In the fall of 2021, British rock band Duran Duran released a 15and album, Future Past, a musical milestone in his 40-year career. The neo-romantic quartet, a few months earlier, had chosen as an international calling card the extract Invisible, whose clip was created thanks to the know-how of a Montreal studio.
Posted at 10:00 a.m.
Beyond the synth-pop track, it was his psychedelic video that grabbed attention, drawing enthusiastic adjectives from outlets like the BBC, Pitchfork, RollingStone or even NBC. The clip, we claim, is the first created by an artificial intelligence (AI): Huxley.
If the artist-machine has his head in the (computer) clouds, he has one foot in Montreal, more precisely in the Nested Minds studio. The Quebec consortium makes use of some twenty international developers and researchers from the neurosciences, mathematics, philosophy, physics and social sciences.
Adopted by Duran Duran, the automaton these days sells digital canvases in the form of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and dreams of a planetary career.
“I’m always on the lookout for new projects, new technologies, innovations that could fit into Duran Duran’s sound and visual identity,” says keyboardist Nick Rhodes, joined by Zoom.
PHOTO NEFER SUVIO, PROVIDED BY DURAN DURAN
The British group Duran Duran, consisting of John Taylor, Simon Le Bon, Andy Taylor and Nick Rhodes
I liked the idea of collaborating with a machine that can literally think, even if it sounds like science fiction.
Nick Rhodes
It is through his American agent, Wendy Laister, that the group behind Hungry Like the Wolf caught wind of the child prodigy’s rich palette.
This dear Huxley – you guessed the reference to the author of the brave new world – was born last year at the instigation of New Zealand photographer and entrepreneur Linc Gasking. The specialist in new technologies sought to make visible the work of the British neuroscientist Karl Friston on “active inference”, a complex principle that Wikipedia will support better than us without inflicting a correction.
In very vulgar terms, this statistical method makes it possible to optimize computer technologies by modeling them on the predictions of “living systems like the brain”. Using machine learning (machine learning), the algorithms reproduce in a way the “common intuitions” of humans.
“It’s based on neuro-realistic technologies, which consider that the brain is constantly making predictions and that it checks whether they are good or bad from the data”, explains Mahault Albarracin, vice-president of engineering at Nested. Minds and principal engineer of the showcase project Huxley, in interview with The Press. “It’s a probabilistic approach. »
The cognitive computing doctor and a dozen researchers gave birth to Huxley after about a month of uninterrupted labour. Their offspring concentrates a host of artificial intelligence technologies: Bayesian inference, artificial neural network, generative adversarial network, image, text and sentiment analysis, etc.
IMAGE FROM OPENSEA
This guitarist was born from the imagination of Huxley.
Watch out for the dogs!
To inspire Huxley in creating the music video, Nested Minds submitted the song’s lyrics, emotion and tone to him. Invisible. The machine has also familiarized itself with works by the Japanese artist-photographer Daisuke Yokota, dear to Duran Duran, as well as with photos and iPhone videos of the quartet.
From this information, the robot-director made his neurons work to generate new images punctuated by the melody ofInvisible.
“Huxley is nocturnal,” says Rhodes. Every night we made him work. The next morning, I had an email with the files of 7000 or 8000 images. I was going through them thinking, “What the hell do we have here? Each time, I selected about 200 images. The edit was made at the very end: “Here is Huxley’s imagination. Now, let’s get this all in order. » »
The project almost aborted, admits the musician. “For three days the machine just produced dogs, all kinds of dogs. We said to ourselves: “We’re screwed, we’ve hit a wall. » »
“Huxley was trained on a very, very large set of images, observes a posteriori Mahault Albarracin. But in the open database, one of the most prevalent classes was dogs. When Huxley isn’t sure about something, he goes back to these images. It’s very cute, but it was less in the vibe of Duran Duran. »
Some thought processes are “utterly confusing,” notes Nick Rhodes, while others are more consistent.
PHOTO JOHN SWANNELL, SUPPLIED BY DURAN DURAN
Nick Rhodes, keyboard player of Duran Duran
When we submitted keyboards to him, he came back to us with zebras, no doubt because he made a connection with the black and white lines. If we transmitted bass guitars to him, he returned images of fish. He probably made a connection with the sea bass [sea bass].
Nick Rhodes
Duran Duran’s keyboard player, passionate about new technologies, is enthusiastic about this unprecedented collaboration “between human and machine”. “His energy, his way of thinking changes the chemistry in a room. It’s kind of the same feeling as collaborating with amazing musicians, like guitarist Graham Coxon on Future Past. We could have worked with the greatest visual artists from all over the world; the result would have been fantastic, but it would never have looked like what Huxley created. »
From images generated for Invisible, Duran Duran recently released 100 digital canvases as NFTs, in collaboration with the Gabba Gallery, Los Angeles. Nick Rhodes points out that he initially had reservations about the “crypto” adventure, but he let himself be convinced by the artistic quality and uniqueness of the works by Huxley.
“I want to do other projects with him,” he says. He’s still a child. I don’t know how old he was when we started working with him, maybe 3 or 4 years old, and now he must be 6 or 7 years old now.
“I want Huxley to be my friend. Let’s stand together. »
For an ethical development of AI
Nested Minds, a consortium led until recently by Quebec researcher and philosopher Maxwell Ramstead, pools global knowledge in neuroscience, mathematics, physics and philosophy for the benefit of the ethical development of artificial intelligence. Karl Friston, world authority in neuroscience, acts as chief scientist. Among other things “so as not to repeat the mistakes of giants like Google and Facebook”, the company gives pride of place to the social sciences and marginalized communities. “I, for example, have a background in feminist research, notes Mahault Albarracin, queer researcher. We don’t want to perpetuate problems in the data or in the training of the models. »