#grimes artificialintelligence davidfranks

[itsbuckdowns]

Artificial Stupidity Needed: Grimes, “We Appreciate Power”

If “We Appreciate Power” seems a little off the shelf, derivative and choppy, that seems to be part of the point. There's something about artificial intelligence that we all think, perhaps, but cannot really confirm until we plunge and go where there is no Undo button.

The poetic conceit of the song is that the artist has uploaded herself and the AI processor is now in the business of making the next move. It all seems bona fide, I guess -- there’s a Grimes scream that I used to think of as “that scream from ‘Scream’” but is now, even as pressed-down and trunc’ed-out as it is here, “that scream on ‘We Appreciate Power’ ”. The sword from “Genesis” makes a cameo too, augmented by a crossbow and some other weapons -- can I call something that looks like a Star Wars blaster “retro”? The future is an old person’s dream and here, we appreciate power.

I think of my old friend David Franks and a phase of his where he theorized “involuntary collaboration” as a concept and then executed on the theory, sometimes to the chagrin of his collaborators. Some obverse to involuntary collaboration -- self-co-optation? is going on, maybe. Upload every move you’ve made and the machine can do the math of what’s next.

Doing the math to get what’s next right is the promise of artificial intelligence, broadly speaking. But the elimination of error, and the kinds of work that grow out of bad guesswork and losing bets, is a kind of losing bet, too. The insistent mess of “Vanessa” with its dizzying reverse footage and wickedly misapplied facepaints, is a kind of guesswork done on the cheap that Grimes, now a global pop princess, may never be broke enough to have to do, to be able to do, again.

But forward does not go back, and if “We Appreciate Power” sounds like a glib and glossy mistake, that too seems to be part of the point. The conceit of artificial intelligence is not enough -- she knows it, and so do we. What of artificial stupidity? If I could upload my dumbness in addition to my smarts, maybe the machine would have a chance at spitting out something like a “me” instead of a cheap and compressed copy.

This is not an argument the interface is willing to make. Rather, now that it has been given a platform in the face and brand of Grimes, AI will make a case for itself, and that case is the subject matter of the lyric -- not a lyric that Grimes would have written, I don’t think, not this facile totalitarianism: “one day everyone will agree” “when will the state agree to cooperate”, and most nakedly, “simulation: it’s the future.”

Grimes the artist correctly intuits that Grimes the simulation, being all intelligence and no stupidity, no imagination, no limits and no obstacles to grind against, will always fail to be anything other than right. She has seen and made better moves than the right one. Memory teaches imagination to dream things that rightly cannot be, and imagination pushes our bodies into places we should not go. Artificial Intelligence is too smart to make that mistake. Pity the poor computer.