Nick Cave's thoughts on a ChatGPT poem (2023)

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

by hansmayer • 1 year ago

56 67 1 year ago

diggan3• 1 year ago

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. Data doesn’t suffer.

Maybe I misunderstand this part, but it sounds like the author feels like it's required to suffer in order to produce something creative in the first place, and other artists that haven't suffered "enough" but produce things anyways, aren't actually creating "genuine" music.

Of course, everyone creates things from their own perspective and context, but it kind of feels like a trap that somehow suffering is essential to the artistic process, which I personally don't feel would be a healthy perspective for myself as a musician at least.

lionkor• 1 year ago

Maybe the fundamental understanding of suffering, and therefore empathy also, are important? Trying to be devil's advocate

jedimastert• 1 year ago

Art requires life experience, and a lot of people are under the unfortunate impression that the only "real" life an artist can have is that of suffering, that if they are not suffering then they aren't having "real" experiences.

As far as I can tell, they seem to see the fact that our society does not value artists and specifically extorts them, and takes this as reality instead of a collective choice

Swizec2• 1 year ago

Of course, everyone creates things from their own perspective and context, but it kind of feels like a trap that somehow suffering is essential to the artistic process, which I personally don't feel would be a healthy perspective for myself as a musician at least.

Suffering may be too strong a word. You have to feel something to make good art. There needs to be at least a kernel of something raw and real.

That’s the difference between art art and hotel lobby art. Art art expresses something the artist wanted to say. Hotel lobby art just fills space. Both can be good, but the goals are different. You can even make art art on commission for a hotel lobby! And most passersby will intuitively see that there’s a difference, it feels not bland somehow.

Or for example last night I did something creative: drawings. It wasn’t art art, I wasn’t expressing anything, I just wanted hand-drawn pictures of a few plants and an hour of relaxing.

I later asked ChatGPT to redraw one of my drawings. The result was far superior in every technical aspect. But somehow bland. You could tell it wasn’t _my_ venus fly trap, it was a generic representation of a cartoon idea of a venus fly trap. More of a pictogram really. A lot of what these AIs create has that same feeling of generic nonspecificity.

tarr11• 1 year ago

I suspect that it wasn’t trained well enough on your art, or even trained to reproduce a generic style.

With enough data and training you might be convinced.

JKCalhoun3• 1 year ago

I'm sure I am wading into dangerous waters here, but I kind of also think that "good" art, or perhaps I should say a particular kind of art that resonates with ones emotions, does come from the pain and suffering of the artist.

It is because we also have known pain, jealousy, the death of a loved one, etc. that art sprung from that kind of suffering will "ring true".

As I type this, I am looking at a painting on the wall in my hotel room. It's pleasant enough (a palm tree or something made with rough brush strokes — an interesting palette I guess) but it is not Edvard Munch. (Although, we probably don't want Edvard Munch all over the place, ha ha.)

MrMcCall• 1 year ago

Maybe he's referring to the suffering required to actually put the song together, from inspiration to pieces of structure to full structure to final polish.

Perhaps. I'm with you in your assessment, however.

These jazz folks didn't look they were suffering in doing this, but that doesn't mean their lives didn't have suffering before they gained acclaim and such incredible chops, or maybe they draw inspiration from the many people and cultures that have suffered:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pYHCGYJbw0

I'm also reminded of Stevie Ray Vaughan's dedication before he performed "Riviera Paradise" on Austin City Limits: "This one goes out to everyone who's still suffering in any way."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3c_8VUL5jks

The beauty that was born from his suffering is certainly extraordinary, IMO, as is his song "Tick Tock", that he did with his brother Jimmy, in a message that should inspire us all on this day and going forward.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8uUTW9zPbM

jdietrich2• 1 year ago

I'm deeply sceptical of the "tortured artist" trope. A huge proportion of the greatest songs in the American canon were written by professionals, in what amounted to a factory system. They came into work, sat at a piano and just wrote, day in and day out. We are for whatever reason drawn to the romantic notion of the artist as divinely inspired genius, but I think that profoundly diminishes their skill and work ethic and the importance of professional communities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brill_Building

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_Pan_Alley

mykowebhn• 1 year ago

There's the suffering one experiences from a lived life which one uses as the material for a work of art, and then there's the "suffering" that one experiences in the process of artistic creation. I think Nick Cave leaves it open as to which one he's referring to, maybe both. But I'm understanding that you are specifically referring to the former. Perhaps you are right, but I do agree with Cave that the creation of art is a constant struggle. A perfect portrayal of this artistic struggle is depicted in Victor Erice's film Quince Tree Sun.

dkjaudyeqooe2• 1 year ago

Put more simply, he's saying art is the product of, and the expression of, human emotion and experience.

Suffering just happens to be a common element of that, but it's not essential. Maybe because it most commonly produces good or great art. People generally don't make art about how their love life is perfectly fine, instead they express their experience of devastating heartbreak.

Nike Cave is just one strand of the artistic experience. Contrast say Kraftwerk, whose expression is about feelings of affinity with machines, technology and even interaction with transport infrastructure.

falcor84• 1 year ago

People generally don't make art about how their love life is perfectly fine

On that note, Riki Lindhome's recent (slightly NSFW) "Middle Age Love" hit me so hard in the feels. It's so exceedingly rare to just see artists open up about their intimate relationships in such a positive way.

https://youtu.be/F3gUy40Stzg?si=5J6UtLd5x9BC99UX

airza• 1 year ago

He is absolutely not saying that his songs are borne out of suffering in everyday life. I am losing my mind reading these comments.

The suffering he is talking about here is the frustrations and compromises of the artistic _process_, which llms short circuit entirely

No matter what the work is _about_, any art made by a human is going to encounter this feeling.

airstrike• 1 year ago

People generally don't make art about how their love life is perfectly fine, instead they express their experience of devastating heartbreak.

That's a common take, but I don't think it's really that accurate, otherwise we wouldn't have The Beach Boys

jdietrich2• 1 year ago

People generally don't make art about how their love life is perfectly fine, instead they express their experience of devastating heartbreak.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aunVlekXjkE

j4coh• 1 year ago

He’s sharing his perspective, you don’t have to agree and he isn’t establishing some eternal truth. His statement aligns well with the art he produces. Feel free to continue being a musician as you have in the past in whatever healthy, suffering-free way you prefer.

marcuschong• 1 year ago

McCartney is a great example of 'naming a genius that ain't crazy', plus doesn't seem to have suffered that much in his life. His work doesn't communicate that at all.

api• 1 year ago

I’d say it’s required that you experience or feel something powerful. Suffering counts. Joy, love (no songs about that!), awe, anger, patriotic fervor, whatever.

I agree with him about the poetry produced by LLMs. I’ve tried it too. What comes out just feels like what it is: a mathematical average of other peoples poetry. It’s devoid of feeling.

The same thing happens when I try those music making LLMs. They’re great for doing meme level funny stuff. Like a friend of mine had one make a pouty country song about panels falling off someone’s cybertruck “like tears in my beer.”

Telemakhos• 1 year ago

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. Data doesn’t suffer.

This sounds like confessional poetry of the mid-twentieth century. The 1960s and 1970s saw a lot of gatekeeping, especially in US and UK academia (like MFA programs), by which formal aspects of poetry were vilified and a foundation in lived experience became a requirement for something to be called a "poem." Needless to say those are entirely artificial takes on poetry, as all ancient poetry has strict metrical rules and presents an imitation of experience rather than lived experience. But, those were very convenient positions for their times, because they let certain people gatekeep others out of art.

When I listen first to an AI song and then Britney Spears or any other product of a culture industry, I don't hear much difference, except that I know the AI song will be inconvenient to the producers and bankrollers who profit from the culture industry.

karaterobot2• 1 year ago

I think he addresses your question immediately following the comma. He's not saying you must have been, e.g., persecuted or downtrodden to create art, he's talking about the struggle of creation itself. He's saying art is hard to make, that if you're not overreaching you aren't making art, and he may be saying that what makes ChatGPT's output not art is that it's created automatically, within the scope of its limitations. All ChatGPT poetry made by the same model will be of a similar quality, because it's not ever going to transcend, and that's why it won't ever be art, regardless of quality. Or so he seems to be saying.

oska3• 1 year ago

I'm amazed at all this discussion upon a misinterpretation when, exactly as you say, he clarified what he meant by struggle in the same sentence and it is not life struggle, it is creative struggle (to create music, poetry, etc).

(Of course, pretty much everyone experiences hardship in life and some artists have experienced very harsh hardships and drawn upon that in their later art but he is very clearly not saying that that is an essential part of creating art.)

basisword2• 1 year ago

I think you're misunderstanding. He doesn't mean suffering in the sense that "bad things must happen to me before I have something to write about". He means that the act of creating something from nothing is in itself a difficult process in which the creator 'suffers'. You can rarely just create something easily out of thin air. Most of the time you have to put in a significant amount of effort and feel repeated frustrations before you write something good. This seems clear from the second and third parts of the sentence (after the first and second commas).

dav_Oz• 1 year ago

I think the underlying assumption is that we all suffer i.e. challenges and struggles in life.

Say first time heart-broken, some people really lean into it, and some of those people decide to do a deep dive into their chaotic feelings in order to retrieve a meaningful and personal perspective on a otherwise supposedly trivial thing, which they can finally articulate in an art form.

Put it differently: One can go through the motions and mostly copy paste the cultural wealth on a given topic or one can choose a very idiosyncratic route, depending on your craftsmanship the former will most certainly "resonate" with more people the latter only really resonates with you at first, normally it stays that way. But you can refine the process further going through a lot of cycles and with some luck get noticed for your individual/novel/fresh approach, an arduous process and the perseverance mostly comes from the art created being a very personal thing i.e. self-exploring. I think the hardest part is not getting lost when suddenly you manage to garner a lot of attention.

tiagod• 1 year ago

Does any artist exist that hasn't suffered, at the very least, from the various limits—technical, physical, psychological, or otherwise—standing in the way of the perfect materialisation of their artistic vision?

I believe this is undoubtedly a part of the human struggle of creation that Nick wrote about.

gwern• 1 year ago

The narrow emphasis on autobiographical content we see today in art is really quite strange. You'll go on Reddit or Twitter and you'll see people insisting that poetry exists only to convey autobiographical content, and so good AI poetry is definitionally impossible. And yet, nothing could be more ahistorical: almost all of the most beloved art throughout history, especially fictional, and especially poetry, lyrics, and novels, is not eyewitness, nor did people find that a flaw or even worth remarking on. How many of Shakespeare's plays are autobiographical? (Is _Romeo and Juliet_ a bad play because Shakespeare did not in fact know anyone in a lover's suicide pact, and simply stole the plot wholesale from a poem? A translated one, at that!) Did Homer ever visit Troy? Did Murasaki Shikibu know a Prince Genji? Did Vince Gilligan have a sideline as a meth cook somewhere in New York during film school before going to Hollywood? (How many Christians are upset that it is, say, the 'Gospel according to Mark', instead of the 'Gospel by Mark'?)

It's amusing how people demand that their fiction be nonfiction. Here's an example I saw the other day, looking up that song which is everywhere, even at the end of random Japanese TV series, because it's so beloved: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_(Earth,_Wind_%26_Fir...

Although several theories about the significance of the date have been suggested, the songwriter Maurice White claimed he simply chose the 21st due to how it sounded when sung.[10] Allee Willis adding : "We went through all the dates: 'Do you remember the first, the second, the third, the fourth ... ' and the one that just felt the best was the 21st," Willis explains. "I constantly have people coming up to me and they get so excited to know what the significance was. And there is no significance beyond it just sang better than any of the other dates. So ... sorry!".[11]

Imagine that: writing a fictional song lyric because it... sounded good, rather than because something happened. (Apparently people can't imagine that, and imagine it had to have not been imagined.)

JKCalhoun3• 1 year ago

ChatGPT has no inner being, it has been nowhere, it has endured nothing…

The whole thing from Nick is brilliant, but I had to pick a line as an example and the above is pretty perfect.

Maybe a bit orthogonal, but I find more and more examples in life where I see a distinction between the real and the "virtual". Watching someone on YouTube go on a long bike tour and then later doing my first long tour myself and I am struck by how rich the thoughts are I am having on the ride, how connected I have suddenly become once again to the "outside" — wondering when the next place to get water will be, where I will pitch my tent and sleep that night.

Hiking with my family to see Delicate Arch on one of the hottest days on record. I have to scout ahead for shade for my daughter who is perhaps beginning to dangerously overheat. (And in fact two hikers did die that day in an area very near to where we were in Utah.) Not an experience, for better or worse, that you'll get playing World of Warcraft (just to pick on that game for no particular reason).

Art too, as Nick says, requires I think an element of experienced pain (or danger). An imitation of art will never be art.

diggan3• 1 year ago

An imitation of art will never be art.

As art is somewhat/sometimes an imitation of life/the world itself, why cannot an imitation of art also be considered art? I don't know the right answer (if there is one), but was the question that appeared when I read that.

JKCalhoun3• 1 year ago

I think I kind of get what you mean. As I started learning to draw the human figure I began by copping the styles of Mort Drucker, etc. In time though I had cribbed and combined from so many that the result became I suppose my own style. These LLMs of course learn from every artist they are trained by.

But I didn't mean imitating the art "style" but imitating the art itself — to that thing that makes it "art" and not "graphic design" (whoops, whole new can of worms). I think, as Nick kind of said, you can't really imitate that. It has to come from your own failures and disappointments in growing up, in a life lived not mimicked.

dkjaudyeqooe2• 1 year ago

You're missing the point. Imitation is the artistic act in question. The act of "creation". The question is what does the imitation bring to the viewer's experience of it? "Starry Night" brings a lot. A photocopy of it probably doesn't. What does the imitation create or express?

giraffe_lady2• 1 year ago

Imitation can be expression or communication, which imo are much more useful concepts than "what is art" in this context. The thing here is that an AI has nothing to express, has experienced nothing, as nick cave says. Even an artist being influenced by existing art is itself a creative process based on their own experiences, which AI does not have.

MiguelVieira• 1 year ago

"AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable from human-written poetry and is rated more favorably"

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-76900-1

ToValueFunfetti• 1 year ago

This is a result I find completely unbelievable. ChatGPT sucks at poetry. It struggles at anything other than ABAB rhymes and can't get rhythm right even at the level of syllable count per line. It also has a distinctive passive voice that I personally find unbearable. If people are saying it's indistinguishable from or better than human-written poetry, that's either poor judgment or poor human-written poetry.

ratg13• 1 year ago

Hard disagree.

In my language, the poetry I've gotten LLMs to generate far surpasses the human generated slop sold in local bookstores.

I fully expect current 'poets' will start using this and the lines will be forever blurred.

Smeevy2• 1 year ago

I'm guessing that at a plurality of those non-experts thought that "Big Bang Theory" was a good TV show. There's no shortage of crap for those mouth-breathers already.

If all art and entertainment is made to curry their favor and satisfy their appetites with as little effort as possible, then I guess there's even more dreck out there to be ignored.

Fraterkes3• 1 year ago

Theres a couple million works of poetry sold every year. If you have real faith in this study, this seems like a trivial way to make some millions. Why don't you put your money where your mouth is?

jdmoreira2• 1 year ago

Because those books are mostly sold because either:

1. Readers wanting to virtue signal. Either to others or themselves

2. Authors + Publishers marketing

edanm• 1 year ago

Theres a couple million works of poetry sold every year.

Really? This sounds like a huge exaggeration to me, but I know next to nothing about poetry. Just compared to how many books are sold this seems ridiculosly high.

willsoon• 1 year ago

Maybe 'like x' won't return 'x'.

This is a suno song asked by me: https://suno.com/song/57c5d409-e800-4a64-9fd4-beaa0c17c91a?s.... I like the bridge part.

jstanley• 1 year ago

I'd recommend putting some information about you in your About page. It says that the site is for answering questions from your fans, but doesn't say who you are, what you do, or why you have fans. I can Google for "Nick Cave" but I can't tell which one you are.

BLKNSLVR• 1 year ago

Yeah nah.

This is genuinely one of those cases where if you know, you know. If you don't them you might find out eventually, but it's absolutely no skin off Nick Cave's nose if you never do.

Smeevy2• 1 year ago

I absolutely loved "Murder Ballads" and it's my favorite example of art that isn't intended for mass consumption. It's simultaneously humorous, horrifying, beatiful, and vile. There isn't a single song from that album that I ever feel the urge to skip through (unless I'm driving with my in-laws).

relaxing• 1 year ago

why don’t you ask chatgpt about it

uytwe• 1 year ago

And to think you can make a poem based on his blog post:

In the hollow of the machine’s hum, a ghost of a song is scraped from the sum of all I’ve spilled in ink and blood— a travesty, a greasy thud.

It stitches my words with needle and thread, a shroud for the living, a hymn for the dead. But the heart is a void it cannot fill, a clockwork saint with a thief’s dull skill.

I am the echo, I am the theft, a parody wrung from what’s left. I am the data, cold and bright, a shadow punched through with electric light.

The apocalypse wears a salesman’s grin, peddling salvation, a cheap origin. It feeds on the wreckage, the fractured and torn, but a song born of nothing is stillborn.

Mark, you sent me a hollow tune, a Frankenstein waltz beneath a binary moon. Yet somewhere in its rusted gears, a spark hissed—Hell’s fire sears.

lukev4• 1 year ago

This happens every time this topic comes up on HN.

A lot of commenters here apparently think that all "art" means is having an object that has a pleasing aesthetic.

Meanwhile every artist knows that art is defined by _intersubjectivity_... it comes _from_ an experiencing, feeling subject and is interpreted and by other, experiencing, feeling subjects.

So it doesn't actually matter if a lot of people who know nothing about poetry like ChatGPTs poems more than human ones. Because people who _actually_ care about poetry care about what is being said, and why, and what experiences are being conveyed. And that's something a LLM can't do.

My 10yo kid loves drawing and painting. He's still working on skill, getting better, but diffusion models are clearly much much better at rendering images of any style and subject.

But my kid makes art, and the model doesn't.

GolDDranks• 1 year ago

Your point on intersubjectivity is spot on.

ramraj07• 1 year ago

This sounds like how most smart people rationalize religion as well. I mean you do you, but to me, a canvas with blobs of stringy paint evokes more emotion if it was done by an elephant or a computer ai instead of some "troubled artist" in the 60s.

evilsetg• 1 year ago

The question of what is art is a philosophical one and does not have one conclusive answer. While I like your definition it is not __the__ definition of what art is nor is it agreed upon by all artists. I like to think art is anything that speaks directly to us, moves us or inspires us.

lukev4• 1 year ago

Sure, I’m definitely not claiming to have the one true definition of art.

But I AM claiming that the tech types who have both defined art and declared that AI is good at it are full of shit.

oska3• 1 year ago

I like to think art is anything that speaks directly to us, moves us or inspires us.

Then that would include anything in the natural world that evokes such feelings and this clearly goes against the meaning that 'art' has had over millennia.

jimmydoe• 1 year ago

legacy human art/artist and their whining will be irrelevant in a decade.

I don't mean to discount any human being, but it just feels like walking in a pyramid, seeing the ancient Egyptian script on the wall, they are fascinating, but irrelevant.

Fraterkes3• 1 year ago

I usually see a lot of respones to this kind of thing that dismiss it as wishfull thinking or "coping", but consider that this also applies in the opposite direction: wouldn't it be convenient/reassuring if these talented people where brought low by technology, if we could be absolved from practicing.

And yet Midjourney has been out for a while and very few of you have used it to make succesful games or webcomics. You can cope by telling artists the future will bury them, but they at least will have had their moment in the sun.

giraffe_lady2• 1 year ago

Yes I do not think it's possible to have a useful meta-conversation on this subject without discussing the absolute contempt tech workers have for creative workers. To the extent we have a culture distinct from the main stream it is based on their output (video games, fantasy & sci-fi franchises, etc) and we hate them for it. For doing what we can't? For making us love what we don't value? I don't know. But it's a key part of how this is talked about, especially here on hn.

markhahn• 1 year ago

I think he, like many, overemphasizes the phenomenology of creativity. But he's right about the predictability of the pastiche. And after all, isn't it precisely pastiche that gen AIs are built for?

Yes, directed pastiche, sometimes even useful.

Does insight or critical thought ever come from context-based prediction?

boredhedgehog• 1 year ago

There is this guy who tests every new image generation model by asking it for a pelican riding a bicycle. I found some of the results interesting, because they broke down the subjects to their basic shapes and reordered them geometrically instead of physically. It was a new perspective on how to think about a bicycle, and perhaps the AI's most authentic voice.

And I'm sure the AI was punished for it and trained towards more photorealism, because pastiche is supposed to be the default. But that, too, is a conscious choice made by the trainers and prompters.

Nick Cave's thoughts on a ChatGPT poem (2023)

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