Quite similar to the release of ‘The Black Riders’ at the end of 2019, I had no fresh ideas for a follow-up album when ‘A Wandering Mind’ was out. I had released an album every two years, which made me ride a steep learning curve in so many aspects of music and its production but it also left me a little bit tired, so I decided to take a break from Arctic Plant for as long as necessary until new ideas would rise inside of me without forcing them to.

As I’m writing this article, this holiday was 4,5 years ago and I really don’t remember how I spent it without working on new music but I do remember very well how it helped me to find new inspiration and ideas to write about. It was on my 30th birthday in April of 2022 when I first told my girlfriend about a new idea for the next album. By the time, it was just a vague feeling that got me hooked, like ‘this COULD be quite something’ – whereas from today’s perspective, it’s the biggest and most relevant topic I’ve ever worked on: Artificial Intelligence.

In 2022, the attention for A. I. by far wasn’t as huge as it is today – at least here in Germany. Only a handful of people were using the early LLM models, whereas today almost everybody is using them and they rapidly evolve and get both more use- and powerful, hence potentially dangerous. It’s definitely no science fiction anymore – it’s here to stay. So, as the sceptic person I am, I started to think about possible consequences of a wider use of A. I. to our society.

Throughout the 2010’s, the social networks were the one thing that had the biggest impact on our lives in general. They radically changed the ways we interact with each other and in which ‘funnel bubbles’ we’d swim. The algorithms learned quickly how to please us but also how to suggest things to us in such a subtle way that we’d gain a certain opinion on them. The line between use and abuse became ever more blurry as the tech companies improved their algorithms. Neuronal Networks, however, had been a rather nerdy thing that seemed to only have a use in science by that time. But with the Large Language Models, they suddenly got a very easily accessible front end. All of a sudden, we realise that through things like ‘Captchas’ and ‘Pokémon Go!’ we’d been training an A. I. over many years. Now we can chat with it, just like we could with a human being. We can ask any question and it will answer in our favour based on all the data it had been trained with – for good and for bad, depending on the intention of those who train and control it. All of a sudden, the algorithms from the social network era seem old fashioned. I can now ask an A. I. to give me suggestions on what to buy, who to vote for, how to run relationships and countless other very personal things.

In hope for rational, profound answers without a human bias – especially to things that people would be too shy to talk about to a real person – we might consider asking A. I. because of this easy accessibility and the fallacy that nobody else will know we ever asked. But the answers will depend on who controls the A. I. we are talking to and this is where it becomes crucial. With all the experience from the social networks, we can be sure that all of this personal information about us will be stored and used within the artificial intelligence. Some day, it might know more about us than we know about ourselves and with this knowledge, it will be able to control us – from very subtle and delightful (happy distraction) to horrific blackmailing and slander. It’s all possible…

With this vision in my mind, I was convinced that there was no other way but making the relationship between society and the upcoming A. I. technology the topic for my next concept album. I wanted it to be social critic – a warning to not give up thinking for ourselves and a finger pointed at the weaknesses of people’s mass usage of technology we’d already seen with the social networks. The grand idea for album number four was born!

tbc