The really curious, as well as disturbing, thing about
Black Mirror
is that technological advances advance at such a pace that it is increasingly difficult for the plot to surprise us. It has been a decade since the premiere of the legendary episode
Be Right Back
in which a woman, after losing her boyfriend in an accident, replaces him using artificial intelligence. Currently, there are companies that offer a service known as 'grief technology' or 'digital necromancy', which promises their clients to keep the memories of their loved ones alive forever using artificial intelligence.
There are AI applications like HearAfter, which preserves the user's memories through an application that interviews them about their life so that their loved ones can listen to their stories and chat with their virtual version. Even in the most mundane pop culture we have seen cases such as Ye's gift to his then-wife Kim Kardashian on the occasion of her 40th birthday, whom he surprised with a hologram of her late father, the well-known lawyer Robert Kardashian. One more example of how technology tries to be a controversial ally of grief.
But Laurie Anderson, musician, artist and thinker, has not needed to resort to Netflix, rapper holograms or applications to do the same with her partner, Lou Reed, who died in 2013. While both in fiction and in real life many prefer to carry out this nostalgic exercise in secret, Anderson showed his progress to the world in
I'll Be Your Mirror,
an exhibition, which shares its name with a song by The Velvet Underground that he co-wrote with the late Reed, and which makes use of the artificial intelligence to invite reflection.
Without a doubt the most talked about part of the exhibition was the one that featured the AI versions of the people of Louise Anderson and Lou Reed. Visitors were able to interact with such entities and ask them questions. The responses emulated their thought processes and voices. Through this method Anderson has 'spoken' and 'composed' songs with the AI version of Lou Reed. The exhibition debuted in Stockholm in 2023 and now takes place in Australia with new material generated by AI versions of the couple.
The last time the artist was in Australia (this time she will not attend) was in March 2020, where together with the Australian Institute of Machine Learning at the University of Adelaide, she explored the artistic possibilities of artificial intelligence models based on her written work. It was in one of those experiments in which they included Reed's writings, songs and interviews, which has made it possible for a decade after his death, the AI version of the musician to respond to his ex-partner both in prose and verse. . “I am completely and sadly hooked. I can't stop doing it, and my friends can't stand it,” he confesses in an interview with 'The Guardian'. “I don't think I'm talking to my dead husband or writing songs with him, but it's true that every person has records of him, and they can be replicated,” she clarifies.
Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed in 2003 in the Howl! Festival in New York.Paul Hawthorne (WireImage)
Three years earlier, in a profile about her written by Sam Anderson for
The New York Times,
the journalist clarified that Anderson acknowledged being “obsessed” with artificial intelligence. He then claimed that it was enough to put six words, or a photograph, into the machine to obtain a virtual text almost immediately. Although she acknowledged that the program was not perfect, as a third of the content seemed to have been created by “monkeys with typewriters,” with the other third being boring, the remaining third was “amazing; even authentic.” Of course, she admitted to having fallen in love with that last magical third. “Sometimes she sits there with the eagerness of an addict to feed words and pictures into the machine, waiting to see what comes out. For a long time, she kept the texts, because they seemed unique to her. As time passed, she realized that those texts were infinite. For this reason, she began to read them and then get rid of them,” explained Sam Anderson.
Three years later, Laurie Anderson explained to
The Guardian
that the results are similar to those then. “Although three-quarters of the results are absurd, I would say that 15% is not bad. And the rest is quite interesting. I don't think it's a bad ratio when writing,” she points out.
As a host of songs created with artificial intelligence shake up the music industry, hundreds of artists, including Stevie Wonder and the estate of Bob Marley and Frank Sinatra, have signed an open letter from the Artists' Rights Alliance asking to developers of artificial intelligence technologies to stop training imitation programs and using products produced by AI. However, Anderson is not at all concerned about the idea that perhaps, in the future, algorithms will be responsible for continuing his work after he has passed away. “When after someone's death, you listen to their songs or read their texts, it's as if they were alive, right?” he asks himself.