The singer, songwriter, and visual artist Grimes and tech mogul Elon Musk seemed to many a fairly unlikely pairing. What brought them together was an AI pun that Musk wanted to post on Twitter, only to find that Grimes had beaten him to it by several years.Â
The pun in question was “Rococo’s Basilisk”, a merging of the term Rococo, a highly ornamental and theatrical artistic style, and the concept of Roko’s Basilisk, which contemplates the risks of AI and considers a future in which robots take control and punish the humans who resisted their ascension to power. Suffice to say, you would be forgiven for not getting the joke. The juxtaposition of art and technology is, however, a rather fitting metaphor, both for the couple itself and for Grimes’ latest endeavour: an AI-generated lullaby for their son.
It was hard to miss the news of the child’s birth on account of his unconventional name: X Æ A-12 (pronounced “Ex Ash A Twelve”) – with X being his first name – later changed to X Æ A-Xii in order to comply with California’s naming laws (although his chances of finding a personalized keyring in a souvenir shop remain slim).
Grimes recently partnered with Endel, an app that “creates personalized soundscapes to give your mind and body what it needs to achieve total immersion in any task”, to create a lullaby for her son. She combined the algorithm generated by Endel, that uses artificial intelligence to recognize the sounds that would have the most soothing effect on baby X, with her own musical artistry, resulting in a totally unique composition for her child.
The creation of this lullaby is an example of the new possibilities emerging for the coexistence of the arts and artificial intelligence, and contradicts the widely held notion that the future prosperity of the arts is threatened by the growing importance of AI. In the case of Grimes and Endel, the algorithm is incorporated into the creative process to serve as a means by which to achieve new forms of artistic expression. Indeed, Grimes sees this technology as an extension of human artistic creation, suggesting that an algorithm such as Endel’s mirrors the creation of art. , she said: “Everything you make when you make art is a contribution to millions and millions of artists. My neural net, my brain is just filled with the work of other artists, and everything I make has the fingerprints of… thousands or tens of thousands of people’s work. We don’t create anything in a vacuum… Ultimately, we all kind of function like A.I.; we’re all a product of all the content that we feed ourselves”.
With the pairing of AI and the arts still in its early stages, Grimes is positive about the role it will play going forwards – provided that the element of humanity is maintained. This may seem like a paradox, however she stresses that the nature of the output of artificial intelligence depends entirely on the human input: “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.” From this notion we can conclude that rather than making the liberal arts redundant, the flourishing of artificial intelligence in fact makes them absolutely essential in our ever more technological world.