Last month, Kmag introduced Paul Feder, a Brooklyn-based experimental producer who was yet again pushing the limits of sound with his AI-infused new single, ‘Paperclips’. The teaser track to his then-upcoming EP Echoes is an unsettling, Kraftwerkian ‘fever dream’ inspired by Nick Bostrom‘s Paperclip Maximiser theory. The single and its video set AI as as a maniacal, obsessive character which would stop at nothing to fulfill a singular need, thus creating a paperclip dystopia.
Now with Echoes fully released as of 23rd July, audiences will see Feder intends to paint a broader and more well-rounded picture of possible outcomes as AI advances, and it’s not as doomsday as ‘Paperclips’ would have had us believe.
I’ve watched the rapid advances in artificial intelligence with a mix of wonder and existential dread. In ‘Echoes’, I explore the anxiety I feel about being replaced by AI while using AI technology in the creative process. I navigated through this uneasy territory and ultimately embraced the collaborative potential of human and machine.
Slightly less upsetting than old Bostrom and his theory, Echoes nonetheless opens a number of questions with its remaining two songs, and though they’re much more harmonic and dreamy, fans are put on notice: that unsettling feeling may not go away by the end. ‘Human Love’, being the middle track on this three-tracker, is a bit of a hybrid between ‘Paperclips’ and the title track. Where ‘Paperclips’ poses the AI machines as the villain a’la the Terminator films, ‘Human Love’ makes them more emotionally sentient beings, just trying to understand what makes them different from humans, a’la Chappie or Short Circuit. Their desire in this track is not all-consuming but wistful, as they ‘just wanna feel your love.’ The music reflects this yearning with subtle, more ambient tones and haunting synths, whilst the beat remains a constant and robotic house beat, until the break where something seems to give with the entre of a more emotive future bass beat. Albeit temporary, this may be where artist and AI start to understand each other.
‘Echoes’ closes the EP and seems to be indicative of that potential between AI and artist about which Feder was pondering whilst writing this EP. Completely ambient and beatless, ‘Echoes’ is both the most emotive track and the one likely using the most AI. It’s almost as if the artist has entered the world of the machines to find it’s just as nuanced, complex and beautiful as the human world. With the only vocal being ‘who will carry me/you home’, it seems to be a dialogue between artist and AI, with the artist trying to help the machine to feel, and in turn feeling the existential pull of it being just out of reach. The same feelings are put forth by the corresponding video, also made with AI, as it flips through AI versions of earth’s most breathtaking visages. Again, as beautiful as it is, something feels out of reach.
Perhaps what makes humans so uncomfortable with things like AI and its uncanny nature is the whole ‘reality just out of reach’ phenomenon itself, rather than any danger of a robot apocalypse. It’s forced disassociation, and with humans as a species often feeling the truth or meaning of life is also just out of reach, we’re also forced to think about the emptiness in that gap, represented all too well by AI. But what if the key isn’t just staring wistfully at the gap but trying to bridge it? By making some sort of peace with AI in the process of writing Echoes, Paul Feder seems to have made a bridge for himself, and now sees the potential. The ‘echoes’ in the EP are of what could be, rather than worries about what isn’t.
Echoes is out now and can be streamed on Spotify.