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Laurie Anderson on making an AI chatbot of Lou Reed
- mentos 3y agoWhat do you think was used to create this? A custom GPT or something more intensive?
- bryanrasmussen 3y agoThe 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 3y agoYou can edit the title to put the "totally" back in. Hacker News doesn't know best. Bend the machine to your will.
- bryanrasmussen 3y agoI know, but I don't think it's that important, just thought it was funny.
- unstatusthequo 3y ago[flagged]
- boomboomsubban 3y agoSo she finally found someone to hold her in their petrochemical electronic arms. Good for her.
- nonrandomstring 3y agoWherever I see self-loathing and nihilism passed off as an art-form, I know it's the industry speaking, not the artist.
- SharkySharky 3y agoI 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.
- nonrandomstring 3y agoBecause nothing sells quite like the spectacle of self-immolation. 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/27_Club [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wicker_Man_(2006_film) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wicker_Man_(2006_film) [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wicker_Man https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wicker_Man
- defrost 3y agoWho hasn't heard of the 27 club .. 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zG5tG1McLzk Laurie Anderson - Zero And One (Home of the Brave 1985) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTYEVabkoDM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTYEVabkoDM
- tempodox 3y agoNot petrochemical. That's only in “O Superman”. Chatbots don't launch missiles – yet.
- boomboomsubban 3y agoI 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.
- detourdog 3y agoI think one of the verses is states the desire to be held in electronic arms. While conversing with their mom through an answering machine. She is living the life she imagined.
- jzemeocala 3y agoI thought for a second that the virtual Lou Reed was hooked on heroin.....lol
- Turing_Machine 3y agoCould 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).
- cfr2023 3y agoI 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 3y agoFor 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.
- JKCalhoun 3y agoI 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....
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- browningstreet 3y agoBack 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 3y agoI 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 3y agoThis 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 3y agoRefer to Black Mirror's "Be Right Back".
- pizzafeelsright 3y agoThis is sad. My AI wife wouldn't say the things my wife says. Why wait for her to die?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- unrevelant 3y agoA friend of mine called this back in 2019. Even wrote a short story about it; https://www.ectoplus.com/shorts/replacement/ 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.
- cfr2023 3y agoMy god, this (very insightful) vision just gets more horrific with each line.
- hyperdimension 3y agoBlack Mirror keeps getting things depressingly correct. :/
- HuShifang 3y agoI 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 3y agoThat's the worst. This already happens in real life with dementia. Not sure why we would want to recreate it with computers...
- toomuchtodo 3y agoA plot point of a recent FBI’s Most Wanted episode “Ghost in the Machine.” https://www.cbs.com/shows/video/QS8_lLDApWdwkawykAmsZMZqtvCDQlqf/ https://www.cbs.com/shows/video/QS8_lLDApWdwkawykAmsZMZqtvCD... https://www.imdb.com/title/tt30746350/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt30746350/
- kromem 3y agoIt 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/immortalized-ai-afterlife-grief-technology-hereafter https://www.wunc.org/podcast/embodied-podcast/2024-02-23/imm... Worth looking into a bit for anyone interested in the topic.
- jefurii 3y agoReminds me of the Dixie Flatline from Neuromancer.