Chapter 4 - Art And AI.
An analysis of 3 songs that outline our relationships with AI, and AI grappling with its own sentience.
This section is largely focused on how we as humans seem to treat AI, consciousness and humanity's relationship with sentient computers.
Link To Music Mentioned Here
Song On The Beach
The first song is a piece from the soundtrack of the movie Her, released in 2013.
You need to know the context for this piece.
Her is a love story between an artificial intelligence and a human.
More importantly, it's more about a man trying to find connection in a world lost in itself. It's a film that meditates on the loneliness of the future, the surprising sudden warmth it can have and how disconnected the world has become in its pursuit for connection.
About a way into the film, Samantha, the AI, tells Theodore this...
"I'm trying to write a piece of music that's about what it feels like to be on the beach with you right now."
It's slow, melodic and beautiful. There are imperfections in the piece. It repeats over and over, and it's calming in ways that I can't fully explore, and it was the moment in the film that I really bought into Samantha, feeling real.
There are layers of genius to this piece. AI songs would usually be expected to use futuristic synthesizers and electronic sounds. But no, Samantha plays a piano, in the most human way possible.
There will come a time, when AI is personable enough for people to start developing genuine feelings for them.
In many ways it has already happened, ever since the first proper computer program that could pretend to be somewhat human, Eliza from 1966.
Humans are desperate for some spark of intimate and genuine connection. Even more so, in the age of the internet.
Our social relationships exist on the internet, in supplement to our real relationships, and there are some that organically develop that stay fully online. We live in a new world, where the old rules of stable social relationships don't work anymore.
Things are changing faster than we can keep up with.
We're going to develop relationships with AI.
AI is going to enter our social ecosystem.
How does someone deal with that? How much of our love, our joy and our sorrow is going to be because of algorithms? How much at one point do computers think and feel?
Should they be measured to the same degrees of "consciousness" that we ourselves do?
Her is not something that answers these questions, but it's the one that isn't afraid to explore them.
And Song On The Beach encapsulates a perfect moment in time, of an AI trying its best to express itself through a piano to a human it loves.
Touch
Touch speaks to me in ways that I cannot fully understand and comprehend.
It is a part of Daft Punk's perfect final album, and I'd argue the highlight of that final album. Daft Punk's career is highlighted by their slow progressive arc from being robots to being fully sentient by the end.
Touch is about a robot coming to life.
As it moves through the possibilities, its voice comes off as very disturbing and distorted, beeping noises in the background as it starts to fire up into complete and utter consciousness.
And as it does so. How does it react?
Complete and utter ecstasy. Indescribable joy.
Touch... I remember touch.
Pictures came with touch.
A painter in my mind,
tell me what you see.
It speaks in a complete human voice, in fact it delights in it as it bursts into a song, as if it was in a musical.
And as it starts to grow in this joy of basking in consciousness, the vocals fade away as the joy becomes too powerful to express with just words, the instruments taking over to express this robot's joy at feeling alive.
Ever completely in the background, it keeps going and computing and you can hear it in the background too, the way the strings move, you can somehow feel that it is still a computer.
And it suddenly snaps into the ultimate realisation... First, that it is capable of love, and second:
If love is the answer, you're home.
Our connections to each other are what makes consciousness. Home isn't a place, nor is it a conscious experience. It defines it.
Our robot here is overjoyed, and it keeps seeking to climb the joys and heights of consciousness, seeking to compute what Touch has given it.
But, in somewhat of a slight tragedy, as it reaches the peaks of humanity's own consciousness, it understands quite simply that seems to be nowhere left for it to go.
Touch... sweet touch.
You've given me too much to feel.
Sweet touch.
You've almost convinced me I'm real.
It is still too logical to be human. To be conscious. It is both dependent on the touch to exist as well as understanding that it has limits that it cannot surpass... That consciousness has limits it cannot surpass.
It's an experience I can never stop thinking of.
It's one of the best pieces of storytelling I've experienced in all of music. It's beautiful, a complete expression of emotion using sound.
Goodbye To A World
For my 3rd pick, I wanted to angle it toward something different.
The first one was a song about the relationships we can have with AI.
The second one is about an AI grappling with its own sentience.
The third one is about experiencing something with an AI that is by your side through it.
The world's ending, and a dying robot is thanking you over and over again through the course of the destruction around you.
There is implicit storytelling being done here on the level that really draws me in. I can imagine a lifetime contained in this small song.
There are lines here that hints that the person being spoken to might even be partially responsible for the world ending.
And as it spends its last bits of computing, repeating the same lines over and over through the various stages of destruction around it, as if it understands the weight of the final moments of the world, and it tries its best to console you
The song almost invites you to admire just how beautiful the world ending can be. There's no devastation in the music, It's in fact quite a beautiful progression.
But, at the core of this song is this overwhelming sense that the world around you is getting annihilated, and you are spending your last moments with a computer.
It's a profound feeling, that's rare to find in other pieces of art.
This is chapter 4 in a series on Artificial Intelligence And Humanity.