Laurie Anderson says artificial intelligence spells ‘the end of the world’
The artist and musician said you ‘can impersonate anyone’ with the technology.
US avant-garde artist and musician Laurie Anderson said the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) is “dismantling our world”, as she reflected on the prospect of the technology being utilised to win a future war or election.
Anderson, who rose to fame in the UK with her eight-minute song titled O Superman in 1981, said she has embraced AI in her work, but also acknowledges its danger in society.
“As a tool, I love it,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs.
“I also recognise that it’s the end of the world kind of thing, it’s horrible. You can impersonate anyone.
“You could win an election with something like this. You could start a war with something like this.
“We depend on a certain amount of authenticity that gets stamped, but we don’t know who’s saying what anymore at all.
“So the success of certain aspects of – let’s say intrusions into social media, let’s say disinformation – is enormous.
“It is dismantling our world.”
The 77-year-old said she is currently working with a group in Toronto using AI to create imagery out of spoken language – “so as you say something, it appears as an array of visuals”.
“It’s frightening,” she said. “It’s like having somebody invade your dreams, or be able to see what you’re thinking or dreaming. It’s wild.”
Last year, Anderson revealed she was “addicted” to using an AI text generator to emulate the words of her late husband, Lou Reed, who co-founded US rock band The Velvet Underground.
The couple married in 2008 after meeting in 1992, before Reed’s death in 2013.
Anderson told Desert Island Discs host Lauren Laverne how her Buddhist beliefs helped her grieve, following its teachings which included the instruction not to cry.
“That is the number one rule, no crying, zero crying,” she said.
“It was exhilarating… It’s also a great honour and privilege to feel all those things and to try to understand them. I mean, it’s awesome.”
Anderson also spoke about the responsibility she felt inheriting Reed’s archive.
“It was like a 15-storey building falls on you because you suddenly have to take care of all of those things and I wasn’t prepared for that really, we’d never really talked about anything,” she said.
“We did talk about having something called the L&L art ranch, and that was going to be when we were really old and no one wanted to come and hear us anymore, we were going to have a kind of bar where he could play every night, and we just do whatever we wanted and that was the plan.
“But the plan wasn’t for him to die and then I would just have to do what?”
Born in Chicago, Anderson is both a recipient of a Grammy lifetime achievement award and a Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication.
It came after Anderson became Nasa’s first artist in residence, a two-year commission to produce a piece of work completely at her creative freedom, which inspired her performance piece The End Of The Moon.
Desert Island Discs will air on BBC Radio 4 on Sunday at 10am.
