Hark! The Herald Robots Sing:Holly Herndon and Matt Dryhurst @ Serpentine North.

AI. It's the future. But it's not just the future. It's the present too. Some people think it will be wonderful, others things it will be diabolical. It's likely to be both - if you think of how much unsuspected damage social media has done to the world and to our brains since its advent then you can multiply that hundreds or thousands of times for AI. 

Geoffrey Hinton, the 'Godfather of AI', believes there's a 10%-20% chance that AI will lead to human extinction within three decades. It seems like pretty important stuff so why is so much debate about it so dry, so academic, so unappealing and uninteresting to the layman? Maybe Matt Dryhurst and American composer Holly Herndon's The Call, currently on show, at London's Serpentine North could make some sense of it.

Maybe not. Art seemed a good way of exploring AI and, keeping it seasonal, The Call features festive sounding choirs. But, alas, it's nowhere near as interesting or as enlightening as one would hope for it to be. Herndon and Dryhurst view AI as a creative instrument and the latest in a series of coordination technologies that allow individuals to work and build collectively.

This, they suggest, is not dissimilar to group singing (hmmm) which also serves a similar purpose of creating meaning in social and civil life. To demonstrate this, the artists put out a call to various British choirs asking them to perform a songbook of musical exercises and hymns which were then fed into AI. There's even a room, haughtily called The Oratory, you can go into and add your own voice to the AI's data set. There's a promise your voice won't be used so I don't quite get how that works.

There's also another room you can go into to hear the AI singing. There's a few speakers hanging up, some musical notation, and some history on composers that have been utilised for this installation. The only name I recognised was Pauline Oliveros.

But that's it - apart from some model thing at the front that I couldn't make head nor tail of. I suppose we're supposed to be awed or frightened by the power of AI to create its own songs but surely we all know AI can do, and has been doing that, for years. It would be far more interesting if Herndon and Dryhurst looked into issues like morality, ecology, and theft of intellectual property that will undoubtedly arise with the inevitable rise of AI.

Regulation too. But there's nothing of that. If I hadn't been told the music being played was made by AI I wouldn't have guessed. I would have thought it was pleasant enough, if unremarkable, choirs singing Christian sounding songs. It all seemed a bit of a wasted exercise and I still await art making far more interesting, and pertinent, points about AI than this disappointing and underwhelming show. AI may be many things in the future but underwhelming is unlikely to be one of them.