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Laurie Anderson on making an AI chatbot of Lou Reed

theguardian.com

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Re: Laurie Anderson on making an AI chatbot of Lou Reed

#41

Post by hyperdimension »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #39
freejazz wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have. Yet its a popular and beautiful song called... Heroin. You'd be foolish if you think Lou wasn't aware that it got plenty of people into it and did have an ultimate effect of glamorizing it in some individuals' eyes. "I'm waiting for the man" is another.

> a popular and beautiful song 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).

Heh, this appeared right after writing my other comment. I'm glad I'm not the only one.

Re: Laurie Anderson on making an AI chatbot of Lou Reed

#42

Post by freejazz »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #39
freejazz wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have. Yet its a popular and beautiful song called... Heroin. You'd be foolish if you think Lou wasn't aware that it got plenty of people into it and did have an ultimate effect of glamorizing it in some individuals' eyes. "I'm waiting for the man" is another.

> a popular and beautiful song 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).

>(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.

Re: Laurie Anderson on making an AI chatbot of Lou Reed

#43

Post by nonrandomstring »

freejazz wrote: post #42
nonrandomstring wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a popular and beautiful song 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).

>(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.

Maybe my NY music culture chops isn't so great, but how I heard it David Bowie and Andy Warhol had to drag Lou kicking into the limelight.

Re: Laurie Anderson on making an AI chatbot of Lou Reed

#44

Post by HuShifang »

unrevelant wrote: post #31

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, v…

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?

Re: Laurie Anderson on making an AI chatbot of Lou Reed

#45

Post by InSteady »

freejazz wrote: post #37
InSteady wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you listened closely to the lyrics? The song most definitely does not glamorize heroin use. And by all accounts, Lou and the Underground were rather bemused when the media would imply that it did. Also, little known fact, Lou didn't particularly like heroin and didn't use it much at all. He was mostly a speed freak and alcoholic. I won't claim to know what the rest of GPs point is though :)

I have. Yet its a popular and beautiful song called... Heroin. You'd be foolish if you think Lou wasn't aware that it got plenty of people into it and did have an ultimate effect of glamorizing it in some individuals' eyes. "I'm waiting for the man" is another.

By this interpretation, do we then have to take any subject that rock and roll touches as glamorization? The sound of Heroin is dirty and gritty, the lyrics ugly and honest. The few positive notes in the song "It's my life, and it's my wife," "And I feel just like Jesus' son," "And now I'm better off than dead" are hardly glamorous. They just underscore the theme of the song: allure of self-annihilation in order to escape all the ugliness around us.

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.

Re: Laurie Anderson on making an AI chatbot of Lou Reed

#46

Post by InSteady »

hyperdimension wrote: post #40
InSteady wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you listened closely to the lyrics? The song most definitely does not glamorize heroin use. And by all accounts, Lou and the Underground were rather bemused when the media would imply that it did. Also, little known fact, Lou didn't particularly like heroin and didn't use it much at all. He was mostly a speed freak and alcoholic. I won't claim to know what the rest of GPs point is though :)

What I'm curious about is Perfect Day . I want to say I read him denying it being about heroin, but it just sounds too close to the feeling to me. Maybe I just see in it what I want to see; I'm not sure.

I'll admit that I haven't read any official biographies or anything, but I have picked up from several authentic (seeming) sources over the years that Lou was just not all that into heroin after some early experimentation. He was a massive alcoholic, and liked to inject speed for much of his career, but was never very big on downers.

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.

Re: Laurie Anderson on making an AI chatbot of Lou Reed

#47

Post by InSteady »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #43
freejazz wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>(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.

Maybe my NY music culture chops isn't so great, but how I heard it David Bowie and Andy Warhol had to drag Lou kicking into the limelight.

A recent documentary has many people around him, including his sister who he was close with, stating that he was very much motivated by and obsessed with fame. He desperately wanted to be much bigger than he ever got.

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).

Re: Laurie Anderson on making an AI chatbot of Lou Reed

#48

Post by toomuchtodo »

unrevelant wrote: post #31

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, v…

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/

Re: Laurie Anderson on making an AI chatbot of Lou Reed

#49

Post by BoorishBears »

unrevelant wrote: post #31

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, v…

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.

Re: Laurie Anderson on making an AI chatbot of Lou Reed

#50

Post by kromem »

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.

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