Nick Cave on ChatGPT

https://www.theredhandfiles.com/chat-gpt-what-do-you-think/

by lizardcone • 4 years ago

87 11 4 years ago

isaacfrond• 4 years ago

Blah blah blah.

I have a machine on my desktop that composes lyrics in the style of any artist living or dead. There are maybe a few hundred people alive who can do better. There is certainly no-one I know that can do even remotely as good.

It is a miracle.

It is the pinnacle of a hundred years of AI and IT research.

It deserves respect not ridicule.

CaptainZapp• 4 years ago

It is the pinnacle of a hundred years of AI and IT research.

Hyperbole, much?

In addition I disagree. On the surface the results are awesome. When you dig in a bit, especially in your field of expertise, it's utter superficial bullshit.

Edit: Added paragraph to be compliant with HN guidelines.

epistemer• 4 years ago

ChatGPT seems best at creating mediocrity outside a person's circle of competence because then the mediocrity is hidden to the creator and they can honestly act out this type of hyperbolic theater.

mahathu• 4 years ago

I have a machine on my desktop that composes lyrics in the style of any artist living or dead.

What's it like to have such a lack of emotional connection to others and yourself that you genuinely can't distinguish between AI generated word salad and real artistry by real humans? As Nick Cave said in his letter, a big part of the value of art isn't in coming up with words that vaguely sound like they have meaning, but in sharing emotions with your fellow humans, allowing for a genuine connection in the process. If you get that same feeling of connection from your machine on your desktop maybe your standards are a bit low?

sitkack• 4 years ago

You are assuming that everyone internalizes communication the same way. When I read poetry and listen to music, I project it into my own experiences. When I listen to Johnny Cash song about killing a man and having regret, the man in black didn't kill a man, but I think about the times in my life where I made a mistake that can't be undone and what it feels like.

The source of the words might matter for you, but it is the projection of those words into my own psyche that has the affect on me.

I can give you a machine that will print a Certificate of Authenticity for any experience you desire.

circlefavshape• 4 years ago

I think Nick Cave's response is a bit over the top, but in fairness ChatGPT's "song" is total horseshit, and resembles Cave's output only very superficially

dgreensp• 4 years ago

There’s already a lot of creative work that is somewhat superficial and unoriginal but serves its purpose, for better or worse. There are pop songs I like, for example, where the lyrics could have been written by an AI (but the production and vibe of the music make up for it). The lyrics were actually written by a producer or two in an afternoon while they were having a good time and not taking it too seriously, just writing what sounded good (in constrast to the suffering-to-put-words-to-one’s-pain described in the letter). I think it’s possible to underappreciate how art can carry a message, and creative works can touch people in a way that an AI working by itself won’t because it has no reason to; it has nothing to say. GPT-3 is basically a fancy autocomplete. That said, will AI-generated works probably touch people deeply and make them feel things? Sure. It’s not hard to make humans feel things. And AI that is good at summarizing and reflecting things back to us will make us feel seen. It’s easy to underestimate AI and overestimate the genius of the poor artist who is trying to generate new ideas and produce work based on them at the limits of his human capacity for generating novelty and synthesizing output.

It’s already easy to generate mediocre work, and humans decide what gets popular, whether it’s the audience or the people choosing what gets made or distributed.

Movie scripts have been getting more superficial and less original, so if an AI writes a Spider-man movie and no one can tell, it will be because we’ve met in the middle.

college_physics• 4 years ago

The positive scenario is that the clumsy rushing to eliminate the human from the loop, across the board (social media algos and adtech, AI-everything, crypto/nft etc) will only elevate the value of human attributes like creativity, trust, real connections, authority, agency/privacy...

The negative scenario is that the forces that brought us here have no real counterforce and will continue dissolving pre-existing norms and values, with totally uncertain outcomes

fabbari• 4 years ago

I have a point to make, that I'm not totally convinced I believe in myself. Take this as a devil's advocate argument.

Nick Cave - correctly so - says that you can't write if you haven't experienced something to write about and you need to have an inner self that experiences things to do that in the first place.

But AI being trained on a vast amount of human writing, writing that was the consequence of the life experience of millions of selves, could be considered - if not a 'self' - as having experienced all the digested human experiences.

The mockery - the pastiche effect - is the result of asking ChatGPT to write something in the style of 'Nick Cave'. I bet it would read the same if you asked anyone to write something 'in the style of...'.

I don't honestly know.

revolvingocelot• 4 years ago

This response is probably more abstruse and rhetorical than logical, but here goes.

Consider that, if the AI "actually" has experienced all the digested human experiences, the vast majority of them -- even those, in the phase space of human experiences, "close" to Nick Cave, that the AI might utilize in order to seem most like Nick Cave -- are not those of Nick Cave, and detract from the machine's ability to authentically impersonate Nick Cave just as Nick Cave's writings add to that ability.

But, like, I don't think it actually has experienced all that stuff! Don't fall into the trap of thinking that human language correctly encapsulates (or even comprises!) human thought. You'd be in good company -- great philosophers like Bertrand Russell made that error, too. But human language is a messy abstraction for Something Else that's going on while we think. I can read inspiring or evocative words, but I don't really think that even the most vivid description can give me the visceral experiential knowledge of what it's like to climb Everest, or whatever. I can, however, read a lot about Everest and the experience of climbing it, and then write something that might trick readers into thinking I speak from firsthand experience. I suspect that this is closer to what the AI is doing.

tubatime• 4 years ago

It could perhaps in time create a song that is, on the surface, indistinguishable from an original, but it will always be a replication, a kind of burlesque.

I read this sentiment on HN before and I doubt it. If it’s indistinguishable (ignore for now the qualifier “on the surface”) then what distinguishes it? No true songwriter?

I just dunno if it is a useful way to think about song writing or other art creation.

Nick Cave on ChatGPT

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