Nick Cave has said that ChatGPT and AI songwriting are “a grotesque mockery of what it is to be human”.
ChatGPT is a chatbot launched by OpenAI in November 2022.
It is built on top of OpenAI’s GPT-3 family of large language models and is fine-tuned with both supervised and reinforcement learning techniques.
The 65-year-old singer and songwriter addressed the growing interest in the chatbox service in his blog The Red Hand Files.
He revealed that he received plenty of song submissions from his fans that were generated on ChatGPT.
Responding to a submission by a fan named Mark, Cave wrote: “With all the love and respect in the world, the track is bulls*** and a grotesque mockery of what it is to be human.”
The lyrics of the song read: “I am the sinner, I am the saint/ I am the darkness, I am the light/ I am the hunter, I am the prey/ I am the devil, I am the saviour.”
“Since its launch in November last year many people, most buzzing with a kind of algorithmic awe, have sent me songs ‘in the style of Nick Cave’ created by ChatGPT. There have been dozens of them,” Cave wrote in his blog. “Suffice to say, I do not feel the same enthusiasm around this technology.
“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,” he added.
“Data doesn’t suffer. ChatGPT has no inner being, it has been nowhere, it has endured nothing, it has not had the audacity to reach beyond its limitations, and hence it doesn’t have the capacity for a shared transcendent experience, as it has no limitations from which to transcend.”
Earlier this month, Cave confirmed that he’s working on a new Bad Seeds album.
