Robotic music a travesty, says Nick Cave

Australian singer-songwriter Nick Cave is sceptical about artificial intelligence taking over his job after he received lyrics from fans written by a chatbot supposedly in his style.

Nick Cave in Milan on the weekend. Picture: Getty Images

Australian singer-songwriter Nick Cave is sceptical about artificial intelligence taking over his job or those of other musicians after he received lyrics from fans written by a chatbot called ChatGPT supposedly “in the style of Nick Cave”.

Among the dozens of songs sent to Cave since the free “generative AI” chatbot ChatGPT launched at the end of last year, was one initiated by Mark from Christchurch, who wrote in to Cave’s email newsletter The Red Hand Files.

Despite touching on hallmark Cave themes like religion, death and violence, such as the line “I’ll dance with the devil, and I’ll play his game”, Cave was deeply unmoved.

“The apocalypse is well on its way. This song sucks,” he wrote, in his latest issue of The Red Hand Files on Tuesday morning.

The chorus of the song read: “I am the sinner, I am the saint / I am darkness, I am light / I am the hunter, I am the prey / I am the devil, I am the saviour”.

“Mark, thanks for the song, but with all the love and respect in the world, this song is bullshit – a grotesque mockery of what it is to be human, and, well, I don’t much like it.”

Many industries are grappling with what ChatGPT will mean for their future. ChatGPT can write complex code, and it can create hundreds of blog posts on a certain topic in seconds.

It can also write full essays with a single line of prompt text, causing Australia’s education industry to reveal it is brainstorming ways to detect AI-generated answers and control cheating by students. According to US researchers, ChatGPT can even pass medical licensing exams.

Cave is currently in the process of writing a new album which he called a “blood and guts business”. He said AI “can only mimic” the human experience and would never be able to write a meaningful song.

“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 wrote. “ChatGPT’s melancholy role is that it is destined to imitate and can never have an authentic human experience, no matter how devalued and inconsequential the human experience may in time become.

“Writing a good song is not mimicry, or replication, or pastiche, it is the opposite. It is an act of self-murder that destroys all one has strived to produce in the past … This is part of the authentic creative struggle that precedes the invention of a unique lyric of actual value.”

He argued replication was not the same as having a “new and fresh idea”.

“What ChatGPT is, in this instance, is replication as travesty. ChatGPT may be able to write a speech or an essay or a sermon or an obituary but it cannot create a genuine song. 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.”