Why did the comedian cross the road? To get to the generative AI of course.
To find out what happens next, watch an amusingly bizarre new video by comedian Ana Fabrega and Cristóbal Valenzuela, co-founder and CEO of AI start-up Runway, maker of a tool that generates videos from text, images or video clips. The pair set out to explore how, if at all, artificial intelligence could enhance Fabrega’s work.
The resulting footage, which you can watch below, showed January 27 at Seven on Seven (7×7), an event sponsored by New York-based arts nonprofit Rhizome. The program pairs seven artists and seven technologists to follow a simple, yet far from simple, directive: Make something new—a work of art, an app, a prototype or anything else—in just a couple of months. In the video, Fabrega, who is best known as a star and co-creator of the HBO Spanish language comedy series Los Espookys, responds to AI-generated content made from Valenzuela’s prompts with creations of her own.
The Runway exec sent Fabrega an AI-generated song about her seeing the truth in random letters and numbers, for example, and she responded by making a video in which she’s giggling her way through learning the lyrics to the ABCs. Valenzuela vollied back with a strange image of an exaggerated face that looks a lot like comedian Marty Feldman, and Fabrega answered that oddity with a funny video bit in which she’s in court telling the judge she’ll spend all that free time in prison pursuing photography.
Prompt, respond, rinse and repeat. The wacky sum total of the back and forth might not make complete sense, but it demonstrates how AI can lead artists in weird and wonderful directions. And how much potential there is for humans and algorithms to collaborate creatively, with each playing a key role in the outcome.
“Instead of me prompting an AI model, it was prompting me,” Fabrega said on stage at 7×7. “Because everything I was sending Cris was inspired by whatever he had sent me that was generated.”
This year’s event, the first following a hiatus due to Covid, took place in the basement auditorium at New York’s New Museum and explored how artificial intelligence could alter our understanding of everything from love to biology, politics, improvisation and humor.
Prior to making the video, Fabrega and Valenzuela had never before collaborated, or even met. Rhizome, which provides a platform for digital art, brought them together expressly for 7×7, which started in 2010. Past participants include Chinese contemporary artist Ai Weiwei; BuzzFeed CEO and co-founder Jonah Peretti; and filmmaker artist and writer Miranda July.
Fabrega and Valenzuela toyed with a number of experiments before landing on their human/AI video dialogue, which represents yet another exchange in the ongoing, and sometimes fraught, conversation about the intersection of artificial intelligence and art.
Using audio recordings of Fabrega, Valenzuela trained a voice model to sound like her, but it came across stilted and didn’t capture the many vocal intonations typical of her stand-up. He also trained a chatbot to write comedy based on Fabrega’s humor, which it “learned” from about 25 pages of her jokes and short stories. Humor is subjective, of course, but the resulting jokes probably won’t unnerve any stand-up comedians worried AI is coming for their job.
“It kept trying to take jokes I had and make them full sentences,” Fabrega said, “and that didn’t really work.”
See Spot The Robot Dog Dance
Other pairs presenting at 7×7 included Brown University quantum physicist Stephon Alexander and comedian and musician Reggie Watts, who together experimented with improvisation to understand how physics, creativity and AI intersect.
David Robert, Boston Dynamics’ director of human-robot interaction, teamed with artist Miriam Simun to explore the connection between humans and non-humans through a performance featuring Spot the compact four-legged robot dog. It stomped around on stage alongside human dancer Mor Mendel, who dressed in black and yellow, the same colors as the robot, and mirrored the bot’s frenetic movements.
The robot and Mendel circled each other cautiously at times, with the human dancer appearing alternately curious about her automated partner, fearful of it and in tune with it, an apt reflection of the complex relationship between artists and AI.
Seeing Spot through an artist’s eyes, “is valuable to furthering research and also bringing robots into everyday life,” said Hannah Rossi, a field application specialist at Boston Dynamics who helped ensure the robot functioned correctly for the presentation. The audience got to see humans through the robot’s eyes too, via a projection of what Spot “sees” as it maps its environment, which in this case included the audience and the two-legged dancer.
Generative AI tools like image generator Midjourney and OpenAI’s online chatbot ChatGPT have artists both excited about the creative possibilities and nervous about the potential implications for their work and livelihood—and for creativity itself. But this year’s 7×7 presentations, taken together, suggest AI is less a replacement for human intelligence than an alternative set of modes for sensing and synthesizing information and the world around us,” Michael Connor, Rhizome’s co-executive director and co-host of the event, said over email.
“Though clear-eyed about the harms and risks AI presents,” Connor said, “they point to a possible future in which these technologies are complement and companion.”
Not Funny? Blame The Humans
That synergy was a main takeaway for Valenzuela and Fabrega. During a Zoom interview prior to 7×7, they stressed that art created with AI is only as compelling as the humans who help create it.
“Sometimes we hold AI to some sort of impossible set of standards where we ask systems to do entire jokes, entire shows, entire movies or entire songs themselves, and really, that’s never been the point,” Valenzuela said. “You can choose which parts you’re going to incorporate. It’s up to you as an artist how you want to best utilize it.”
Fabrega, who’d never tinkered with the likes of Runway before, found herself surprised by how useful the tool proved for heightening jokes or evoking particular moods.
“It would make really bizarre choices. It would do something unexpected that was really fun,” she said. Other times, she added, the tool “really took away from the humor.”
Laughing about how they labeled AI as an amorphous “it” during their collaboration, the pair concluded that AI alone is no comedian, not intentionally at least.
If the result of a human-AI team-up isn’t funny, “it’s not the machine’s fault,” Valenzuela said. “We realized that after trying to make it funny. It is not funny. Either we are funny or we’re not.”
