Laurie Anderson Lou Reed and an AI Walk Into A Bar

From the interview in the NYT:

Anderson said she has become obsessed, lately, with artificial intelligence. An Australian university she has collaborated with has created a text engine designed to write in three styles: Laurie Anderson, Lou Reed and a combination Anderson/Reed. You just have to feed it a little information — six words, or a photo — and it will produce, almost instantly, a whole virtual text.

The program isn’t perfect yet, Anderson said. Roughly a third of what the computer spits out is total nonsense — “monkeys with typewriters” — and another third is just boring. But the final third is surprising, even authentic, some kind of new fresh magic. That final third is what keeps her coming back. Sometimes she sits there with the hunger of an addict, feeding words and pictures into the engine, seeing what comes out. For a long time, she would save the texts. They felt so precious. After a while, though, she realized that the texts were infinite. She could have one whenever she needed it. So she read them and then let them go.

Anderson got out her laptop, turned it toward me and opened the A.I. text box.

“Ask it a question,” she said.

I thought for a second. “What is the story of America?” I asked.

Anderson typed it in. After a few seconds, the A.I. answered with a long paragraph in Anderson’s voice. It was actually a good impression — it talked about America elliptically, as Anderson would, using a metaphor of a theater production. “Theaters who really know what they’re doing don’t just copy other people’s lines but rework them, amplify them, make them their own,” the fake Anderson said, and the real Anderson read it aloud. “And people tell each other their story which is called the story and there are lots of stories about betrayal and redemption and love and hate and heroism and sacrifice and the end. And then of course there are the countless movies that are made every day by some kind of action hero or action hero with a lot of running and talking and bravery and some sort of democracy.”

Not bad, we agreed.

Then Anderson ran that same question through the A.I. — “What is the story of America?” — but asked it to answer in the voice of Lou Reed.

The computer answered with a poem:

The story
Of the dirt
It hurt
To be so good
And then to be so bad
You should
Not have come
All the way
From Europe and back again
Just to see
What would happen
To these people
If they found out
What you had done
But what could they do
With all the evidence
That they had gathered
Both from you
And from others
Namely, from your face
The albino friend
Who came disguised
As a bird from the air
To ask for money
Because he or she was worth
More than you or your parents
Were worth more
Because of what
They did in the name
Of whom you were made
The bondsman walks slowly
In front of me
Holding his audience
Until I walk
Slowly in front of him
Toward the light at the
At the end of the streetlights

Anderson read this out loud to me: this poem about America, her lost country, in the voice of her dead husband, ending with the discussion of him moving toward one final light. She did a few more Lou poems, including one in which he spoke in the most intimate terms: “my eyes are thin and dry, my heart is beating very fast.” Anderson’s whole career has been about voice, voice as presence, and here — in the room with us, coming out of a computer — was her husband’s voice. I asked her how that felt, to hear this simulacrum, this computer-Lou, referring to himself like that.

“Wonderful,” she said. “Just great. He’s talking to me from somewhere else. I definitely do feel that. The line is pretty thin for me.”

Finally we fed the A.I. a photo of one of Anderson’s recent paintings, a huge whirl of color that she hung in the Hirshhorn a few weeks earlier, then painted over and renamed “Autumn.” We fed it to the A.I. and waited. We waited longer. We kept waiting. The A.I. had nothing to say.

From a really good article here: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/06/magazine/laurie-anderson.html?searchR...