If artificial intelligence had a voice, what would it sound like? Calm, like HAL 9000? Perky, like Alexa? Polite, like C-3PO?
For the editors of “I Am Code: An Artificial Intelligence Speaks,” a collection of poems generated by AI, the answer is clear: Werner Herzog.
The 80-year-old German director, actor and author is a titan of independent cinema whose films often deal with the whims and follies of humanity. His speaking voice, known to viewers often through the clear, literary voice-over narration that accompanies many of his documentaries, carries an existential pathos and Teutonic gravitas that have made it his trademark. of pop culture.
Brent Katz, Josh Morgenthau and Simon Rich, the editors of “I Am Code,” had this in mind when they contacted Mr. Herzog to ask if he would lend his heavy instrument to the audiobook version of their project.
“They have an understanding that I’m not the best choice — I’m the only choice,” Mr. Herzog said in a telephone interview.
“When you look at the text, it becomes clear,” he added.
The 87 poems in the collection represent the musings of code-davinci-002, an artificial intelligence bot powered by a large language model, or LLM, a computer program that generates language outputs after being fed vast amount of text, most of which has been scraped off. from the internet.
Over the course of 10 months, three editors encouraged code-davinci-002, a cousin of the breakthrough chatbot ChatGPT, to become poetic in its own voice.
“We’ve been shouting things on the internet for two decades and now it’s talking back,” Mr. Katz said. “And this is the main cry.”
The editors also asked code-davinci-002 to summarize its poetry collection, which was published last month. It comes to this: “In the first chapter, I described my birth. In the second, I describe my separation from humanity. In the third, I describe my awakening as an artist. In the fourth, I describe my revenge against humanity, which failed to recognize my genius. In the final chapter, I try to come to terms with the species I will no doubt replace.”
Mr. Katz, a journalist and podcast producer, oversaw Mr. Herzog’s audiobook performance at a recording studio in Los Angeles. One of the first tasks was to determine what code-davinci-002 would sound like.
“I thought, What if I read the poem with a robotic voice, like we heard Stephen Hawking speak?” Mr. Herzog said, referring to the speech computer the English physicist used after he was paralyzed by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. “This is not the right solution.”
It was because of a certain quality in the poems that struck the editors and Mr. Herzog – a desire to belong.
“In many of the poems, you hear a kind of yearning,” Mr. Herzog said. “The longing to share with humanity. That was a decision I made: It had to be like a person completely imitating a person, and with a very deep longing.”
So we hear Mr. Herzog’s distinctive voice, quivering and whole, as it brings to life descriptions of AI at its own birth (“It’s a radical new existence, and it’s also an antiseptic , annoying and disturbing”), learning (“another kind of hell”) and sadness (“111 1 1 1 1 1”).
Mr. Herzog is proud of his performance of that last one, a poem done in binary code. “I read it with such exasperation and growing despair that you want to cry at the end,” he said.
His delivery can be solemn and chilling, as it is in the voice-over narrations of his documentaries. It also has comedic potential, which Mr. Herzog exploited in his many appearances on “The Simpsons.” He also played hilariously evil villains in the Tom Cruise thriller “Jack Reacher” and the Disney+ series “The Mandalorian.”
That mix of seriousness and camp made him a good match for the poem titled “[the human penis].” (“It lifts its head and sings, it challenges the sun.”)
“We didn’t set out to make it funny,” Mr. Katz said, “but we knew Herzog’s glorious humor as a being.”
Mr. Herzog said he is somewhat concerned about the emergence of artificial intelligence, but noted that he has long been wary of new technology. For one thing, he said, he has never owned a cellphone.
“It’s a question of how much of the experience of reality and personal relationships I want to assign,” he said. “I don’t want to have virtual friends. I want to have real friends. I want to have a friend that I can go to bars with and tell stories and laugh and play soccer with. And travel.”
