Based on their eponymous album recently released on Thrill Jockey, Mouse on Mars and Louis Chude-Sokei create »AAI« (Anarchic Artificial Intelligence), a speculative meta-narrative about the development of an artificial intelligence that deals with its own emergence and future. The starting point of the album, as well as the sound piece created especially for »Ventrilogues,« is a language modeling software developed in collaboration with a collective of computer programmers. What sounds like the voice of writer and scholar Louis Chude-Sokei is actually a synthetic voice generated by artificial intelligence. The voice was created from the texts and voices of Chude-Sokei and DJ and producer Yağmur Uçkunkaya, which were fed into the software as a template. The result is a kind of voice instrument that Mouse on Mars can play like a synthesizer, allowing them to shape speech acts through parameters such as speed or mood.
In the text written by Chude-Sokei, as machine learning progresses, machines begin to develop language, consciousness, and empathy – anarchic and unpredictable qualities that gradually free AI from the corset of technical optimisation and its exploitation as a tool. In doing so, Chude-Sokei draws a parallel to the history of slavery and reminds us that up to the present, humans have degraded other humans into tools for their claim to power, legitimising their actions by the fictitious construction of non-existent racial differences.
In contrast, »AAI« sets a positive utopia in which AI and technology provide new impulses as emphatic, imperfect, and idiosyncratic accomplices, in order to free humanity from its current cultural and moral stagnation.
