Clarice Assad performs her work 'The Evolution of AI' with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra

Composer Clarice Assad could have used artificial intelligence to help create her latest piece. Instead, she decided to turn a mirror toward the topic of AI itself.

As part of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra's Sandbox composer residency program, she created a kind of sci-fi saga in miniature. Called "The Evolution of AI," it will be premiered at this weekend's SPCO concerts, and Assad will be at the center of it all, portraying an AI avatar, a kind of human-machine hybrid who interacts with the orchestra.

So did Assad know this to be the direction she wanted to go when the Sandbox residency offer came her way?

"I didn't know what I was going to do at all," the Brazilian American composer said last week from her home in Chicago. "Daria Adams, the violinist who's overseeing this particular project, was talking about Bedřich Smetana's 'From My Life' [also on the program], and composers talking about their lives. And I was thinking, 'What if I were a character, not myself, and telling something from my life, but not really human?'

"And then I started going crazy with this," she continued. "Who is this character? And learning about AI, different softwares, especially things with narrative, image, videos and speech."

The Sandbox residency model allowed her to shape the work over the course of months in collaboration with the orchestra, something rare in the classical music business.

"This could not have happened without the time that we had to try things out," Assad said. "Not everybody is open to new things. Some are very rooted in traditional concepts. Not this orchestra."

"The idea of evolution is a perfect metaphor for the piece itself, the way it was created through our Sandbox model, and the whole topic of AI," Kim said last week. "We're living in the middle of this intense period of questioning about how AI will affect our lives on a daily basis, and this piece embraces all of that uncertainty, and finds both the drama and the humor in it."

Assad's piece may not qualify as a comprehensive history of artificial intelligence, but it does include something of a thumbnail chronicle of Western music, incorporating themes that stretch from the earliest surviving composition — the first- to second-century "Seikilos Epitaph" engraved on a pillar in Turkey — to the early 20th-century creations of Igor Stravinsky. But that fits with a work that encourages some perspective at this possible turning point in human history.

"Right now, it's a question as to what this technology is going to do to so much of what we do as humans," Assad said. "I don't have the answer, but I also believe that now is the time to be asking these questions. How can we be smart about using them as friends and not as foes? It's too late to go back. It's too late to not be a step ahead of what's coming. … It's going to be a terrible period of adjustment for people.

"But it could help solve a lot of problems, like climate change. They just found a new type of antibiotic with AI that I think humans couldn't have found alone. It can fight the superbugs. That's amazing."

And so is Assad, according to Kim.

St. Paul Chamber Orchestra with Clarice Assad

What: Works by Leoš Janáček, Assad and Bedřich Smetana.

When: 11 a.m. and 7 p.m. Fri., 7 p.m. Sat.

Where: Ordway Concert Hall, 345 Washington St., St. Paul.

Tickets: $12-$55 (students and children free), available at 651-291-1144 or thespco.org.