital doubles of Laurie Anderson and her late husband, rock musician Lou Reed. In Australia, the exhibition is shown as part of the annual creative industries festival Adelaide Festival. The exhibition also included “The Scroll,” an artificial intelligence-generated version of the Bible that Laurie Anderson first showed in 2021 at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington.

The “I’ll Be Your Mirror” project was created by American Laurie Anderson in partnership with two Australian scientific organizations – the Machine Learning Institute and the Sia Furler Institute. The Sia Furler Institute for Contemporary Music and Media was created by one of the most successful pop writers of our time, whom the whole world knows under the name Sia. She is a native of Adelaide. With money from the woman who creates the biggest commercial hits, a woman at the forefront of the avant-garde has realized her project.

In 2020, before ChatGPT and Midjourney, Laurie Anderson forced an AI to study the entire volume of her own texts – poems, letters, articles. She started this work in Australia, but the project had to be paused due to the COVID-19 pandemic. After the work was resumed, a program for generating texts named AI Laurie Anderson appeared. Ms. Anderson then moved on to create a digital model of her husband, Lou Reed, the former Velvet Underground leader who died in 2013. So next to AI Laurie Anderson appeared AI Lou Reed, whom the artist “fed” the rock star’s texts.

The algorithm, created by Laurie Anderson, allows her to enter prompts, after which AI Lou Reed begins to create written answers in prose and poetry.

In addition to the very fact of creating digital models of the creators, one of the main intrigues of the project was the gap between style and content. Technically speaking, a machine can learn to write like Lou Reed, but can it be Lou Reed? “No, I don’t think I talk to my dead husband or write songs with him,” Laurie Anderson tells The Guardian. “But a man has a style and it can be replicated.”

In the year of Lou Reed’s death, the episode “I’ll Be Back Soon” was shown to the public as part of the Black Mirror series. It tells the story of how the widow of a man killed in a car accident creates a virtual model of him using his “digital footprint” – social media posts, voice messages and photos, and then transfers the generated artificial intelligence into a synthetic body. The title of the current exhibition – “I’ll Be Your Mirror” – has nothing to do with the series: Laurie Anderson at least claims that she has not seen this episode. However, the experiment partly repeats the plot of the latter. An artist says she’s “hopelessly hooked” on Lou Reed’s chatbot, which allows her to communicate with her late husband. According to her, three quarters of the texts that the generator produces are complete idiocy and stupidity, 15% may arouse fleeting interest, but the rest has a right to exist. Even for a living author, of flesh and blood, this is a good ratio.

From a visual point of view, the exhibition “I will be your mirror” can hardly surprise the viewer. These are huge, not very legible printed texts by AI Laurie Anderson and AI Lou Reed, placed on the walls of the library facing each other.

When you start to read the content, you can understand that AI Lou Reed is more likely to answer in rhyme, and AI Laurie Anderson brings more convincing arguments to discussions. In the pre-ChatGPT era, this would have been much more impressive than it is now.

A real sensation would be if two artificial intelligences communicated with each other without resorting to human prompts. It’s probably a matter of time. But now, in addition to Lou Reed’s widow, probably only his most devoted fans can feel sacred awe of the lyrics of AI Lou Reed.

Many fellow creators do not share Laurie Anderson’s reverent attitude towards artificial intelligence. Last year, Nick Cave’s post on his blog The Red Hand Files was frequently quoted. “Chat algorithms and neural networks have no feelings and therefore cannot go beyond the capabilities inherent in the program,” wrote the singer, calling ChatGPT’s imitation of songwriters “a grotesque mockery of humanity.” At the same time, the use of AI in art has many moral and legal aspects that have not yet been clarified. How does copyright work when a work is used by artificial intelligence to create a new art form? How to feel about the use of images of a real person in the creation of pornographic materials by a neural network? What will a show like “ABBA Voyage” (see “Kommersant” dated June 1, 2022) be like if virtual doubles of the artists also sing songs created by artificial intelligence? Progress cannot be undone, and such problems will inevitably have to be solved. In an interview, Laurie Anderson recalls how Karel Capek’s play RUR (1920), which pioneered the depiction of android robots, reflected humanity’s fear of machines taking over the world. However, even after a hundred years this did not happen. Not yet. And the main threat to humans remains humans.