Işık Barış Fidaner: “Humanity can create realistic utopias with the help of robots”

Source: sahneden.net (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 in Freud, from revolutionary workers’ anthems to 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).