A known AI hater, Nick Cave has once again gone off on OpenAI’s ChatGPT and its imitators being used to mimic real songwriting.
Music industry has been producing loads of souless and generic songs for years without help of ChatGPT
Indeed - it’s just streamlining the process.
Humans are difficult to work with - you start out polishing a set of near identical white teenage boys from an early age, and before you know it they die from an overdose or - even worse - start producing music they enjoy without heeding the advice of market analysts. It’s better not to take any chances.
Better outsource your boyband to Korea, white teenagers don’t know shit about discipline
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Known AI hater and famed singer-songwriter Nick Cave has once again gone off on OpenAI’s ChatGPT and its imitators being used to mimic the actual talent to write and record music.
In a “letter to the editor”-style blog post, Cave took questions from two purported music industry folks about songwriters using generative AI to speed up the process.
“ChatGPT rejects any notions of creative struggle, that our endeavours animate and nurture our lives giving them depth and meaning,” Cave seethed.
As the ChatGPT-curious Cave fan noted, the “Red Right Hand” singer had indeed written about the now-notorious chatbot before — and his commentary back then, at the beginning of 2023, feels a bit like prophecy now.
Back in January, when OpenAI was still fairly new to the public psyche and hadn’t yet resulted in people losing their jobs by the thousands, another clueless fan wrote into the musician’s blog with ChatGPT-generated lyrics that they had instructed the chatbot to write “in the style of Nick Cave.”
But considering what we’ve already seen happen since Cave’s first takedown of ChatGPT — the rapid mainstreaming of generative AI, which has rocked academic institutions and led to massive entertainment industry strikes over the existential dangers these technologies pose — it’s becoming more and more difficult to disagree with him.
I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Funny that they call him the Red Right Hand singer when he’s played Stagger Lee exponentially more often.
Or the fact that RRH isn’t even in the top 10 of his best songs
Good bot!
“The apocalypse is well on its way,” Cave wrote. “This song sucks.”
so, he’s pissed off because an AI-generated song… sucks?
good artists will keep creating good art; lazy ones will create more and more worthless artificial art; smart ones will be able to offload some of their work to these helpers. The world will carry on.
Good artists will keep creating good art; record labels will keep pushing increasingly cheap and braindead bullshit strangling any hope of actual innovation made by anyone who needs to make a living to survive.
Human culture gradually grows into an easily consumed, regenerative cheeseburger-like mess. A billion near identical five second snippets of unprovocative entertainment that satisfies nobody but the shareholders, but feeds endless masses of consumerist dopamine slaves until they slowly die of boredom without ever having thought an independent thought in their life.
And the world, indeed, carries on.
the worst part is that by this description AI is not really changing things. It seems to me the industry was always headed that way and AI is maybe speeding it up if anything at all.
These are rarely “AI problems”.
Yes, the mainstream is quick to use AI as a scapegoat because their frogs have been thoroughly boiled by corporate profiteering, which is the real problem.
This is true - at the end of the day it’s just the age old struggle of maintaining humanity in face of modernism. Apollonian versus Dionysian, John Henry versus the steam drill.
What’s worrying me is that humanity appears to be losing ground fast, and that AI not only speeds up the process but makes fighting back even harder.
I admire Nick Cave a lot and value his opinion as a songwriter. He’s absolutely right in calling it the “boundless machine of artistic demoralisation.” What’s more demoralizing than know ChatGBT could churn out a facsimile of your work, making a mockery of your artistic struggles and obsessions? All you have to do is listen to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (my fave album is Tender Prey) to see that he was exorcising something deeply personal and a little perverse, and that’s one of the things that makes his music art and not just a digital token.
Adapt or die.
I’m not nearly as passionate in my attitude toward generative AI, because I think it CAN in theory be used in productive ways, but I ultimately agree with him more than I disagree.
I think if we were not living under such comodified circumstances, it wouldn’t be much of a problem, But since we do, I think he’s completely correct that it’s a corrosive development in a world in which art has always been in a tug of war between people who enjoy making and consuming it and people who see it purely as a means of enriching themselves.
I’ve tried using “AI” based plugins for mixing/mastering audio and songs. It can be really hit or miss with the quality of its results, so it’s nothing to lean on too heavily, but it’s great for using as a jumping off point or for giving you something to replicate yourself (mix wise) with other plugins and improve on with your own knowledge.
It’s got a ways to go in the mixing/mastering area, but it’s already leaps and bounds better than just 3-4 years ago.
I look at it from the perspective of a vocalist who can write every facet of a song except the lyrics. Is it really that different from hiring a ghostwriter? I love the idea of an AI (or LLM) that I can infodump my emotions into and it can help arrange those feelings into lines. I feel that has more personal gravity than just having someone else do it. Just my perspective tho.
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his god save his king
