I 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.
Because 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
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.
Not quite sure what you're "clearing up" there. For me, having owned
every Velvet Underground release on vinyl and lost friends to the
needle I'm comfortable on the subject of addiction, metaphorically or
literally. Laurie Anderson is quite poetic and intelligent enough to
appreciate the face of reification and commodification wrought by
techno-consumerism, whether it's selling records or AI apps.
> Wherever I see self-loathing and nihilism passed off as an art-form,
refers to, and how this:
> Because nothing sells quite like the spectacle of self-immolation
ties into the content linked. As it stands it appears as though you've just riffed off the word addiction in the title, which naturally leads to pointing out why it was used.
Guess I'm talking about an "industry" that when they're "done" sticks
a fork in the young lives it burns through for its banquet. FWIW I
don't think Lou Reed ever set out to glamorise addiction. He lost a
lot of good people along the way too. He wrote the reality he
saw. Maybe making it to 71... there's a bit of survivor's bias. But
when someone talks about "addiction", however folksy and cute their
art project, they're talking about human misery and lost life, no?
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.
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.
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).
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.
That wasn't the point of my latest comment. Oh well.
And let's not be obtuse and ignore the fact that you replied to GP's claim that Lou did not intend to glamourize addiction with "Heroin was his most famous song. What the hell are you talking about already?" You haven't outright stated much of anything of substance, but your argumentative tone has invited discussion anyway so here we are.
>"That doesn't mean the artists themselves have glamorized the subject.. "
>And let's not be obtuse and ignore the fact that you replied to GP's claim that Lou did not intend to glamourize addiction with "Heroin was his most famous song. What the hell are you talking about already?" You haven't outright stated much of anything of substance, but your argumentative tone has invited discussion anyway so here we are.
OP's claim? Did you just jump in on that one post? Did I quote something that led you to this conclusion?
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.
I 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.
Could 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).
I 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.
For 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.
I 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.
Back 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.
I 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...
This 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?
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, 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.
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?
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.
55 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 107 ms ] threadoriginal title: Laurie Anderson on making an AI chatbot of Lou Reed: ‘I’m totally, 100%, sadly addicted’
Bend the machine to your will.
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
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wicker_Man_(2006_film)
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wicker_Man
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
Laurie Anderson - Zero And One (Home of the Brave 1985) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTYEVabkoDM
> Wherever I see self-loathing and nihilism passed off as an art-form,
refers to, and how this:
> Because nothing sells quite like the spectacle of self-immolation
ties into the content linked. As it stands it appears as though you've just riffed off the word addiction in the title, which naturally leads to pointing out why it was used.
That covered, it's like what my painter friend said to me: https://youtu.be/xTlsSXNT2bg?t=203
over to you.
I won't claim to know what the rest of GPs point is though :)
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).
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.
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).
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.
And let's not be obtuse and ignore the fact that you replied to GP's claim that Lou did not intend to glamourize addiction with "Heroin was his most famous song. What the hell are you talking about already?" You haven't outright stated much of anything of substance, but your argumentative tone has invited discussion anyway so here we are.
>"That doesn't mean the artists themselves have glamorized the subject.. "
>And let's not be obtuse and ignore the fact that you replied to GP's claim that Lou did not intend to glamourize addiction with "Heroin was his most famous song. What the hell are you talking about already?" You haven't outright stated much of anything of substance, but your argumentative tone has invited discussion anyway so here we are.
OP's claim? Did you just jump in on that one post? Did I quote something that led you to this conclusion?
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.
See now that is interesting because I've never seen that movie, but I guess it's not just me who can see the connection after all.
I agree with you though, it definitely fits into Lou's general theme, so it could just be a coincidence after all.
"We currently have nearly 1,700 advances on file" - https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/times-insider/20...
She is living the life she imagined.
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).
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.
“…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.
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....
Also it made me feel like I was a deranged character in a Black Mirror episode, like Reed's wife in the article...
My view - it probably won't be helpful.
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.
https://www.cbs.com/shows/video/QS8_lLDApWdwkawykAmsZMZqtvCD...
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt30746350/
- 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.
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.