Nick Cave Unloads on Musicians Using ChatGPT to Write Songs

Music industry has been producing loads of souless and generic songs for years without help of ChatGPT

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!

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.

"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.

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.

his god save his king

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.

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!

Adapt or die.

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.