In ART_Official Intelligence, COFFEE HOUSE ANARCHISTS compose a haunting commentary on technology’s invisible influence on everyday life. Language flows like a personal testimony by the computer program itself on how much it governs and dictates human choice, preference and even thoughts. Instead of lecturing listeners on what to think, the song requires them to observe vicariously the invisible power that computer programmes exercise and hence makes its point unsettling and introspective.

It goes on and on with list after list of other ways in which algorithms govern modern life, from television-viewing suggestions through winnowing out of social media feeds and determining people’s face time at work. This listy style makes explicit just how ubiquity pervasively AI insinuates itself into a massive range of things in life beyond entertainment, including health, money and relationship. It’s a shrewd way of showing scale of intervention by AI while seeming not to sermonise. Repetition of a handful of lines provides emphasis, leaving us stuck in a rut, as do others automatically surfing filtered page after filtered page of content.

It’s effective because you have a contrast between automatonic flow of the algorithmic voice and human inventiveness. It’s effective because having the computer voice speak directly like Yung Gemo makes you as if you’re conversing with the song. It addresses how people willingly abdicate control to systems that determine, sort and categorize on their behalf. It doesn’t have a tone of desperation or raging in COFFEE HOUSE ANARCHISTS, though. Lyrics question a actual state of affairs, a state of affairs wherein AI can passively dictate as well as inspire.

The lyrics specify clearly in writing that AI is not merely viewed by watchers or consumed by users. It goes deep into life: medical care, coverage, war and loans. In its discussion on how AI makes choices on whom first to treat on a hospital or when to strike on a war, the song breaks out of standard discussion on social media algos. It raises large questions on fairness, on discrimination and on humanity’s accountability. COFFEE HOUSE ANARCHISTS does well on getting these things personal by putting them in context of day-to-day actions: every swipe on a monitor, every letter typed, every YouTube watched.

The salesmanship of having worked alongside AI as a collaborator by the artist can be found in how effortlessly and otherworldly poetical the lyrics are. It’s a rhythm and flow that’s both robot and human and replays on having worked alongside as opposed to working against its own deployment. Citing its title “I am the algorithm” multiple times, the lyrics ponder on how normalized this invisible power has become, almost like ambient noise against which users do not question.

COFFEE HOUSE ANARCHISTS do not demonstrate against AI per se. Lyrists instead reflect on people having surrendered that control to the algorithm by using it as a time-management tool and entertainment. It’s a nice nuance: blame no longer lies entirely on the machine, but on people’s use and acceptance of it as a given. This concept becomes something one internalizes as a as opposed to something learned on an intellectual level.

On a broad scale, ART_Official Intelligence is a thoughtful piece that doesn’t become overly bleak in its considerations around AI and twenty-first-century life. COFFEE HOUSE ANARCHISTS effectively teems with warning as well as entrancing us at the same time, warning us of harm as well as creative potential hidden in the shape of algorithms. It doesn’t necessarily propose solutions, though its lyrics do make us think about the correct things around freedom, choice and what, in actuality, it is to have technology dictate us.