In a recent conversation with the Australian, Nick Cave talked about his worries over AI.
“I’m an enormously optimistic person about the world in general, but I think the demoralising effect or the humiliating effect that AI will have on us as a species, it will stop us caring about something like the artistic struggle that we will just accept what is fed to us through these things,” the singer said of AI’s impact on people.
The rocker continued, explaining why he’s more concerned about what AI says about people rather than his own job, “I find it all unbelievably disturbing. I’m not worried about my own job or something like that about being replaced or something. Just what it’s saying about us as human beings.”
This isn’t the first time Cave has talked about AI. Earlier last year, he mentioned on his blog that he got many fan submissions of lyrics written ‘like Nick Cave’ using ChatGPT. He wasn’t impressed with the results.
“What ChatGPT is, in this instance, is replication as travesty,” the musician wrote as his response to a ChatGPT-generated song in his style. “It could perhaps in time create a song that is, on the surface, indistinguishable from an original, but it will always be a replication, a kind of burlesque…. Songs arise out of suffering, by which I mean they are predicated upon the complex, internal human struggle of creation and, well, as far as I know, algorithms don’t feel. Data doesn’t suffer.”
He added, “ChatGPT has no inner being, it has been nowhere, it has endured nothing, it has not had the audacity to reach beyond its limitations, and hence it doesn’t have the capacity for a shared transcendent experience, as it has no limitations from which to transcend.”
“Maybe A.I. can make a song that’s indistinguishable from what I can do. Maybe even a better song. But, to me, that doesn’t matter – that’s not what art is,” Cave also told the New Yorker in March 2023. “AI may very well save the world, but it can’t save our souls. That’s what true art is for. That’s the difference. So, I don’t know, in my humble opinion ChatGPT should just f*ck off and leave songwriting alone.”
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds announced their 18th studio album, ‘Wild God,’ on March 6, 2024, and released the title track as a single that day. They then released a second single, ‘Frogs,’ on May 31, and a third single, ‘Long Dark Night,’ on July 23. The full album will arrive on August 30.