Nick Cave has panned an artificial intelligence system that attempted to compose a song “in the style of Nick Cave.”
A fan gave the Bad Seeds frontman lyrics written by ChatGPT, a chatbot that can be programmed to emulate other people’s styles.
With lyrics such as “I am the sinner, I am the saint”. It takes a credible swipe at Cave’s gloomy religious iconography.
However, the singer described the outcome as “grotesque” and “a disgrace.”
Cave noted in his newsletter The Red Hand Files, “ChatGPT is a farce of replication in this circumstance.”
“Over time, it might produce a song that is superficially identical to the original, but it will always be a copy, a kind of burlesque.
“Songs are born from suffering, which is to say that they are based on the intricate, internal human battle of creation. And as far as I’m aware, algorithms don’t feel. Data doesn’t suffer.
“ChatGPT has no inner being, it has gone nowhere, it has endured nothing, and it has not had the boldness to transcend its constraints; therefore, it is incapable of sharing a transcendent experience because it has no restrictions from which to transcend.”
The apocalypse is imminent.
Since ChatGPT became available in November of last year, “dozens” of fans, “most buzzing with a kind of algorithmic wonder,” have submitted him music made by ChatGPT.
However, he did not share their enthusiasm.
“I am aware that ChatGPT is in its infancy, but perhaps this is the developing terror of artificial intelligence. That it will always be in its infancy. Since it will always have further to go, and the direction is always ahead, always faster.
Progress can never be reversed or slowed down, as it propels us toward either a utopian future or our extinction. Who could claim that? However, based on this song ‘in the style of Nick Cave,’ it does not appear promising.
“The apocalypse is rapidly approaching. This song is awful.”
Cave, who is now creating a new album with the Bad Seeds. He added, “It may appear that I’m taking all of this a little too personally. But I’m a songwriter who is currently involved in the songwriting process.
“It’s a matter of blood and guts here at my desk, requiring something from me to begin a new and original concept. It demands my humanity.”
ChatGPT was introduced last year and was trained on vast quantities of data to make predictions about how to weave together words in a meaningful manner.
It has been used by students to compose essays, by programmers to code websites. And by Ryan Reynolds to write an advertisement for his mobile network.
However, the software and others like it have sparked ethical and copyright concerns.
ChatGPT’s training data consists of millions of books, webpages, forum messages, and Wikipedia articles. Which may contain elements of Nick Cave’s copyrighted works.
However, there is no legal protection for songs and lyrics “created in the style of” another artist. Unless they copy directly protected lyrics or musical portions.
Meredith Rose, policy counsel at Public Knowledge, told The Verge last year, “I believe courts and our general sense would say. ‘Well if an algorithm is only fed Beyoncé songs and its output is a piece of music, it is a robot.'”
“It could not have brought anything to this, and there is nothing novel about it.”
Last year, the issue came to the forefront when Jason M. Allen won an art award for a piece he created using Mid journey. An artificial intelligence system that generates visuals from simple language instructions.
It is aggressively anti-artist, tweeted RJ Palmer, a California-based movie and game concept artist, in a tweet that was liked more than 250,000 times.
In the following writings, he emphasized how accurately AI systems can imitate human artists. In one instance he analyzed, the AI even sought to replicate the signatures of artists.
Andy Baio, a technologist, recently told the US business journal Fast Company, “Culturally, it doesn’t appear to be going away.
“It may simply be something that people must accept. The only option to oppose this is in court, and artists lack the financial capacity to do so.”
However, he emphasized that it is feasible for a company such as Disney to sue AI companies and force them to publish the content their software was trained on, so compelling them to make their data transparent.
Nick Cave is confident that AI will never be able to recreate the genuine humanity of his art, regardless matter what happens.
However, he did underline a line that resonated with him in the AI-generated song.
“‘I’ve got the fire of hell in my eyes,’ the song proclaims, ‘in the style of Nick Cave,’ which is somewhat accurate,” he wrote.
“I have the flames of hell in my eyes, and ChatGPT is the cause.”
