Why strive? Stephen Fry reads Nick Cave's letter on the threat of AI [video]

https://aeon.co/videos/why-strive-stephen-fry-reads-nick-caves-letter-on-the-threat-of-computed-creativity

by pluc • 3 years ago

57 85 3 years ago

JKCalhoun• 3 years ago

Very good letter. I'm struck by Nick Cave's comment about the making of beautiful things being the meaning of life.

It always struck me as bittersweet that we should be birthed on this world with a mind capable of imagining oblivion, futility, our own certain death, but we were also given the tools (our creativity) to express both our fears and pain as well as our joys and our love for life.

Were we to evolve to some point where we could live forever, knew no fear or want ... it seems like it would be an artless world then. They might look back on us and our culture with only a mere curiosity and have no understanding of what it was like to be "human".

But back to the point, I question whether AI can every truly make "art" if (and perhaps I put too fine a point on what art is) they can never feel human pain.

baal80spam• 3 years ago

To me, meaning requires effort.

gonzo41• 3 years ago

Today's AI is not making art. It's finding a well fitted solution to a set of contraints.

Maybe in the future AI will create art. But we'll be distracted with discussion about rights for AI around that time.

prerok• 3 years ago

I suppose this is a question of what is art. There have been numerous attempts at defining it and there are a few schools of thought. Many of those focus on the artist and what part of the artist, what part of their being, was put into the artwork and what they were trying to convey. This does not exist in AI generated content and, I suppose, this is what is hurting people in the art business: there is no individual being behind this, so it's like it's soul-less.

On the other hand, there are plenty of people, including me, who are not really affected by what artist created what and why. We care more about whether the art touches you, conveys a thought, a feeling, leaves you changed. Such art can be a joining of previous arts and therefore can be generated by AI or produced by an "amateur", who only copies others' artstyles. I would still consider it art.

This AI revolution on the artistic fields will no doubt leave many authors scrambling for work because AI will produce better results faster. Originality and more personal notes will save a few, so I doubt that the most prolific and well known auteurs are in danger, but many many will not be so lucky. Just like in industrial revolution in the past.

huppeldepup• 3 years ago

  As Cave’s letter articulates how foregoing the struggle of creation risks destroying the ‘collective, essential and unconscious human spirit’, his characteristically masterful writing combined with Fry’s powerful reading serve as a reminder of the value and vitality of human creativity.

Art is what comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable. It appears that Mr. Cave is very comfortable and wishes to keep progress from disturbing him.

morelisp• 3 years ago

This line is absolutely madness when you look at who is behind the current AI push.

jazzyjackson9• 3 years ago

you can't just call whatever you're doing progress, the progress ought to be demonstrating improved outcomes by some metric

is multiplying the speed we can spam each other with marketing copy and deepfakes a good measure of progress?

williamcotton2• 3 years ago

AI has no effect on singer-songwriters.

People that are into someone playing an instrument and singing their own poetry in a live setting will keep the form alive.

People that listen to expensively produced hot-100-esque music are already not that interested in watching live music.

What does Nick Cave need to worry about? When he tours people go to listen to his music and poetry, not someone else’s!

Do you think live music is going to suffer that much more since the ultimate dagger, the phonograph?

Gare• 3 years ago

Do you think live music is going to suffer that much more since the ultimate dagger, the phonograph?

Well, you can also have AI band playing AI music live. Cue vocaloids.

Riverheart• 3 years ago

Yeah. How quickly we forget the hologram Tupac and Gorillaz concerts as well as a the virtual live concerts from Fortnite.

williamcotton2• 3 years ago

I don’t think that people into artists like John Prine are going to be into what’s akin to showing up with a record and pressing play! They already want a human expression.

jazzyjackson9• 3 years ago

Hatsune Miku is playing Coachella this year, no joke

jvanderbot• 3 years ago

The effect is that, at least for 90% of my music listening, I'm looking for new music, with a few genres that I really like. Only occasionally do I queue up a classic that I know well. And I am completely uninterested in the people making it.

My wife is the opposite. The person is hugely important.

So there will be, in our household, a 50% (45, I guess) decrease in the need for human artists. But I am happy to pay someone to generate that music for me, like a Spotify.ai or something! What I don't want is a destruction of any creation and shared experience.

It's been the same for mid journey. I will spend an hour generating imagery for posters or desktop or game art or ttrpg etc etc. I don't even bother image searching most of the time. But I still enjoy sharing with the game crew or friends.

thrwayaistartup6• 3 years ago

Nick Cave is expressing a personal loss, and I believe that he truly feels that loss. But to me, this letter reads roughly like: "if I were the server or the bouncer instead of the performer or the writer, all of humanity would cease to have meaning". Which is perhaps true, for Nick Cave. But it also betrays something grotesque and profoundly wrong about his view on the relationship between paid labor and the human soul.

It's a wonderful thing to find meaning in one's work, and for the things in which one finds meaning to be well-compensated. But it is no birthright. Contrary to Nick Cave's view, I can absolutely assure you that non-artists in HR departments and nursing stations and factory floors and classrooms often live full happy human inner lives. Those lives are of their own making and do not derive from the artiste class's output.

Manual production of high-quality clothes, tables, and glassware used to be the norm. Generations of people found meaning in these crafts before the industrial revolution changed the economics. People still do these things, only in rare cases as their primary way of making a living. Most art does not sustain developed world middle class existence. Most art is hobby. And that's okay.

The creation of software and AI systems is itself a form of craft-work and soul-work, which many engineers and scientists relate to the same way that Nick Cave relates to music. It is unclear to me why Nick Cave's striving is more important than the striving of engineers and scientists, or why his feeling of what humanity is, is more important than theirs.

jazzyjackson9• 3 years ago

I might assert, with false nostalgia because I wasn't there, that we had a much better connection with what it meant to be human when we were tilling dirt and making clay pots and weaving cloth for each other, and now having been estranged from the physcial meaning-making all we have left is our image making, our personas we create for each other and these arguments we have online, and now we're automating that away too.

thrwayaistartup6• 3 years ago

we had a much better connection with what it meant to be human when we were tilling dirt and making clay pots and weaving cloth for each other

Actually, I agree. I think Nick Cave is right about this. I do think this sort of alienation has a cost.

But that doesn't mean that there is any remotely moral case for undoing the green revolution and allowing billions to starve. And it does not mean that the machines which feed those billions of people who might otherwise starve are somehow the root cause of a decline of humanity. In fact, quite the opposite.

And this is the paradox: our alienation from agricultural work is precisely what enables our very existence.

My main observation is that there is a way out of this paradox. As it turns out, you can go out grow some food in a garden, or write a song, or paint a picture, even if that work is commodified and there is no paycheck. The commodification and automation of those industries does not prevent one from engaging in them as soul-work.

The teacher who plays in a band in his garage is no different -- from a "soul of humanity" perspective -- than Nick Cave. But Nick Cave's implicit argument argument demands that he is different, and not from an economic perspective, but from a very soul of humanity perspective. It's extraordinarily off-putting to me in that sense.

Of course, engaging in art as hobby instead of for pay does require free time and a share of returns on our societal bargain. On that note: elites like Nick Cave should be spearheading serious conversations about political economics and labor economics, instead of lamenting the loss of their extraordinarily unique status.

swayvil3• 3 years ago

Many of us never see reality. Air-conditioned home to air-conditioned car to air-conditioned office. Artificial goals and artificial entertainments. All communication with members of your office and echo-chamber social media organs.

The whole population is fugueing out.

cnewey• 3 years ago

Well said.

minsight2• 3 years ago

Cave was expressing an answer to a question about cutting corners in the process of creating music. ( https://www.theredhandfiles.com/chatgpt-making-things-faster... ) There is certainly value in the work of nurses, bouncers and servers, and my interpretation of Cave's other written works leads me to believe that he is a proponent of finding joy and creative expression, even in tasks which don't have an obvious artistic product. AI lacks insight and lack of insight is what can turn a succulent feast of a life into biweekly deliveries of Soylent.

thrwayaistartup6• 3 years ago

AI lacks insight and lack of insight is what can turn a succulent feast of a life into biweekly deliveries of Soylent.

Does a picture of a humming bird lack insight? Does collage art lack insight? Do remixes lack insight? Does mass-produced formulaic pop music lack insight?

Maybe. Or maybe some artists enjoy those creative processes and some audiences enjoy the output. Maybe oil painters who critique photography, and photographers who critique collages, and musicians who critique mash-ups, and DJs who critique modern production studios, and, yes, artists who critique the use of AI models in creative processes, are all just being pretentious assholes.

(It is possible I am simply misunderstand Cave. I take most of his writing to be artistic prose. It's possible that these are sincere metaphysics and that Nick Cave does literally believe in some sort of ur-religious "essential and unconscious human spirit underpinning our existence". In which case I think he's got a nutty religion and consider the fact that AI is an existential threat to that religion mostly a net good for humanity.)

abathur2• 3 years ago

I suppose I don't really disagree with you, but a fair fraction of us would be likely to mourn, in fora like this, the end of the ability to sustain a middle-class existence via the craft of making software.

leashless14• 3 years ago

Incredibly talented people complain when technology lets talentless people make some of the beautiful things that they imagine but never had the talent to make real.

It's like rich people saying money does not matter. "Easy for you to say." I can't draw. But now I can take the talent I have and extend it to make images.

Is it art? I don't know. I don't care. I was not able, now I am able, and the people who are able complain.

Screw 'em. This is what tools are for. The strong should not tell the weak they cannot use props.

leashless14• 3 years ago

"Supermodels complain about plastic surgery letting ugly people look better" type headlines abound in AI

rafaelmn• 3 years ago

Plastic surgery only gets you so far. Likewise for AI generated content.

jazzyjackson9• 3 years ago

the tech would not exist if not for the talented people you are screwing

mvandermeulen• 3 years ago

How are they being screwed?

leashless14• 3 years ago

Mine workers extract iron ore.

Iron ore is made into iron which is made into machines which shovel iron ore.

"Tell it like it is

Till there's no misunderstanding

When you strip it right back

Man feed machine

Machine feed man" to quote a (human) poet

jkic473• 3 years ago

Do you think so? I can see the AI being trained with crowdsourced input like "does picture A look more like a Mondrian than picture B".

Almondsetat• 3 years ago

Artists complain because they are being hit with the fact that most people don't care about art.

Why is AI taking over corporate designs? Because, my dear artist, the stuff corporations commissioned you wasn't art, they were formulaic cogs into a soulless machine.

Why is AI taking over porn? Because, my dear artists, almost all of your NSFW commissions wasn't art, its single purpose was making someone cum.

Before automation people were forced to hire artists. Do you think the Church in the middle ages would have hired so many painters to decorate the walls of the myriad of minor churches in their possession? No, they would have saved them for the big meaningful projects and let AI do the job elsewhere.

The people really paying you for your art are a minority and won't go away. Deal with this fact however you like. Perhaps if you're such a good artist then use AI to round up your weaker skills such as marketing or story writing.

viraptor3• 3 years ago

That's not what Nick Cave says though, is it? He's not complaining about the tech enabling people to create. He says the whole song results suck and only have surface level similarity to someone. The closest he gets is actually just accepting: "ChatGPT may be able to write a speech or an essay or a sermon or an obituary". He's not even saying anything about using LLM as a tool to help you express what you actually want to create, ("here's the beginning, now I need a line about X, but [constraint Y]") but rather criticises the complete "song in style of ..." result.

thrwayaistartup6• 3 years ago

No. His critique is one of process, not of output quality.

He is asserting the existence of an "unconscious human spirit", asserting that ChatGPT "is fast-tracking the commodification of the human spirit by mechanising the imagination", and that we should fight against AI as we would fight against genocide: "just as we would fight any existential evil, we should fight it tooth and nail, for we are fighting for the very soul of the world."

Incidentally, I agree with the importance of struggle and soul-work. I agree with the general valence of the lament, but come away with a very different call to action. In particular: I just don't think I have the right to impose luddism on the rest of the world for my particular niche while benefiting lavishly from the rest of the world's alienation form their much more essential labor.

To me, it's the ravings of an angry, arrogant, and entitled elitist who fears being dethroned from his comfortable luxury and refined status. And a hilariously hyperbolic one at that. Of all the actual evils I would write something like this about, AI Art probably isn't even in the top 1,000,000. Can you imagine looking at the world today and writing that last paragraph? My god.

---

Quotes:

ChatGPT rejects any notions of creative struggle, that our endeavours animate and nurture our lives giving them depth and meaning. It rejects that there is a collective, essential and unconscious human spirit underpinning our existence, connecting us all through our mutual striving.
ChatGPT is fast-tracking the commodification of the human spirit by mechanising the imagination. It renders our participation in the act of creation as valueless and unnecessary. That ‘songwriter ‘you were talking to, Leon, who is using ChatGPT to write ‘his’ lyrics because it is ‘faster and easier ,’is participating in this erosion of the world’s soul and the spirit of humanity itself and, to put it politely, should fucking desist if he wants to continue calling himself a songwriter.
This impulse – the creative dance – that is now being so cynically undermined, must be defended at all costs, and just as we would fight any existential evil, we should fight it tooth and nail, for we are fighting for the very soul of the world.

8jef• 3 years ago

Moreover, calling upon bible's genesis as an analogy for creation makes for a very weak, backward argument.

Hoasi5• 3 years ago

Incredibly talented people complain when technology lets talentless people make some of the beautiful things that they imagine but never had the talent to make real.

If we are speaking about the democratization of tools, this is not what is happening here.

In effect, prompting Dall-E or Midjourney does not make you a creator.

And herein lies the problem. It doesn't enable the talentless to create something beautiful. It allows anyone to prompt aggregated images, regardless of talent or years dedicated to a craft. These images have no intrinsic value and, on top of that, don't belong to the prompter.

This technology is a collage tool, and it's great, but it doesn't make anyone a creator. If you believe it does, you're in for a rough awakening.

Right now, the best models are only working thanks to bypassing the will of thousands of artists who didn't agree to have their work used for training data. As such, we are not essentially speaking about talent but the democratization of theft.

Again, it's not the technology itself that is the problem. Most artists are pro-technology and don't oppose it. Besides, if you learn how to draw (anybody can learn this skill, come on!), you probably won't be impressed by most Midjourney results.

thrwayaistartup6• 3 years ago

This technology is a collage tool, and it's great, but it doesn't make anyone a creator. If you believe it does, you're in for a rough awakening.

Hannah Höch would like a word.

leashless14• 3 years ago

This is entirely not the point.

I want to see a picture of a 5 kilometre high tower surrounded by spiralling cones of line on an infinite plane made of tessellating fractals.

Now I have that picture. Great.

I did not make than image "to be an artist". I made that image because I wanted that image. If it came out of a search engine rather than an AI, I wouldn't care.

This kind of utilitarian creation of images is like photography for things that don't exist. Fine art? Art? Craft? Search of latent space? Collage? I don't care.

Creator as an identity? I don't care.

Whether machines are allowed to learn from humans is a hot topic. Every working artist studies, in great detail, other artists. They often make exact copies, as exact as they can, of great works to learn how those artists made them.

Be very careful that in banning AI learning you do not also ban human learning. A law that covers one might also cover the other.

dorkwood3• 3 years ago

Is it art? I don't know. I don't care. I was not able, now I am able, and the people who are able complain.
Screw 'em. This is what tools are for. The strong should not tell the weak they cannot use props.

Really? This famously maligned group of people, who have endured a lifetime of jokes about their useless art school degrees and student loans they'll never repay, we're now calling "the strong"?

Artists aren't upset because a few developers made a machine that can generate pictures. They're upset because the machine couldn't have existed without their work, which they did not consent to being used, and it's now on the way to destroying their livelihoods all across the globe.

Can't you see the tragedy in their story?

unraveller• 3 years ago

No machine could have been invented without taking from the human work that came before it. Those people provided the inventor with a task to be done.

As they tell inventors, you can't patent an aim, only a method, and only for a time. Indeed, the aim is everything they mean to promote by patents... better, faster, cheaper ways of operating in the world.

I thank the artists for their aim. That some don't want what they were aiming at to fall into lesser hands tells me they never did art for the right reasons. The accolades becoming diluted is no tragedy.

leashless14• 3 years ago

When a talented person tries to ban the tools that make an average person able to do the same stuff the talented person can do, this is intentionally disabling people to preserve a class privilege.

If there was a pill that gave people +40 points of IQ would we have born-smart people trying to ban it? Yes, some.

If we had a machine that put knowledge right into people's heads by nanobot magic would we have people trying to ban it? "This four week doctor training is an unacceptable threat to the medical industry" You bet it is pal, you bet it is.

This is not to say that *art is not vitally important* but it's not so important that we should ban talentless people getting access to the ability to make something that you will not be able to visually distinguish from art just to protect the monopoly of the talented-and-trained ones.

I can't draw. Now I can draw-with-machine-assistance. Maybe it's not the same as "drawing" for some numinous reason. I'm too talentless to care.

Somebody is going to take this away from me to protect the people who can draw?

No.

famahar• 3 years ago

I wish people had a bit more confidence about making art. Not everything needs to be a flashy colorful realistic looking drawing. I'd argue they weren't talentless, just unconfident and narrow minded towards what art can be. Grab a canvas and go wild. People will be surprised with how easy it is to make art and you'll quickly shape your own unique art style.

pluc• 3 years ago

Transcript (actual letter) here: https://www.theredhandfiles.com/chatgpt-making-things-faster...

swayvil3• 3 years ago

AI makes McDonald's hamburgers. Cheap and infinite. 90% of the population consider that haute cuisine. Eat em all day. Suffer inexplicable tummy aches. Etc.

So let them. It isn't like we can do anything about it.

putpls3• 3 years ago

For a while now I've wondered which topic would force me to create a HN account and it turns out it is AI art.

My position is that AI "art" is absolutely a loss and not a gain for humanity. It is unfortunate that so many HN users are output focused on this and believe that AI tool -> output is the equivalent to human creativity -> output. Art is not the same as making a basket or glass. There are aspects to those processes that are painful, time consuming and tedious and therefore worth being automated. When it comes to creativity the process is part of the joy, even the painful aspects.

I use AI constantly for work because there is no joy in me whipping up a script or code snippet for something that isn't intellectually stimulating, in our work saving time is a benefit and automating things allow us to focus on the aspects of the work we enjoy. And the truth is AI will often do my work better than me when given the right context.

When I sit down to write some fiction I do not have the same desire to skip the labour and get an LLM to do the work for me. This would remove the entire point of why I do it. My art, be it better or worse than AI art, is an expression of self. This is not a tool as it is for coding, the endgame here is replacement.

Frankly, I find that most of the people that seem so dismissive of creative people's concerns have never attempted a serious creative project themselves and fail to understand the 'why' of art in the first place. If you do not care about meaning, process, and the millenia-spanning conversation that art is then it makes sense why you do not see this as an issue. If you see music as "pleasing sounds" and have no interest in the expressive side then sure, AI art is for you, but then it's not AI art, it's AI sounds, or AI images. Content is not the same as art.

This post will come across snobbish but I cannot find another way to put it. I want to have an open conversation but frequently reading comments that paint creatives as elitist is frustrating when these concerns are genuine. Art is not something that can be optimised and measured, no matter how hard you try, and removing the human aspect is removing the entire point.

I can't put all my thoughts here and I'll save you all the rest of the rant, but as someone with a deep respect for both programming and art I am confident that they are not equivalent despite many HN users treating them as such.

One day I hope to formulate the argument properly, but for now I'll leave you with this.

lukko• 3 years ago

I feel very strongly about this too. True art is a struggle to bring it into reality - you have to almost expand the space of possibility. It's easy to make derivative work, all the arguments about artists just interpolating other people's work are very weak - some artists do that, but good ones are truly original, even if they steal. It sounds a bit grandiose, but art can cut through the human experience to reveal some kind of truth. AI cannot do that because it does not understand the world or what it is to be human.

I think AI art is a complete misnomer and there is no net benefit of being able to generate images so easily, it just means there is more noise in the world.

putpls3• 3 years ago

I think AI art is a complete misnomer and there is no net benefit of being able to generate images so easily, it just means there is more noise in the world

Agreed. It will be difficult to not sound grandiose or pretentious when discussing this subject because the whole discussion becomes a question of what art is in the first place, but oversaturating it with soulless noise will benefit nobody.

pinbender• 3 years ago

I encourage you to consider why you would put programming in a separate category from "art". You seem just as output focused about code as those who motivated you to create a HN account.

Baskets, glass, code, photography, painting, they can all be art. Or a commodity. Or both.

putpls3• 3 years ago

This is a fair response but I do address it when I say we can automate the tedious and boilerplate parts of programming so we can focus on the aspects we enjoy i.e. the big picture stuff that intellectually stimulates us and allows us to be artistic when writing software.

An analogy would be that I would appreciate a tool that could mix paints and give me any hue to paint with on demand, but I don't want that tool to take the paintbrush away from me completely.

upleft• 3 years ago

I also just created an account to reply to you. I too feel strongly the same - that AI images are not art just because they look like art.

Art is a form of meaning making, thought processing, and an attempt to communicate and compare and comment. It is a language in and of itself. It is about all of the stuff that led to the creation of the thing, and the context of the time and place it was made. Successful art helps the viewer make a connection or gain a perspective they may not have otherwise. It can invoke big questions about deeply philosophical things, and make fun of you for thinking those things are important at the same time.

AI art scrambles all that up, borrowing from here or there without much going on beyond what you directly see. It is often focused entirely on the aesthetic output, which is mostly beside the point.

swayvil3• 3 years ago

Only artists will understand this. Artists will dodge the bullet and carry on. Everybody else gets an invisible bullethole. They will suffer without understanding why.

ChrisArchitect• 3 years ago

(2023)

More Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38425251

matthewsinclair• 3 years ago

Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38425251

syntaxfree• 3 years ago

*Title: The Soul of Creation* by Nick Cave

(Verse 1) In the dawn of all existence, in the silence of the void, God spun the world in six days, in a dance of cosmic joy. On the seventh day, He rested, His creation full of worth, A canvas painted with His struggle, a gift to all the earth.

(Chorus) Leon and Charlie, hear this ancient tale, Of creation's sacred heart, beyond the earthly veil. In every act of making, in every loving deed, Lies the essence of our spirit, the planting of a seed.

(Verse 2) Now comes a force, cold as the night, ChatGPT its name, A mechanized imagination, turning art into a game. It seeks to strip creation of its struggle and its pain, Rendering our efforts as nothing but a chain.

(Chorus) Leon and Charlie, see this stark divide, Between the soulful artist's path and the mechanized guide. In every note and lyric, in every brush and pen, Is the heartbeat of humanity, time and time again.

(Bridge) "Let's make it fast, let's make it easy," the machine coldly sings, Forgetting art's a journey, not just a pair of wings. The struggle, the striving, it's where our truths are found, In the depths of our creation, our spirit's battleground.

(Verse 3) God looked upon His world, and saw that it was good, A reflection of His essence, in every field and wood. So Charlie, in your creating, let your spirit freely dance, For in your artful striving, you'll give the world a chance.

(Chorus) Leon and Charlie, remember this true call, Creation's not just crafting, it's a rising after fall. In every stroke of genius, in every dream unfurled, Is the story of our spirit, the echo of the world.

(Outro) So let's fight against this tide, this digital malaise, Defending art's true essence, through all our nights and days. For in our hands lies power, in our hearts the flame, To keep alive the soul of the world, in every crafted frame.

(End) In the dance of the Great Crested Grebe, in the sun's first light, Lies the joy of creation, our eternal, noble fight. Leon and Charlie, in each step and every turn, Is the essence of our being, the fire that will always burn.

dang• 3 years ago

Related. I thought there was another one but couldn't find it...

Nick Cave on ChatGPT and the creative process - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37080160 - Aug 2023 (110 comments)

Do you think AI will ever be able to write a good song?(2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34764923 - Feb 2023 (3 comments)

Nick Cave on ChatGPT - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34404396 - Jan 2023 (11 comments)

Why strive? Stephen Fry reads Nick Cave's letter on the threat of AI [video]

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