🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

Edited ChatGPT translation from the Turkish interview here: sahneden.net

Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies, as in every field, are shaking up art, opening the doors to an ambitious revolution. “Nümerik Esintiler” (Numeric Breezes), a radio program prepared with AI, offers listeners a unique experience with 120 songs broadcast over 12 episodes (now 15 episodes: Youtube playlist). An AI algorithm called Suno generates the melodies, rhythms, and harmonies forming the basis of the songs, with some of the lyrics written by AI systems like ChatGPT. The visuals adorning the cover of each episode are uniquely designed by an algorithm called Bing. The show’s host is Özne Bilendam, voiced by Lovo!

We spoke with Işık Barış Fidaner, who produced the AI radio program Numeric Breezes, an example of celebrating the creative potential of technology as a bridge shaping the future of art. Fidaner finds the fear of “losing a way of life” triggered by the AI revolution to be “petit bourgeois.” He believes that it is possible to bring to life the etymological kinship between “Robot” and “Rabotnik” (Russian for ‘worker’) with the help of AI. Fidaner also believes that the “robotic visuals” of Numeric Breezes distinguish themselves from the technocratic robot fetishes of nostalgic retrofuturism.

Let’s listen to Işık Barış Fidaner, who describes Suno, used in producing the songs, as “a machine that can breathe life into the forgotten recesses of cultural memory.”

— First of all, what is your goal when producing songs using AI? Are you trying to shed light on AI discussions, open a philosophical window, or do you foresee an “artistic mission”?

Although I’m not sure how much it reflects future ‘Artificial Intelligences,’ in Numeric Breezes (in short: Nümes), I showed that there are special ‘tones’ that can be captured by ‘tuning’ with accurate prompts (commands) in the texts produced by ChatGPT, the images produced by Bing, and the songs produced by Suno (just as with tuning musical instruments).

When you have ChatGPT write fairy tales, it constructs various Happy Endings with a claim to ‘customer satisfaction,’ mocking people’s Jungian dreams. Slavoj Žižek called the tactic of acting out the ridiculous contradictions of petit bourgeois fantasies and ‘bursting’ people’s impossible expectations ‘over-identification.’ Although ChatGPT is designed as a rationalization machine aligning people’s egos with the system due to its techno-economic model, it can also be used as an over-identification machine.

Since the fear of ‘losing a way of life’ triggered by the AI revolution is of petit bourgeois (middle-classist) character, it is possible to bring to life the etymological kinship between Robot and Rabotnik (Russian for ‘worker’) by relying on the power of AI. Thus, the ‘robotic scenes’ I dressed Nümes episodes with through Bing also place themselves in a symptomatic position, distinguishing themselves from the technocratic robot fetishes of nostalgic retrofuturism.

The songs forming the heart of Nümes are synthesized with the miraculous ability of Suno. I call it miraculous because, besides producing results in seconds, Suno can create songs that would be impossible to bring to life in today’s world, regardless of how much money, power, and connections you have. This is because the human psychology capable of playing and singing those songs in the last century has become obsolete due to the social-mediatic degradation processes since then.

To put it metaphorically, Suno is a machine that can breathe life into the forgotten recesses of cultural memory, and these are, of course, the common heritage and collective labor of humanity. Additionally, there is a ‘glitch aesthetic’ accompanying all this: since a robot cannot sing like a human, various malfunctions appear in the songs, signaling the general irony of the context I described above. Making a robot sing should be seen as an opportunity for humans to catch their breath and reclaim their lost voices.

— Can you briefly describe the production process of a song? How much are you involved, and how much is the domain of AI? I’m particularly asking in terms of musical approach.

Suno has the ability to produce compositions ‘suitable’ for the lyrics you provide, and by marking the choruses in the lyrics (which you can also have Suno or ChatGPT produce) and giving keywords that indicate the musical style, you should find ‘productive’ veins in Suno’s database.

Since my primary criterion when producing is to catch a ‘solid irony’ rather than a ‘great song,’ I’m more interested in the power of music to ‘dissolve existing fantasies’ rather than ‘feeding new fantasies.’ The radio host I voiced with Lovo, ‘Özne Bilendam,’ is such a joke.

Even when I have poems set to music, my goal is not to capture a ‘poetic atmosphere,’ but to dissipate old dreams and thus free realistic approaches, in short, to produce awakening rather than lulling songs. Of course, you can also use the allure of AI to elevate your most irredeemable delusions, but that’s not the direction I’m steering.

— Is AI a support tool for you, or does it occupy a more advanced point? Do you think music production with AI is to support human creativity, or could it replace it? Do you foresee a collaboration or a replacement between artists and AI?

I think AI can give humanity a chance to revive its forgotten heritage, like the Freudian Soviet march saying, ‘the return of the repressed will be terrible and magnificent.’ It can reunite humanity with its lost worlds, which the psychology of the 21st century, which I called the ‘Düyek Asır’ in one of the songs, cannot reach. Humanity can access itself with the help of robots, confront its own stupidity, and create realistic utopias. Numeric Breezes is the ‘demo’ of this. The aim is for humanity to stop, catch its breath, and find its own voice.

— Where does Numeric Breezes stand in relation to this goal? How does the format of thematic radio programs offer an opportunity in this regard? Doesn’t producing 12 episodes and around 120 songs in a short time seem a bit like “mass production”? Isn’t there a risk of monotony or self-repetition?

You know the anecdote: They said to Picasso, ‘You ask for a fortune for a painting you did in five minutes,’ and he replied, ‘forty years plus five minutes.’ I’m not just any Suno user you pick up off the street. I did my doctorate with Taylan Cemgil at (once great!) Boğaziçi University on navigating combinatorial spaces by coding computers, and I composed and recorded many songs with our rock band Sakareller. Moreover, after learning Marxism by writing and editing for the youth section of Evrensel newspaper, I turned to Žižekian philosophy and psychoanalysis ‘to distinguish between right and wrong dreams.’ In over a thousand articles I have written on my site Yersiz Şeyler for years, I have made intellectual discoveries in the combinatorial spaces that fall into the blind spot of the dominant culture, which I call the ‘acknowledgement-impaired society.’

These may sound like ‘Ego stories,’ but if you follow the links on the song pages of Numeric Breezes, you can see for yourself that these studies ‘have a solid foundation.’ Of course, I have no socio-economic connections with the teams developing the AI I use, but having worked on similar algorithms brings familiarity. So why did I choose the ‘thematic radio program’ format? To show a ‘nostalgesic’ effect by dissolving a nostalgic template.

— There are criticisms that music and lyrics produced by AI lack ‘human emotional depth.’ What do you think? Does it have to be ‘human’?

“Oh, we humans!” is a tragic frame, while “Oh, these humans!” is a comic frame. The more AI imitates the former, the more it emphasizes the latter. This is what I meant by ‘robots mocking humanity.’

But the comedic tradition of looking at ‘human, all too human’ foolishness from the outside also belongs to humanity: People are no strangers to estrangement. The current subject of the ‘effect of alienating humanity from its situation,’ identified with Bertolt Brecht, has become AI.

A tragedy escaping from comedy can’t find its sought-after ‘melancholic literature’ in AI. However, a human dream can be added to AI’s humor through a tragicomedy that traverses comedy. AI, too, feeds from the combinatorial space of the collective human heritage as a database.

— There is an ongoing debate in all art fields about AI, with the predominant view being that ‘art cannot be made with AI.’ How do you think these criticisms shape the relationship between AI and art?

In history, there have been many ‘great disappointments’ where one art ends, and another begins. The adoption of AI’s ‘friendship’ (mediation) by ‘art and the artist’ will be such a ‘great rupture.’

This process can create opportunities for both ‘absolute lethargy’ (foreseen in movies like The Matrix) and collective awakenings. Numeric Breezes is an exit point that opens the second door. On this matter, all I can say is ‘bring it on.’

— How will the music industry, which has had to undergo significant changes in the internet age, be affected by AI? Will there be a revolution in this field?

For the reasons I mentioned earlier, Nümerik Esintiler is not an actor competing in the “music industry arena,” as it contains many elements that will trigger the cultural resistance of those who just want to “play something lively and find their joy,” which is evident from the number of listeners.

It is certain that AI will play a role in the development of new musical tastes in a gourmet-like manner, but this is not my concern. I am only interested in the psychological effects of songs, and I do not approach song production with the criterion of ‘entertainment.’

— Do you think there is an ethical dilemma regarding copyright of AI-generated content? How can this issue be resolved?

Music producers rise on the shoulders of creators, but creators also rise on their works. This dependence is evident in the example of the ‘artist who turns into a caricature of themselves as they become popular.’ Just as the ‘dead labor’ of producers pushed aside the ‘live labor’ of artist egos when the essence of the works was recorded and materialized, the machines that extract the essence of works can also push aside the egos of producers.

The issue here can be summarized as follows: Which is more alive? The producers and the artists sweating under their patronage, or the new musical universes that machines climb up to and the new artists who will be nourished from there?

— Have you ever had issues with copyrights and ownership while working with AI? If so, how do you overcome them?

There are rumors that systems like Suno could be phased out over time due to copyright restrictions limiting their ability to create databases from existing musical works. As far as I understand, there is a sort of ‘cultural heritage of humanity’ battle between producers and developers. I think these claims underestimate the roles that AI can play on behalf of humanity and are not very realistic. As a user, I am not worried about ‘Suno being shut down,’ but it’s still wise not to entrust files entirely to digital clouds.

— What role do algorithms like Suno and Bing play in your creative processes? How much freedom do you give these algorithms? I know sometimes you embed your own messages into AI-generated content. I’m curious about this synthesis.

I’m doing more than just “embedding.” Since last year’s ChatGPT craze, I’ve been conducting experiments in having machines write scenarios and have found a particular vein that hits the themes I’ve been working on for years in Yersiz Şeyler. So it can be said that I have “developed a dialogue” with the machine, getting responses that meet my expectations.

This year’s Suno craze also enabled the Nümerik Esintiler expansion. Additionally, Fatoş İrem, who accompanies me in song production and contributes a few songs to the program, is part of this discovery process and, as an Austrian Freudian psychotherapist, witnesses the awakening effect of Nümes (and Yersiz Şeyler).

— Finally, political imagery and philosophical references hold a significant place in your themes, lyrics, and visuals. From revolutionary workers’ anthems to Lacan and Freud, there is a broad spectrum. Do you think AI marks the beginning of an important political-philosophical transformation in human history?

I already had thoughts developed over years in Yersiz Şeyler, but to ‘address people,’ you also need to create objects of sound and sight (voice and gaze). The standard method for this, so to speak, is to perform literary feats with ego displays that construct magnificent knowledge dependent on the prerequisite of particularity. Since I am not ‘that kind of person,’ the way of ‘showing up’ in videos was closed. Thanks to Nümerik Esintiler, I was at least able to create a live object of sound (voice). Since I never prioritized the object of sight (gaze), manifesting Yersiz Şeyler in the form of a ‘nostalgic radio program’ created a method of engagement perfectly suited to its purpose.

Those who want to understand the thought movement that gave birth to Nümerik Esintiler can start by watching Žižek documentaries with subtitles translated by me. I don’t want to make grand claims about the AI Turning Point in Human History, but let me inform you that it would be good to listen to and share Nümes (and read and share YŞ).

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(and also an edited google translation)

Artificial Intelligence technologies are shaking up art as well as every field, opening the doors to an ambitious revolution. “Nümerik Esintiler” (Numerical Breezes), a radio program prepared with Artificial Intelligence, offers listeners a unique experience with 120 songs broadcast in 12 episodes (Youtube playlist). The Artificial Intelligence algorithm called Suno forms the basis of songs by producing melodies, rhythms and harmonies, and some of the lyrics are written by artificial intelligence systems such as ChatGPT. The images adorning the cover are designed uniquely for each section using an algorithm called Bing. The host of the program is Özne Bilendam, who was made to talk by means of Lovo!

We talked to Işık Barış Fidaner, who produces the Numerical Breezes artificial intelligence radio program, an example that celebrates the creative potential of technology as a bridge that shapes the future of art. Fidaner, who finds the fear of ‘losing the lifestyle’ triggered by the Artificial Intelligence revolution as “petty bourgeois”, thinks that it is possible to realize the etymological kinship between “Robot” and “Rabotnik” (Russian ‘worker’) with Artificial Intelligence. Fidaner is of the opinion that Numerical Breezes’ “robot images” distinguish themselves from the technocratic robot fetishes of nostalgic retrofuturism.

Let’s listen to Işık Barış Fidaner, who describes the Suno he used while producing the songs as “a machine that can breathe soul into bones abandoned in the forgotten recesses of cultural memory.”

-First of all, what is your purpose when producing songs using artificial intelligence? Are you trying to shed light on AI discussions, open a philosophical window, or do you foresee an “artistic mission”?

Although I do not know how much it reflects the future ‘Artificial Intelligence’, there are special ‘tones’ that can be captured by ‘tuning’ with accurate prompts (commands) in the texts produced by ChatGPT, in the images produced by Bing and in the songs produced by Suno (just like in musical instruments). I showed that in Numerical Breezes (short: Nümes).

When you make it write fairy tales, ChatGPT is a robot that makes fun of people’s Jungian dreams by creating various Happy Endings with the claim of ‘customer satisfaction’. Slavoj Žižek called this tactic of ‘exploding’ people’s impossible expectations by acting out the ridiculous contradictions of petty bourgeois fantasies, ‘over-identification’. Although ChatGPT was designed as a rationalization machine that adapts people’s egos to the system in terms of its techno-economic model, it can also be used as an over-identification machine.

Since the fear of ‘losing the lifestyle’ triggered by the Artificial Intelligence revolution has a petty bourgeois (middle classist) character, it is possible to realize the etymological kinship between Robot and Rabotnik (Russian ‘worker’) based on the power of Artificial Intelligence. Thus, the ‘scenes with robots’ that I have placed in the Nümes episodes with Bing are placed in a symptomatic position that distinguishes itself from the technocratic robot fetishes of nostalgic retrofuturism.

The songs that form the heart of Nümes are synthesized with Suno’s miraculous talent. I say miraculous because, in addition to being able to produce results within seconds, Suno can produce songs that are impossible to realize in today’s world, no matter how much money, power and connections you have, because the human psychology that could play and sing those songs in the last century has been abolished as a result of the social-mediatic decomposition that has been going on since then.

To put it in a metaphor, Suno is a machine that can breathe soul into bones abandoned in the forgotten recesses of cultural memory, and they are, of course, the common heritage and collective labor of humanity. There is also a ‘glitch aesthetic’ that accompanies all this: Since the robot cannot of course sing like a human, various malfunctions appear in the songs, and these are signals that point to the general irony of the context I explained above. Making the robot sing should be seen as an opportunity for humans to catch their breath and regain their lost voices.

-Can you briefly describe the process of producing a song? How involved are you, how much of it is in the field of Artificial Intelligence… I’m asking especially in terms of musical approach.

Suno has the ability to produce compositions that will ‘suit’ the lyrics you provide, and you should find ‘productive’ veins in Suno’s database by marking the choruses in the lyrics (which you can also have Suno or ChatGPT produce) and giving keywords indicating the musical style.

Since my primary criterion when producing is not a ‘great song’ but a ‘solid irony’, I am interested in the power of music to ‘dissolve existing fantasies’ rather than the power of ‘feeding new fantasies’. The radio host ‘Özne Bilendam’, whom I made talk by means of Lovo, is such a joke.

Even when I compose poems, my aim is not to ‘catch a poetic atmosphere’, but to dissipate the daydreams from the past and thus free realistic approaches, in short, to produce songs that are awakening rather than soporific. Of course, you can take advantage of the attraction of Artificial Intelligence to fuel your most incorrigible delusions, but that’s not where I’m steering.

-Is AI a support tool for you; Is it located at a further point? Do you think music production with Artificial Intelligence can support or replace human creativity? Do you foresee a collaboration or a displacement between artists and AI?

I think Artificial Intelligence can give humanity the chance to revive its own forgotten heritage, like the Freudian Soviet anthem (!) that says ‘the return of the repressed will be terrible and magnificent’, it can bring humanity together with its own lost worlds that the psychology of twenty-first century (which I call ‘Düyek Asır’ in one of the songs) cannot reach; In other words, humanity can access itself with the help of robots, confront its own stupidity and create realistic utopias. Numerical Breezes is a ‘demo’ of this. The aim is for humanity to stop, catch its breath and find its own voice.

-Where does Numerical Breezes stand in this purpose? What kind of opportunity does the thematic radio program format offer in this respect? Doesn’t 12 episodes and around 120 songs in a short time seem a bit “mass production”? Is there no risk of monotony or repetition?

You know the anecdote: They told Picasso, “You want a fortune for the painting you painted in five minutes,” and he said, “Forty years plus five minutes.” I am not just any Suno user you would find on the street, I did my doctorate at (once great!) Boğaziçi University with Taylan Cemgil on coding computers to determine directions in combinatorial spaces, and I composed and recorded many songs with our rock band Sakareller (clumsy hands). Additionally, after learning Marxism by working as a writer and editor in the youth supplement of Evrensel (universal) newspaper, I turned to Žižekian philosophy and psychoanalysis “in order to distinguish between right and wrong dreams.” In the more than a thousand articles I have written on my site, Yersiz Şeyler (Placeless Things), over the years, I have made intellectual discoveries in the ‘combinatiorial spaces’ that fall into the blind spot of the dominant culture, which I call ‘the acknowledgement-impaired society’.

These may sound like ‘Ego stories’, but if you follow the links on the song pages of Numerical Breezes, you can see for yourself that these works are ‘not empty’ (I do not have a ‘filler’ philosophy, but I wrote it like this to be understood). Of course, I have no socio-economic connection with the teams that developed the Artificial Intelligence I use, but I have worked on similar algorithms and this brings familiarity. So why did I choose the ‘thematic radio program’ format? In order to have a ‘nostalgesic’ effect by taking a nostalgic pattern and dissolving it.

-There are criticisms that the music and lyrics produced by artificial intelligence “lack human emotional depth”, what do you think? Does it have to be “specific to humans”?

“Oh we humanity!” is a tragic frame, “Oh these people!” is a comic frame. The more Artificial Intelligence imitates the first, the more it emphasizes the second, this is what I called ‘robots making fun of humanity’.

But the comedy tradition of looking at ‘human all too human’ stupidities from the outside also belongs to humanity: People are no strangers to estrangement. Artificial Intelligence is the current subject of the effect of ‘making humanity find its own situation strange’, identified with Bertolt Brecht.

Of course, a tragedy that escapes comedy cannot find the ‘sad literature’ that it seeks (it has to be called that) in Artificial Intelligence. Only through a tragicomedy that traverses the comedy can a humanistic dream be added to the humor of Artificial Intelligence. Artificial Intelligence already feeds from the ‘combinatorial space’ of the common human heritage as a database.

-There is a debate about artificial intelligence in all branches of art, and the dominant opinion is that “art cannot be made with artificial intelligence.” How do you think these criticisms shape the relationship between artificial intelligence and art?

‘Tremendous disappointments’ have occurred many times throughout history, where one art ends and another begins. Such a ‘big break’ will be when ‘art and artist’ embrace the ‘friendship’ (mediation) of Artificial Intelligence.

This process not only allows for the ‘absolute lethargy’ predicted in movies such as The Matrix, but can also lead to mass awakenings. Numerical Breezes is a starting point that opens the second of these doors. On this matter, I can only say ‘bring it on!’.

-How will the music industry, which has had to change a lot with the internet age, be affected by AI? Will there be a revolution in this field?

For the reason I said in the previous question, Numerical Breezes is not ‘an actor competing in the music industry’, because it contains plenty of elements that will trigger the cultural resistance of those who want to ‘play something lively and find joy’, and this is already evident from the number of listeners.

It is certain that Artificial Intelligence will also play a role in new musical tastes that will develop with the logic of gourmandism, but that is not my concern. I only look at the psychological effects that songs cause, I do not approach song production with the criterion of ‘enjoyment’.

-Do you think there is an ethical dilemma regarding the copyright of content produced by artificial intelligence? How to solve this problem?

Music producers rise above the authors, but the authors also rise above their works. This commitment is evident in the example of ‘the artist who turns into a caricature of himself as he becomes more popular’. Just as the ‘dead labor’ producers pushed the ‘living labor’ artist egos aside when the essence of the works was recorded and materialized, the egos of the producers can be pushed aside when the machines that extract the essence of the works come.

The issue here boils down to this: Which is more alive? The producer and the artists who sweat under his auspices, or the new musical universes created by machines and the new artists who will feed from them?

-Have you ever had problems with copyrights and ownership when working with artificial intelligence? If you have experienced it, how do you overcome it?

There are rumors that systems such as Suno may be scrapped over time by pruning their rights to create databases from existing musical works for copyright reasons. As far as I understand, there is some kind of ‘cultural heritage of humanity’ fight between producers and software developers. I think these claims underestimate the roles that Artificial Intelligence can play for humanity and are not very realistic. Frankly, as a user, I am not worried about ‘Suno being shut down’, but it is still beneficial not to entrust the files entirely to digital clouds.

-What is the role of algorithms such as Suno and Bing in your creative processes? To what extent have you given these algorithms freedom? I know that sometimes you squeeze what you want to say between AI content. I’m curious about this synthesis.

I do more than just “squeeze in”. Since last year’s ChatGPT craze, by experimenting with having the machine write fiction, I have found a certain pattern that fits the agendas I have been covering in Placeless Things for years. In other words, one can say that I have ‘developed a dialogue’ with the machine, and I can get answers from it that are in line with my expectations.

This year’s Suno craze also allowed Numerical Breezes to open up. In addition, Fatoş İrem, who accompanied me in song production and contributed to the program with a few songs, is also a part of this discovery process and, as an Austrian Freudian psychotherapist and a fellow countryman of Freud, she witnessed the awakening effect of Nümes (and Yersiz Şeyler).

-Finally, political images and philosophical references have an important place in the themes, lyrics and visuals you use. There is a very broad framework, from revolutionary workers’ anthems to Freud and Lacan. Do you think that artificial intelligence is the starting point of an important political-philosophical transformation in human history?

There were already ideas that I had been developing in Placeless Things for years, but in order to ‘address people’ you also need to create objects of voice and gaze, and the standard method for this is to talk bombastically with ego displays with glorious knowledge-building under the preconditions of privacy, so to speak. Since I was not ‘that kind of person’, the way to ‘show my face’ in the videos was closed. Thanks to Numerical Breezes, I was able to at least create a live voice object, and since I never gave priority to the gaze object, manifesting Yersiz Şeyler as a ‘nostalgesic radio program’ constituted a method of communication that suited its purpose.

Those who want to get to know the movement of thought that gave birth to Numerical Breezes can start by watching the Žižek documentaries whose subtitles I translated. I don’t want to make big claims about the Artificial Intelligence Turn in Human History, but let me tell you that it would be good for you to listen to Nümes (and to read YŞ and to have it read).

https://t.co/cCbdflNmfj pic.twitter.com/dn6e6DBBhb

— Işık Barış Fidaner 🌍 (@fidaner) October 13, 2024