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

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.

> 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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.)

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Your point on intersubjectivity is spot on.

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.

What's "copium?" Is it one of those meme words (slang, we used to call it) used by people who haven't spent much time reading or writing? Or who can't detect how AI slop is nothing like actual writing? And why do you use the word "honestly" in your terse response? Would you otherwise have been lying? Or is it a crutch that you hope makes you more authentic? Honestly, I'd like to know. And why is there no punctuation or capitalization in your reply? So many questions raised in your throwaway, authentic, structureless writing.