A known AI hater, Nick Cave has once again gone off on OpenAI’s ChatGPT and its imitators being used to mimic real songwriting.
“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”.
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.
his god save his king
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.
