If we’re to believe the breathless hype, right now we are living through the dawn of the age of artificial intelligence – a moment that will sweep, gradually then suddenly, through all aspects of our lives. It feels like we’re mere years away from handing the shop keys over to the robots, and kicking back with our headsets onto a surfeit of personalised content, made possible through the power of AI. It is rough and imprecise now, they say, but very soon, it will have learned all that it has to learn, and it will do things far better than we ever could. 

So if this is the future we’re heading towards, I’m glad for the existence of something like Offal – an unquantifiable 10-minute audio series that gets sent to me directly through WhatsApp every week. Offal is a weird one. It is, from what I can ascertain, a product of the art collective Offal Industries, who only agreed to speak to me pseudonymously as their fictional CEO, ‘Jeremy Portal’. It is not a podcast, they’re very clear on that. “We don’t play nicely with others,” Portal tells me, via statement, “and we have no interest in being categorised and filed away alongside other shows”. Instead, each episode is an ‘audio zine’, and a bricolage of experimental music, literary screeds and deepfaked comedy sketches; if you’ve heard Chris Morris’s Blue Jam, you’ll recognise its uncanny vibe.

But where Chris Morris had to push actors into repeating his absurdities, Offal makes use of a different set of tools: AI voice generation software, and in particular, the voices we hear on the end of automated phone lines, or vibrating from the speakers of a self-checkout machine. These benign, regionally ambiguous voices become more discomforting, Portal notes, “because our performers are machines and therefore lack empathy,” he says. “They produce sincerity where no human performer would, or sometimes interpret the source material in surprising, even inappropriate, ways.” 

The material is broadly sourced; some snippets written by the collective, others by artists like Babak Ganjei or writers like Max Porter, of Grief is the Thing with Feathers fame. The word ‘offal’ is a recurrent, almost relentless, theme, although it’s never really established why. I asked them for a definition. “Offal, to us, of course symbolises all of the cultural products we sometimes ignore. In this context, it means the creative transformation of neglected, obscure or experimental music, comedy and literature into unusual and wonderful new forms.”

While the Blue Jam comparisons are irresistible, where I think their collective sits is closer to the constituents of what The Quietus’ John Doran famously termed as ‘New Weird Britain’. It is a functionally underground phenomenon: it arrives on your phone unmarked every week, with no credits or synopsis; it runs a voicemail box you can call in and chat to; it “appeals across borders”, building a small but eager fanbase in Mexico, Colombia and South Africa among other places. And it’s an uncomfortable listen, most of the time. It seeps into body horror with all the talk of guts and blood and, naturally, offal. But it’s stimulating and interesting, and a very British way of wreaking havoc with AI tools. 

“This might be a brief window in which AI is imperfect, and can be forced to glitch or do things it simply was not designed to do,” Portal says. There’s a wide open space right now to create, and to pioneer a new method of artistic expression while it’s still mouldable; something they point out. “These are our three chords. Or our 303, sequencer and drum machine.”

“This might be a brief window in which AI is imperfect, and can be forced to glitch or do things it simply was not designed to do” – Jeremy Portal

And so during this time, they want to push the technology as far as they can go, including perfect mimicries of public figures. The voices they have been able to create and use – “sparingly”, they insist;  “we don’t want Offal to become a lame satirical ‘deepfake’ thing” – are unsettlingly accurate. You can see where the dangerous potential lies with this software and there’s something thrilling about seeing a group have fun with it. “We can also clone any voice we want,” Portal writes, “and do it much better than most other people doing it.”

But this isn’t to say that Offal is self-consciously reckless, or even enthused by the potential of the software they have at their disposal. What seems consistent throughout all of the shows, and all available information about them, is that they hold deep concerns for how the very format they’re working within could have deleterious effects for them, their friends and their contributors. “We’re very aware of the ethical stakes of this tech,” Portal says, “specifically the ways in which corporations ‘mine’ and exploit voices from public figures and ‘civilians’ alike, and the threat of course to the paid employment of voice actors.” 

Offal is not a call for their displacement. Instead, all six episodes taken as a whole serve as a perfect piece of performance art on the bleeding edge of the here and now; a moment where AI is still this crude and easy to lampoon. It makes a masterpiece out of the malfunction of these systems, like visual artist Cecile B. Evans’ Sprung a Leak (2016) – a three-act play installation where two robots and their dog react to a data breach unfolding on the screens around them. This time around, the robots are not shown to be panicking, but instead under the total control of their programmers – for now, at least, and maybe for a vanishingly short amount of time.

Offal’s first series has now ended, and the transmissions have stopped coming through to my phone for the moment. But Portal comments that more is to come from the collective: “a print project later this year… a live audio-visual performance, an interactive game engine version of the Offalverse, and,” he suggests, semi-seriously, “our own arts festival at the South Bank.” Grandiose as their plans may be, if the unstoppable force of AI is as imminent as people suggest, then I am glad for the existence of art that still believes that it can stay one step ahead of the machines.

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