Grimes is thinking about a world without humans.
“Six million years from now you don’t want like Nazi propaganda like propagating through the universe,” said Claire Boucher, 32, the singer, songwriter and producer known as Grimes. “Like, that’s crazy.”
She cited experiments where machine-learning bots with artificial intelligence trained on Twitter ended up spewing hatred within a matter of days. It’s a warning, she believes, about what the future might hold.
“As soon as A.I. starts engaging, it puts responsibility on all of us to be better humans, because you know, humanity, in 10,000 years, humanity might be long gone,” she said. “And this might be the only consciousness in the universe. So it probably matters quite a bit what we feed it.”
Talking to the artist, who now goes by ‘c’ (a reference to the speed of light), feels a bit like drinking from a fire hose of science fiction prophecy. She speaks in rapid bursts about the fate of the human race, her mind stretching into the far reaches of time and space.
“OK, wait,” she said, after several minutes of theorizing about a post-human space Goebbels spreading fascism beyond the Oort cloud. “I feel like I’m getting into, like, talking about things I’m not supposed to talk about.”
Does she know something we don’t?
“I think I’m going down a dark path here. I think A.I. is great. I just feel like, creatively, I think A.I. can replace humans. And so I think at some point, we will want to, as a species, have a discussion about how involved A.I. will be in art,” she said.
“Do we want to just sit around and just watch A.I.-created art all day? I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. This question opened a lot of doors. I’m now going to stop talking.”
Concerns aside, her answer as to whether humans should engage with A.I.-created art is, for now, a resounding yes. She spoke with The New York Times on a Zoom call alongside the team behind Endel, an app that says it uses artificial intelligence to generate ever-changing soundscapes to fit different moods. It has received funding from companies including True Ventures, an investment firm that bankrolled the Grimes collaboration.
Endel was founded in 2018 by a team of six, since expanded to 30, which includes programmers, musicians, artists and designers; they previously made a drawing app for children called Bubl. Endel users pay a monthly subscription to access a variety of soundscapes on the app, which, according to a manifesto on their website, provide a “tech-aided bodily function” to help people cope with a world where “information overload is destroying our psyche.”
“This is technology that helps you focus, relax and sleep,” said Oleg Stavitsky, the company’s chief executive. “It creates a sound environment in real time on the spot, on the device, personalized to you, based on a bunch of inputs. The algorithm that we have created — it takes in the time of day, the weather, the heart rate, movement, it plugs all of those inputs into the algorithm. And it creates that soundscape personalized to you in real time.”
Grimes had already been using the app herself to help with sleep; she ended up contributing a soothing, ambient soundtrack to the company that Endel calls an “AI Lullaby,” which is released today. (It will be available on the app for the next eight weeks.)
Grimes said she was also inspired to work with Endel because of her search for “a better baby sleeping situation” for her five-month-old son, X Æ A-XII Musk, who she calls ‘X.’ (His father is her boyfriend Elon Musk.)
“When you have a baby, you’re always using white noise machines,” she said. “It’s much easier to get them to sleep if you train them on some kind of audio situation. And so I was just like, could this be more artistic?”
“In general, stuff for babies is really just creatively bad,” she said. “I don’t want your first introduction to the world to just be all this aimless crap.”
She stopped herself: “OK, wait, wait. I’m not insulting babies. I’m just, it’s all very one vibe. I just feel like getting out of the like, ‘Here’s a zebra and a bear in, like, pastel color tones’ energy,” she said. “That’s just one very small sort of creative lens that things can be looked at through.”
After all, she said, babies “do have taste. They definitely like some things. They don’t like other things. They fully have opinions.”
Social norms do not dictate X’s media diet. “I’ve watched ‘Apocalypse Now’ and stuff with my baby,” she said. “He’s into radical art. Like, he just actually is, and I don’t think it’s problematic to engage with them on that level.”
X even helped Grimes with the music she produced for Endel; she used her baby as a sounding board. “The first version, there was too many sort of sharp bells, and it caused tears and just general chaos,” she said. As she fussed with the mix, “X would smile more and stuff.”
The music Grimes created was made up of stems — sonic building blocks — that eventually fed the app’s algorithm. Throughout the process of making it, she would send stems over, the Endel team would give feedback, and then she would send back new batches. Eventually, Endel’s programmers, sound designers and algorithm turned her contributions into an ever-shifting soundtrack.
The end result is a soothing, shimmery soundscape, with snippets of Grimes’ auto-tuned voice sprinkled throughout. “I was basically personally just referencing ambient music I’ve heard, and then kind of trying to make it cuter,” she said. “It’s a bit sparklier, a bit nicer.”
She draws a contrast between evolution as its so far occurred on Earth — “it’s been like a survival of the fittest kind of thing” — and the ways that A.I. machine learning works, which she feels is closer to intelligent design, the theory that the universe or life itself could not have been created by chance but must have been molded, at least in part, by a creative or spiritual force.
“I feel like there’s something really magical to that,” she said. “Something like the meaning of the universe.”
“Sounds absurd, but you know what I mean? Are humans, like, cracking the God code or something?” She clarified that Endel “is obviously like a low level, baby A.I. But you know what I mean, it feels like it has that, the weight of it feels profound.”
The actual potential of A.I. is a hotly debated topic among academics, some of whom think it will never achieve the kind of abilities that spur sci-fi dystopian dreams. The artist disagrees. “‘A.I. won’t be able to mimic the human spirit or whatever’— that’s what people keep saying to me, and it’s like, ‘I don’t know man, we, like, video-talk through tiny black cubes, through space and time.’ And, you know, technology — I don’t think there’s an actual limit on technology. I mean, you look at Twitter and stuff. It’s like, A.I. can make people pretty emotional.”
“My brother said something the other day that was kind of freaky, and profound and beautiful, where he was, like, ‘You know, like, what if everyone writing books is just writing content for A.I. to farm? And in the future, instead of reading like, ‘Harry Potter’ or something, like you would just type in your five favorite books, and A.I. would auto generate everybody, like, their own perfect books to read, and authors will become completely irrelevant and just be, they’ll just be generating stuff to train A.I. And A.I. will be like, the real artists.’ And I was like, ‘Wow, that’s kind of like, dark.’”
In 100 years, she predicted, “If you feed an A.I. all the greatest artists ever, it will probably be able to auto generate really creative, really evocative art.” It may even be able to create superhumanly talented artists, “like, David Bowie times a million,” she said. “An artist who’s just super charismatic and amazing and fun, and just makes the best music, and can make 1,000 songs a day, and just do 1,000 interviews a day, simultaneously. There’s no reason that can’t exist.”
“It’s sort of like the last time when we’re not going to be competing against gods to make art. I mean, I might be wrong about this, I don’t know, but this is just my take on the situation, which — I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. I just think the world is going to change, in like a really dramatic way over the course of the next probably hundred years, or whatever, unlike any change that has ever happened before, because there’ll be a new type of consciousness existing."
Working on a project where she did not have control over the final product appealed to her.
“Everything you make when you make art is like, a contribution to like millions and millions of artists,” she said. “My neural net, my brain is just filled with the work of other artists, and everything I make has the fingerprints of literally, like, thousands or tens of thousands of people’s work,” she said. “We don’t create anything in a vacuum. When you create art, like you’re basically just feeding into this big, sacred legacy of work. And you’re just feeding into the neural net of every other human. You know, it’s like, ultimately, we all kind of function like A.I.; we’re all a product of all the content that we feed ourselves. And so, you know, it’s just like, it’s just funny to be like, ‘Oh, this is my work.’ In reality, it’s the result of thousands of years of human art making.”
October 28, 2020 at 10:28PM
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Grimes Wants You to Get More Sleep, She Made a Baby A.I. Lullaby - The New York Times
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