Giant of the avant-garde Laurie Anderson began working with the artificial intelligence (AI) technology that would result in her I’ll Be Your Mirror exhibition back in 2020, when machine learning was still most familiar to the majority of us via science-fiction.
Her explorations revolved around training AI models on her own words and writing, resulting in a text-generation program now dubbed AI Laurie Anderson. She then created a second model called AI Lou Reed, fed on the writings of her late partner – Velvet Underground frontman Lou Reed.
In Adelaide Festival’s mounting of I’ll Be Your Mirror, Anderson exhibits a series of texts outputted by the AI couple alongside Scroll, an AI rewrite of the Bible.
Laurie Anderson. Photo: supplied
Conceptually, these works appear to grapple with some extraordinarily interesting questions. They peer into the gap between writers and their ideas, potentially offering a chance to genuinely examine what happens when style and substance are divorced.
There’s also the possibility of meditating on imagination and its fate in a future where some of our thinking is outsourced to machines. And finally, perhaps most poignantly, it surely has something to say about grief and the way we continue to connect with those we love after death.
In actuality, though, this presentation of I’ll Be Your Mirror and Scroll is extraordinary only in its capacity to provoke very little thought about any of these ideas.
Exhibited in the Circulating Library at the State Library of SA, the AI Laurie Anderson and AI Lou Reed texts are printed on boards hung from the ceiling. Behind them, vast shelves of books remain visible. No lighting has been designed to lend the boards any sense of significance. Instead, the white-on-black layout blurs under the warm library lights, with the typesetting making it easier to focus on the rivers of negative space flowing between the words than the words themselves.
Scroll is given slightly more ceremony. The entire book is encased in glass, open and inviting visitors to read a double-page spread. Above the glass, two stanzas from elsewhere in the book hang on yet more ceiling-suspended boards.
No wall labels accompany the works to explain their creation. It is hard to imagine what a visitor wandering in off the street might think as they encounter this collection of (at best) average prose without knowing that it was written by AI.
Complaints about lighting, context and graphic design might sound churlish, but the experience of visiting an exhibition is an essential part of receiving the art within it. The pedestrian nature of I’ll Be Your Mirror makes it nearly impossible to enjoy engaging closely with the text. Despite this, there are sparks of interest among the paragraphs of prose and short poems. In one of the Bible verses, a parking meter is referenced, somehow making the whole confusing and meandering story much more poignant, which raises the question of how much more popular the Bible could be after a good contemporary copy edit.
In his texts, AI Lou Reed is far more likely to speak in rhyme than AI Laurie Anderson, while AI Anderson seems to make a conclusive point far more often than AI Reed. And perhaps if these snippets of prose, which do mimic the writing styles of the human ghosts still lurking within them, had been exhibited before we could all mess around with ChatGPT they may have retained a little more magic.
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It was, briefly, when functional AI first became available, astounding to know that something that could not think could impersonate the rhythms of thinking so well. Then, as with so many enormous technological shifts, the astounding quickly became normal.
In 2024, I’ll Be Your Mirror’s slices of prose, with their glimmers of meaning among quite long tracts of poorly constructed writing, are probably of most interest to those who love Lou Reed and wish they could talk with him again.
For the rest of us, who know these texts don’t result from a human intelligence yearning to say something important, they remain a scramble of words that were strung together on the basis of probabilities. And there is little meaning to be found in that.
I’ll Be Your Mirror is at the Circulating Library in the Institute Building of the State Library of South Australia until March 17. A conversation with Laurie Anderson will be live-streamed at an event at Bonython Hall at 11am on March 6.
Read more 2024 Adelaide Festival coverage here.
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