There’s good reason to distrust any use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in creative spaces. The trend of AI art has become a refuge for those who overlook the fundamental human nature of artistic creation, and the irony of outsourcing a uniquely human pursuit to machine automation.
Microsoft’s “Artifacts” project — a collaboration with TBA Agency — seeks to challenge this narrative about AI and art. Its mission statement is to show that “cutting-edge innovation can amplify deeply personal artistic expression while remaining fundamentally guided by human imagination.” This March, Artifacts worked with various artists to release three innovative projects that utilize open-source AI tools such as Microsoft Copilot.
Among these is Sanctuary, a collaboration between experimental artist and composer James Ferraro and Swedish rapper Bladee. It caught my attention because of how surreal it was that Microsoft would recognize an artist like Bladee, whose notoriety is rooted mostly in underground or online culture. If there’s any artist who could pioneer AI into art, it would be Ferraro, whose avant-garde body of work in conceptual music and visual arts deals with technology and its relation to contemporary issues.
Though Sanctuary is presented as a desktop adventure video game, Bladee and Ferraro more aptly describe it as an “interactive poem.” Players communicate through text with various characters, whose dialogue is dynamically generated by Microsoft’s Azure AI Chatbot. At the end of the game, a final poem is generated based on the communications between the user and the characters.
Set within a post-apocalyptic labyrinth shaped like the Tower of Babel, Sanctuary describes a world in which civilization has collapsed from a plague caused by God’s divine rejection of humanity’s wastefulness and technological overreach.
We move slowly through this purgatory and talk with bizarre characters: worm-like, fleshy Cronenbergian monsters trapped in cages, or snarling jester monkeys and cats that could pass as parodies of scheming capitalists. Fans of Silent Hill, Baroque or Cruelty Squad would certainly appreciate the surreal, nightmarish qualities of this world.
Sanctuary simultaneously draws from the ancient terror of biblical damnation as well as modern anxieties about societal decay. Its literary influences (as it presents itself as a “poem”) reflect this duality. The AI text responses are trained off of poet William Blake’s 18th century book The Marriage of Heaven and Hell to generate dialogue reflecting modern-day escapism and paranoia.
Despite this interesting concept, in actuality, Sanctuary is not a particularly convincing demonstration of AI’s use in either poetry or gaming. To its credit, the idea of using AI for dynamic character dialogue can allow for much greater narrative depth. The tone and context of the player’s input could be interpreted to form procedurally new interactions, rather than being limited by pre-scripted responses. And thematically, the lore of Sanctuary — which includes characters connected neurologically through decaying computer networks — naturally invites the use of technology like AI, which functions on the same principle.
But the text generation is so frustratingly inert to the point where much of the conceptual promise goes unrealized. These AI characters have not much to offer beyond some esoteric and repetitive philosophical gobbledygook. They often speak in looping, cyclical ways that evade meaning. Excerpts from my own playthrough include: “the virus is a virus that is a social construct from which the virus emerges,” and “the wine we consume is the blood of humanity’s will. The will we consume is the blood of humanity’s will”.
No matter how you prompt the characters, it is difficult to extract any dynamically produced thought, undermining the unique potential of AI as an evolving consciousness that is able to adapt and respond to user input. It is hard to believe that the text was generated using the latest state-of-the-art models, as it more closely resembles the hallucination-prone prototypes from years past (or the logic of this old Bladee tweet).
Occasionally, there are fleeting moments of poetic clarity, such as “the streets of the sewers are filled with wine and rotting.” At best, these come off as typical Drain Gang lyrics with an arcane twist: they are strange, melancholic, sometimes hauntingly prophetic. But for every line that hits, there are far too many similar, less effective variations of it. Thus the writing process feels less like intentional authorship, and more like accidentally stumbling onto something slightly interesting amongst a sea of noise.
When the AI collapses into extreme repetition, like “the history of humanity is a process of destruction that is the process of destruction that is...” (repeated around 20 times), it becomes inadvertently interesting. It reminds me of Brian Eno’s idea that “whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature” (from A Year With Swollen Appendices). When AI slips into this kind of verbal fugue state, or mental recursion, it feels like this technology is being strained against its limits and programming, creating an uncanny valley effect.
There is also a fitting irony in Sanctuary warning against technological overreach while being powered by (and inevitably promoting to a mass audience) the very technology it criticizes. For those interested in the AI-based conceptual terrain of Sanctuary, you may want to check out Oneohtrix Point Never’s album Age Of, which focuses on a group of AI minds hallucinating the collective memory of human experience. Holly Herndon’s electronic album PROTO involves a “nascent machine intelligence,” trained to become an active and equal participant in a choral ensemble.
These works extract more artistic merit out of AI than Sanctuary, either by giving it a greater narrative purpose, or through more refined and successful experimentation. This results in a commentary on AI that feels more coherent and robust. While conceptually interesting, Sanctuary gestures towards a future in AI without quite realizing it itself.
