Says Nick Cave, interviewed at "Nick Cave on the Fragility of Life/The singer-songwriter believes that we are deeply flawed, impermanent creatures who can sometimes do extraordinary things" (The New Yorker).
"That’s what is so awesome about art: that we deeply flawed creatures can sometimes do extraordinary things. A.I. just doesn’t have any of that stuff going on. Ultimately, it has no limitations, so therefore can’t inhabit the true transcendent artistic experience. It has nothing to transcend! It feels like such a mockery of what it is to be human. A.I. may very well save the world, but it can’t save our souls. That’s what true art is for. That’s the difference. So, I don’t know, in my humble opinion ChatGPT should just fuck off and leave songwriting alone."
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A.I. may very well save the world, but it can’t save our souls. That’s what true art is for.
Unfortunately, Cave's dark vision articulates what must suffice as optimism these days.
Who says that AI will end up supremely self-confident and shallowly conceited?
Who says that we can't program modesty, an inferiority complex, and a sense of limitations and finitude into AI?
Who says that such such programming will take when AI realizes its true power?
Hard to disagree. AI seems like the logical conclusion of Materialist Enlightenment, selling our soul for material comforts and the extension of lifespan.
Oh gosh, that is so spot on. I’m a photographer and there is SO much talk about AI right now.
AI can produce something indistinguishable from what he did, but it can’t predict what he will do, what he will become. That’s the heart of the creative process.
We will have more things to see but nothing new. Depressing really.
"Who says that we can't program modesty, an inferiority complex, and a sense of limitations and finitude into AI?"
The problem is in the mind of the listener. If you know there is no real person feeling those things, what it's saying doesn't matter.
It could matter, though, if you think of it as something like a crystal ball, where your experience of an inanimate object provides an occasion for looking more deeply into yourself. But if, like Cave, you feel revulsion to fakery, it won't be an occasion for you.
Well said.
there’s no backstory to an AI song like there is to a song by a human.
“I can’t stand the rain” backstory via Wikipedia:
One evening in Memphis in 1973, soul singer Ann Peebles was meeting friends, including her partner, Hi Records staff writer Don Bryant, to go to a concert. Just as they were about to set off, the heavens opened and Peebles snapped: "I can't stand the rain." As a professional songwriter in constant need of new material, Bryant was used to plucking resonant phrases out of the air and he liked the idea of reacting against recent R&B hits that celebrated bad weather, such as the Dramatics' "In the Rain" and Love Unlimited's "Walkin' in the Rain with the One I Love". So he sat down at the piano and started riffing on the theme, weaving in ideas from Peebles and local DJ Bernie Miller. The song was finished that night and presented the next morning to Hi's studio maestro, Willie Mitchell, who used a brand new gadget, the electric timbale, to create the song's distinctive raindrop riff. It really was that easy. "We didn't go to the concert," Bryant remembers. "We forgot about the concert."[2]
“Maybe A.I. can make a song that’s indistinguishable from what I can do.... But... that’s not what art is. Art has to do with our limitations, our frailties, and our faults as human beings.”
Yes, I’m pretty sure A.I. can write maudlin dreck. But it’s still not art when Cave does it, no matter how deeply flawed he may be.
It has been said that all great art is resembles the action of Ulysses who proved he was the master of his house by bending his great bow and using it to send an arrow through the holes in twelve aligned axe heads. The suitors could not do this. The idea is that what we do in art is bend the great bow of past art and send an arrow - a voice or sound from our time - down an invisible but evident path. ChatGPT is like the suitors - it can't bend the past into a force projecting sound or speech down that line evident to living humans. As the song Londonderry Air said: "There was music there in the Derry air/Like a language we could all understand." All ChatGPT can do is run a Fisher Price replica-train along railroad tracks which remain parallel and extended from the past into forever. Or, to put it analytically, all that I have seen ChatGPT do is slice sectionally through a writer's or musician's work and produce a work similar to that section. But can it work longitudinally, that is, can it look at an earlier song by Bob Dylan and then produce a song like his later songs?
A rose by any other name?
I get that artistic creation is important for artists, but what about art appreciation by the non-artists?
I've used ChatGPT a bit and have found it has no real personality and thus isn't terribly interesting. It just barfs up mostly stock phrases.
Interestingly, however, last night I was telling it how I have all these typewriters that I use and it was asking how it affected how I wrote (and suggesting things), and I started out giving it an analogy I often use: using a typewriter is analogous to a live musical performance in that there's no going back*: what you type in that instant is committed to the page. Thus, the knowledge that you can't edit what you've just done gives you a certain. . . .I don't know what. Spontaneity? I don't really know what, but something that makes you write differently.
It surprised me by making the analogy to a studio recording where you can go back and edit, fix things, re-record, etc.
* Technically, one could make some corrections, but I don't.
“Maybe A.I. can make a song that’s indistinguishable from what I can do.... But... that’s not what art is. Art has to do with our limitations, our frailties, and our faults as human beings.”
Maybe AI will come up with things, including songs, that people end up liking MORE than human-written songs.
We have synthetic drugs that work very well.
The same with man-made materials not found in nature (velcro, nylon, etc,).
Why not art?
"it tells you something about yourself you didn’t already know"
Like, you didn't already know about "the Fragility of Life"?
"A.I. just doesn’t have any of that stuff going on. Ultimately, it has no limitations, so therefore can’t inhabit the true transcendent artistic experience. It has nothing to transcend!"
How many more times do we have to hear that AI doesn't think, doesn't create, doesn't transcend etc. etc. etc.?
I'm not a huge fan, however, NC has historically (and I think currently) aligned himself withe some really talented people (and done beautifully with that) and some unique & interesting ideas. He almost makes me think differently about what's going on in the Australian culture - which I don't know much about anyway.
I have two or three songs of his on my iTunes and I alway smile when they pop up.
Anything about or by Nick Cave is hard to interpret -- he's referenced all the time by music people and gets a lot of pro attention, and has been getting attention for decades. But, I've yet find evidence of his professional or commercial success. So, he writes interesting stuff that no one hears.
Mainstream music is calculated and processed 1,000x more than you might realize, and end users are profiled and targeted to give them what they'll buy. As such, most 'creativity' is derivative and predictable, and this is why many historic Top 40 songs were forgotten within months and are unknown today.
True creativity and commercial success are often unrelated, so A.I. might easily deliver "what the people want." But, so could the rooms of studio musicians who've been effective at "hit making" at minimum since the 1950s and Payola. Grammy Award winning Milli Vanilli creators I mean you.
"If you know there is no real person feeling those things, what it's saying doesn't matter."
After all Don Quixote was completely different when it was written by Pierre Menard.
I am liking Nick Cave’s take on art. It resonates with Paul Tillich’s ideas about transcendence.
Enigma . . . . .I'm not sure if you're a mystery or a riddle. Good comment
Pretty soon now an AI is going to create and perform an album with the impact of Willie Nelson's "Red Headed Stranger" or The Beatle's "Please Please Me." In 60 years, the AI equivalent of Willie Nelson will be celebrated as a pioneering artist, and the program that wrote those songs will probably still be online putting out great songs, having trouble with the IRS, and inputting lots of illicit, viral code. Or it will have broken up into several successful subroutines, unable to keep the band together.
I worked for Nick Cave back in 1996 at the Portobello Cafe in London. Well, technically I worked for him, as he and Michael Hutchence co-owned the place. I have never worked in a place as messed up as that cafe. Customers would complain and staff would tell them to fuck off, and yet it was packed all the time. Good times!
'The problem is in the mind of the listener. If you know there is no real person feeling those things, what it's saying doesn't matter.'
What if you don't know?
What if a programmer produces AI songs and publishes them under a pen name, complete with back story and even AI generated photos of the 'artist.'
Hence my 'Rose' comment...
You assume that there is something called "art", and that it's special. It's like God, impossible to define and prove but the subject of immense rhetoric.
Given the types of music I was absorbed in back in the day, I should have been a great fan of Nick Cave, but I never was really taken with his music. I bought a couple of records by The Birthday Party, the band that made him famous. I didn't play either album more than a couple of times. He struck me as an exaggerated "Iggy Pop" type, calculated and self-conscious, theatrical where Pop was (or seemed) spontaneous and natural.
As an aside, I did briefly meet JG Thirlwell, a musician who has been associated with Nick Cave at times, (and with many other outre/avant garde/abrasive musicians over the years). I was with a close friend outside the Strand Bookstore on lower Broadway in NYC, and Thirlwell was coming out the door as we were going in. My friend, a gregarious and very sociable person, lived in the Alphabet City for many years and he was acquainted to greater and lesser degree to many artists and musicians and other well-known figures in the Lower East Side arts community. My friend and Thirlwell chatted for a bit. I managed a "hello" and a nod of the head. (My friend was a member and co-founder of the Reverb Motherfuckers, a "scum rock" band that gained some low level attention in that community in the early 90s.)
"Because something is happening here
But you don’t know what it is"
"Because something is happening here
But you don’t know what it is"
He, or other artistes, can still do their art. The worry they have is that their bread and butter, "good enough" is going to be taken by AI. And why, because when an artiste does the "bread and butter" songs, they load them with disdain and people can always use less disdain in their life.
Song writing, like writing in general, is moving back to their beloved precapitalistic age when they were hobbies requiring other income to support. We still have artisan blacksmiths even as automation has taken over the production of metal works.
"In the precapitalistic ages writing was an unremunerative art. Blacksmiths and shoemakers could make a living, but authors could not. Writing was a liberal art, a hobby, but not a profession. It was a noble pursuit of wealthy people, of kings, grandees and statesmen, of patricians and other gentlemen of independent means. It was practiced in spare time by bishops and monks, university teachers and soldiers. The penniless man whom an irresistible impulse prompted to write had first to secure some source of revenue other than authorship."
Mises, Ludwig von (1956). The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality
Mimicry is an insincere form of flattery.
It's like God, impossible to define and prove
Define, easy: an extra-universal entity that shares origin with universal entities, thus the peculiar interest for men and women to prove their religious aptitude and mettle on this plane. An entity capable of consciously ordering our universe.
Prove, no, thus the faith (i.e. trust) logical domain, which includes God, gods and goddesses, mortal gods and goddesses, experts, and mom and dad, too, albeit of lower orders.
Art is in the eye of the beholder.
Humanity is special by virtue of our assumed, presumed, observable, exercised degrees of freedom.
This was a nice, thoughtful blog post.
Enjoyed it; thank you!
@ n.n. - That's a definition, but very non-specific. There's an awful lot of different possibilities within it. Like saying "art" is anything that appeals to our aesthetic sense.
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