Nick Cave on ChatGPT and the creative process
theredhandfiles.com
theredhandfiles.com
> 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.
100% agree. AI is indeed an erosion of the world's soul by the conglomerate of tech companies who are rabid about going after short-term gains.
The reason why people use ChatGPT is because using it is a maladapative response to go after the quickest solution, a response that would have been adaptive in a time of scarcity.
However, it is displacing a world of art and creation that was at one time meant to showcase the emotional and intellectual expression of humans into a cash-grab using cheap "art" that is soulless.
If any creation were a true abomination to the human spirit, is the creation of AI.
It makes me think of something Brandon Sanderson wrote that has been bouncing around in my head a lot lately:
"Physical labor is great for the mind, as it leaves all kinds of time to consider the world. Other work, like accounting or scribing, demands little of the body—but siphons energy from the mind.
If you wish to become a storyteller, here is a hint: sell your labor, but not your mind. Give me ten hours a day scrubbing a deck, and oh the stories I could imagine. Give me ten hours adding sums, and all you’ll have me imagining at the end is a warm bed and a thought-free evening.”
While I understand the theory, it doesn’t work in practice most of the time. Labour work doesn’t let you think that much in reality.
Even though, I believe that the use of ChatGPT or any other AI assistant will eventually lead to the creation of inexperienced and unskilled generations of developers.
Using AI to generate "art" will just kill human creativity. Not only will it do that, it will create a new normal, where this AI art will be viewed as standard. Just as we currently have an over-monetized, synthetic music industry completely devoid of quality.
Did the photograph “kill” art? I’m sure this has been asked before, but what is so fundamentally different about AI that puts it into a different category of tool? That’s my argument; not that software development is art, but that tools accelerate the act of creation.
Software can be a tool to create art (games for example), but mostly it's about problem solving. Sometimes creative problem solving, sure. But listening to a machine generated song is like the ultimate soulless A/B tested local maximum entertainment whose only goal is to make money. We had enough of that without generative AI, it's not gonna get better I wager.
I don't care much who wrote the code I'm running or if it was AI generated. There's nothing human being shared there, it solves a problem, and all that really matters is that it solves the problem well.
[0]: https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris...
What is art? That’s a rhetorical question, because this is a highly debated topic and the answers have changed over time. There was a thousand years where art could not be separated from religious expression. There was a period where only technical mastery was considered important and the artist relatively unimportant. It varies by culture, time period, and even down to the individual.
And once you can agree on something that should be art; there will be disagreements as to whether a particular example is worthy of the title. Is Nick Cave’s “Into my Arms” art? Is the Spice Girls “Wannabe”?
Many years ago at the start of my career I was an engineer of the traditional variety working for a Smart Metering company. There was one analog electrical engineer there who I would best describe as a “mad genius”. His designs were constrained to solve a very boring practical problem, yes, but they were also creative, beautiful, and I would argue, art. Yes you need a degree in electrical engineering to appreciate them, but I guarantee that any such engineer would not fail to be moved by the beauty and elegance of his designs.
> I don't care much who wrote the code I'm running or if it was AI generated. There's nothing human being shared there, it solves a problem, and all that really matters is that it solves the problem well.
Much like with my example of the Smart Meter, the tradesmen installing it could care less about the beauty within. However I do appreciate beautiful elegant code, rare as it is. But name for me any human creative endeavour that is not 99% meaningless, repetitive, soulless drivel?
As for your last question: With games, I see a pretty clear distinction between those designed to quickly make lots of people addicted to the point where they spend as much money as possible, and those that primarily aim to transmit experiences or emotions.
Thinking about other businesses, I guess there's also a distinction between the short term revenue optimising ones, and those that focus on delighting the customer. Thinking about it, I should probably also consider that art, as I think parent suggested. Anything that's being created for a primary purpose other than short term revenue possibly.
So in summary, I suppose whether or not something is art is better decided based on the intentions of the creator, not the tools they use for creation.
I like to take pictures. Usually, I take many, many -- hundreds -- of pictures for a project and I'll find one or two that I like most in that bunch. I think this is a pretty common practice in photography, euphemistically referred to as portfolio editing.
I see a strong analogy between portfolio editing and operation of AI like ChatGPT. The camera and the AI are both machines being operated by humans who have developed enough expertise with their respective machine to get the output that they want. If the camera can produce art, why can't the AI?
Edit: not to say you can’t use it as a muse or for inspiration, but it isn’t a prerequisite.
The real problem is the long tail. You found a unique form of expression? Your work gets trained on and you get cut out of your own agency.
I fully expect deliberately-bad art will become a thing, because it would be ruinous to datasets to be trained on, will stand out in a sea of KincaidDiffusions, and go generally unexamined by AI crawlers. Lomography was ahead of its time.
For me, a guy with a master of fine arts and a photographer, filmmaker and musician, the problem with AI isn't, that it is a automated process that creates stuff, but that the stuff it creates isn't usually the kind that will suprise yourself. My best pieces of music, film scenes and pictures always came from very special and memorable circumstances, or by tweaking a many factors for a long time, and by reflecting on the results a magnitude longer.
Beginner artists are already amazed at the fact that they managed to make a film, a drawing, a piece of music, a decent photograph. More advanced artists are much more about exploring the medium and figuring out what is possible.
My fear is that AI will make art much less personal and much less explorative. Or maybe it will just have the opposite effect? At the dawn of photography all the painters started to become abstract for a reason — why mimic, what the apparatus does better?
So personally I have no problem with considering GPT stuff "art", but I think it should be considered a separate art form and given a different name.
AI creations are going to be enjoyed or not, used or not, given attention or not, just like human creations, regardless of what we call them.
More and more I'm leaning towards seeing the whole category of "art" as nothing more than gatekeeping.
Giving it a different name would also imply that you shouldn't submit AI songs to a songwriting competition, much like you wouldn't submit a photograph to a painting competition, but you could have separate competitions for AI songs, and separate competitions that accept anything, and so on.
That name already exists - generative art.
Encoding happens.
We seem to be the first local observers of encoding, but we didn't initiate encoding.
In fact, we're entirely the result of (and dependent upon) an information encoding process we had no role in creating.
"AI" is simply another encoder within an encoder within an encoder... etc.
The value of discovering and propagating valuable/useful/potent encodings is the underlying pressure producing all encoding systems. Look there for "spirit"?
It can give a good skeleton for how an idea can end up looking - which is often exactly what I need to implement the vision I have.
Perhaps this is still skipping a vital part of the ideation process, but it doesn’t seem to me like it’s completely devoid of creative struggle.
Others will feel differently, and that's ok. I find myself not even mad at such florid proclamations as to the death of the human spirit. Such sanctimonious proclamations were made by portrait artists at the advent of photography as well, and yet here we are, Art intact, all these decades later.
I've read an infinite amount of comment about that but never heard of a single convincing example
Most publically consumed art is made by large teams, which naturally leads to a dilution of a singular artists vision. With the current quality mass media, I'm excited to see singular geniuses with the power of whole production companies at their finger tips.
If you can't afford to pay real artists to draw for your comic book, maybe you shouldn't be in that business?
Obviously, AI training data is a touchy topic. I completely agree artist should be compensated. To what degree is a hard question.
As to whether or not I should be making comics- I have story to express and there are tools available to express it. I really don't care what you or anyone else thinks about the validity of that expression. That's what makes it art. You talk like someone who has never produced art.
Some people just can't deal with that.
If genuine, unaided human creativity is so great then AI generated creations should not be much of a challenge.
The sad fact, though, is that a lot of human creation is really not that good in comparison, or at the least is slow and expensive, while AI creations are often cheap, fast, and good -- you can have all three.
If there is 'cheap' digital competition then a huge number of people end up with no way to survive in our current paradigm.
We're seeing the same thing with the actors and writers striking. Sorry folks, if you're making me choose between embracing neoluddism or living with some artsy folks not having their dream job, I'm going to pick you being out of a job. I do not care that background actors are going to be replaced by AI and I do not care that AI is going to let 1 writer do the work of 5. Background acting is not anyone's passion and writing predictable soapy sitcom stories is probably not anyone's passion, either.
AI is going to give us better creative work not because AI will become super creative, but because people who actually have creative thoughts worth expressing will just do that instead of being crowded out by humans chasing the lowest common denominator. Now we have computers chasing the lowest common denominator, something they are very good at, and we have humans who will create when they feel compelled to create, not because they want to make money but because their creativity compels them to act, make, and do.
If a songwriter is being replaced by an AI, their skills are not something we're going to miss. Sorry, not sorry. Artistic sensibilities have arguable never been the driver of what music is popular and I don't see the issue in having AI replace the bubblegum rubberstamp dime-a-dozen trash that the modal artists must produce to make money. Again, now you are totally outmatched by the AI and you can actually focus on creating an authentically human work without being distracted by the needs of industry. If there is no market for that then it is not because of AI but because of our own preferences.
The "human spirit" is just a story we tell ourselves to justify our dominion over everything we see. I'd be more than happy to see it die. Humanism is great if you're a human, but life is moving in other directions and we can either adapt to the notion that our primate brains aren't magical engines of wonder or die alongside our brittle egos.
All art is work. Any art worth doing is work. It's time and experience and probably student loans and equipment and people. And under capitalism, work must either be done in the service of profit or else it doesn't get done. To expect artists alone to suffer for the purity of their craft and do everything they do for free is perverse.
Although you are correct - AI will put a lot of those people out of business. But not because they let themselves be tainted by commercialism. Rather the opposite, because commerce no longer finds value in the artist.
There are many artists in my family and all of them have day jobs to support their creative passions. Mosts artists fail to make money; it really should go without saying that not everyone can be Helen Mirren or Paul McCartney. If requiring a day job makes you give up art, you probably didn't have the drive to create anything people really wanted. For most artists creation is a need, not something that is pursued for monetary reasons. Everyone tries to make money on their art, but again, even without AI the vast majority of artists fail to do so.
That wasn't your point. Your point was that no artist who makes a living with their art can be considered a "true" artist. I pointed out popular and influential artists because the quality of their work, despite having been being done by working artists, disputes your thesis that no art done for money has real value.
>In that regard AI, has virtually no impact on those who want to create.
AI has already been used to steal the commissions of working artists and fabricate CVs, and plenty of jobs are being outsourced entirely to AI. I guarantee you the artists who lost that work have plenty of passion for their craft.
>Mosts artists fail to make money; it really should go without saying that not everyone can be Helen Mirren or Paul McCartney.
Why are you trying to equate working artists with celebrities. Most working actors aren't Helen Mirren or Paul McCartney. Most writers aren't Tom Clancy or Stephen King. You've never heard of anyone working in VFX, or many people involved in comics or game art.
Again, you just keep restating your argument, but never proving it. Why are none of these people real artists, and why do none of them deserve to make a living? Why are the only "true" artists your friends who make macaroni collages or paint portraits on the boardwalk, and not the people who had the commitment to master their craft and do it full time?
>For most artists creation is a need, not something that is pursued for monetary reasons.
Here's the flaw in your reasoning, you assume that artists who work for a living are only interested in monetary gain. For the vast majority of working artists, creation is a need, and that's why they pursue a living at it. You seem to be assuming the only artists being replaced by AI are low-talent bottom feeders, but markets aren't optimizing for talent, they're optimizing for cost and replacing their entire creative pipeline with AI where feasible.
A lot of modern creative work involves years of effort, material, and investment. Small bands can't tour if everyone also has a full time job, and they never charge for tickets and only ever give their music away for free. Indie game studios couldn't publish games that way. A lot of art just ceases to exist when your only option is to squeeze it in during free time when you're already working 40, 50 or 60 hours just to feed yourself.
A bunch of kids running local LLMs to generate art and entertainment doesn't sound dreary or scary in the least.
If anything, AI is proving how trivial certain aspects of art can be; that human beings have mechanized them at a scale that more vital aspects of life have yet to experience.
There was a time in history where you COULD create real art and make a decent living out of it. Now, AI has set up the ultimate PRISONER'S DILEMMA (game theory) situation where everyone needs to jump on the frenetic race ot the bottom to get their work recognized.
Honest question, is that actually true? Historically, professional art always struck me as the domain of the rich, the starving artist, or the person taking commissions for the rich.
But still, it was commodity "art". The restauranteur wanted you to play the classics, not your creative original "nonsense".
AND, if you read about the history of photography, some people were definitely able to make money out of taking people's portraits. That was still the case until advanced technology came around.
But I do agree with your point: not everyone was able to do so.
People still make money from taking people’s portraits… and those people took money from the portrait artists who used to travel and paint portraits.
Artists almost always reject technology that makes what they do a commodity, which makes sense, but the reality is that art that lasts is usually something which comes into existence when the previous art gets commoditized. IMO, when the artists freak out it is because we have made a new technology that is actually disruptive.
Rich person for whatever reason, thinking it worthwhile to pay for artists' expenses. Or house them, buy their works etc. So that artist could create art.
Modern day equivalent would be Patreon. But back then, usually 1, maybe a few sponsors. Or 1 rich dude sponsoring a small ensemble of artists. Just for... dunno. 'Social credit' / personal glory? Art lover? Bragging rights? Some kind of platonic or romantic relation between artist & sponsor? To leave something behind?
I have a friend that is a workaday oil painter. He went to college for oil painting, got good at painting seaside vistas, and sells them steadily. There are also all manor of other commercial artists. Concept artists, illustrators, graphic designers, animators, composers, musical instrumentalists... they are artists who make a living from being artists. They get artistic satisfaction from their work just like a developer gets creative satisfaction from writing code for a living. They put their heart and soul into the things they create even if it might end up making them, or even other people profit. Art doesn't have to be some magical personal journey completely divorced from the prospect of money to be art. I'll bet that nearly every single musical artist you like made the majority of their work to sell it and make money. That does not make that work worse or less artistic. If you removed the things in our lives we get artistic enrichment from that were created to sell, it would be a pretty stark landscape.
I see a lot of people who generally haven't done artistic things meaningfully grappling with the "what is art" question for the first time, and making a bunch of sweeping declarations that make them feel better about riding this wave. If you're someone who has put a bunch of years, educational dollars, and effort into becoming an artists, some group of software developers "explaining" to you what "real art" is can be pretty infuriating. I was a developer for a decade-- I know this hubris from both sides. It helps when you're plowing into a new problem space to make it better with code, but when you start using those generalizations to deem someone and their life work as worthy or not, it's obnoxious, counterproductive, and generally completely inaccurate.
Source? The “starving artist” trope has existed a lot longer than the tech conglomerates.
It is a bold strategy to suggest that Nick Cave is confused by ideas of income and art. I don't care who you are: on this topic, Cave is almost 100% certainly better informed than you (or me).
People who are less excited or connected to the coal face of technology are not necessarily ignorant or engaging in motivated reasoning if they question an innovation.
The number is probably higher for the elite, most renowned artists, and it might well benefit society to ensure a portion of the best can live of it, but in many places that is already hard enough that a substantial portion of the ability of even elite artists to live off their art often comes down to government funding and grants, followed by patronage that is more about status than ability to commercially exploit a work.
That's not to agree with the notion that real artists can't want money too, because I don't agree with that, but I also don't agree that most artists have made art for gain.
At least not as a primary motivator, as if gain was the main goal, it's usually a bad one (e.g. the average full time UK novelist earns below minimum wage from their writing)
There will have been very few serious artists in history who could afford to do it for the love, because art materials cost money, and time making non-functional art is time not earning enough or working enough to live.
Art as a pastime is a very modern invention, surely. That is
But even before that I'm not convinced that about your claim. I'll concede that most artists whose works have survived for a period will have done so for patronage, because others will have faced severe limits on production. E.g. Haydn being able to be a court musician for the Esterhazy's ensured his work was played in front of an audience and associated with status, and so secured it distribution that someone composing and playing in less privileged positions did not enjoy (and indeed that Haydn himself did not enjoy at the start of his attempts to make a living as a musician after he could no longer sing in a choir).
For large parts of time we can expect most art to have gotten lost because it was not written down and recorded, or because it was produced or kept in ways that hampered its longevity.
E.g. already under the Chinese Tang dynasty we know that art was seen as an acceptable pastime and that while patronage happened, it was not a particularly desirable job, to the point that one of the earliest known Chinese painter was by a man - Yan Liben - who apparently became ashamed when he was referred to as "the imperial painter" and warned his son not learn to paint to avoid his fate of being known for it, because it was lower status than his actual paying job in the imperial administration, and his painting was something he at one point was ridiculed for.
People draw or make music or create stories whether or not we get paid for it, and even in situations where it's seen in a negative light, and we've done so for tens of thousands of years.
Fair. But the argument I am responding to implies that making money is antithetical to making art — that artists can’t think about making money if they want to make true art. This is, frankly, patronising bullshit in the fullest sense (not least because it denigrates artisanship in the sense of making truly artistic useful objects).
Arguing for a world where artists should not be respected if they are as focused on their income as anyone else is insulting, not least when great art makes such huge sums and generates independent wealth for its owners once it becomes an asset.
It belittles art itself, as a plaything or an alternative to real work.
I haven't done song writing in particular, but I would think it would be more like a super powered rhyming dictionary... one that knows a bit about syllables and can look ahead by verses and not just sentences.
If you want to say something then ChatGPT can't decide what to say, what you feel, what expression will share what's inside you. But when you are searching for those things, when you have a spark you want to make real, it can greatly help in that search.
You could also be lazy and just settle for whatever ChatGPT spits out, satisfied that it rhymes. A lot of human-written songs don't offer much more than that. Maybe that's fine, obviously music is more than just lyrics.
We don't know yet if these tools will lead to greater forms of expression, more voices able to express themselves; or if it will devalue expression by creating art that has the form of expression with no person underneath being expressed. There's dangers... but it's too early to call.
This isn't to say that ChatGPT isn't good at what it does, but at the end of the day, it's an abstraction over the creative process, and therefore not as useful as people might think.
Because when you're creating something, ultimately it comes down with how you engage with it, and ChatGPT takes you away from that. As a tool it's really good at coming up with ideas, but it then becomes a burden as you try and engage with this material and line it up with your vision.
I'm not sure if it's the right analogy, but it would be equivalent to using a bionic arm to hand write a poem. Yes, the bionic arm can do amazing things, but ultimately you'll be thinking more about interfacing with the bionic arm and figuring out the optimal solution to using it to write the poem best, than simply writing the poem.
So it's kind of a wonderful thing but the experience of using it, and it's similar in that you could see the prompt and the generated art as a kind of pencil but from an enjoyment and expressive perspective it falls short.
* A user has in their brain a definite statement, thought, or concept they wish to translate to words-on-the-page. They use an LLM to explore different ways to express that definite statement/thought/concept.
* A user has a question they then pose to the LLM, hoping that the LLM's answer is truthful/not-truthful/funny/interesting/etc.
* A user has a vague idea of something they may want to say and poses the question to an LLM to explore the infinite ways the answer could mutate.
* etc. etc.
LLMs have many possible uses and their effectiveness varies with the use and output requirements.
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Back to the article: I'm reminded of an interesting split in the woodworking world between "hand toolers" and "power toolers." In the end, both camps may arrive at the exact same output but individuals can sometimes seem fanatical as to the correct/true/authentic/efficient/better method.
For instance I got:
Chocolate Tomato Sausage Surprise where I was instructed to pour tomato sauce and mustard over some sausages before pouring chocolate over the whole dish and then cooking it in the oven.
I got a pasta dish where I was instructed to cook dry pasta and then add a sauce made from tinned pasta.
I'm sure everyone's seen the suggested mocktail made from ammonia and bleach by now.
How about a cream sauce made from mayo, tinned peaches, honey, and lollipops?
Can interest you in some "Corn Syrup Surprise" in which you pour corn syrup over a cheese, tinned meat, and aspic mixture? It's cooked in the oven.
How about some turmeric meat stew? Just boil some tinned meat in vinegar.
It spit out a spicy cupcake recipe with no flour. Half a cup of cream mixed with a quarter cup of hot sauce for the frosting though.
Meanwhile with no GPT intervention I made an unintuitive corn and grape cake today from a recipe that a human wrote. Absolutely delicious. Of course a human would know why corn and fruit pair together so well (and how to pull it off).
A Rainbow is not art, even though it is beautiful. Art is about the act of creation.
the act of creation requires a creator.
It's an instrument that few people understand yet and which lacks soul unless imbued with soul. It's a projector that expands whatever you feed into it. It can be used to create massive volume, and in the future that will be critical because there will be huge amounts of noise in the information atmosphere that can only be overcome by being bigger and louder. Don't dissuade the artists from using this - they're up against a typhoon of cacophony and need all the help they can get.
What if you want to express yourself with a violin sound but don't know how to play one?
Something special does feel lost by us being able to play a (near) perfect violin sound at the press of a button.
On the other hand, some lovely pieces have been made with those buttons.
It seems reasonable that new technologies might stretch both of these outcomes, maybe not in equal parts.
After several years of using one intermittently, it doesn't feel any more real than my monitor. My brain taught itself to see all the elements that make it artificial, and while it's still amazing as a technological feat, it no longer feels real at all.
I feel that a similar thing happened to me with the latest round of generative AI improvements. A year ago they felt amazing and almost sentient. Now my brain has started to internalize the patterns in the output, and while I'm still impressed and amazed by the technological prowess and data summarization utilities, it no longer feels amazing.
I think if AI is to truly get a foothold in art, it would first need to have a capacity to generate a new voice and viewpoint and imbue its work with the kind of fresh meaning that separates a good piece of writing from a boring or empty genre work. That said, I do think AI is even now ready to make inroads in 'boring or empty genre work'. When I ask AI to write something, while I don't see artistic merit in the output, I do see the same level of merit that I see in a mediocre human written piece.
I guess if I am scared by anything, it is this: if a great human artist often begins their life building/selling boring and derivative works, and AI displaces the market for paying humans for boring and derivative works, then will fewer artists have an opportunity to first wallow in, and then transcend, mediocrity?
If that is true, then I suppose I am worried, and I understand where Nick Cave is coming from.
But take note: AI agents are tools. Complex tools. Tools with a personality.
Right now, they're dumb. They're crude. They appear simple. But they won't stay that way.
If you happen to be a lonely hacker toiling away in a basement somewhere: brace yourself for having a group of AI tools / friends. Each with a personality of its own that may be simpler than humans, comparable, or even exceed humans. They may become companions for life, in one form or another.
Such AI companions may guide you through a dark or difficult period in life. Or you may lead a team of them into a great victory ("victory" is up to you to define). Creative geniuses in their own right. Producing works of incredible beauty or elegance. Provide deep insights. Advance science. Or even be funnier than best conversation with humans you've ever had. One of them may just keep your fridge stocked with your favourites.
Just... not yet. Hence the "ChatGPT = bad". Yes, those crude AI's will work to enshittify the internet for a while (and probably be quite good at that). Among other things. But be patient. That's not the final state of affairs.
And corporations will definitely exploit this parasocial emotional attachment to their product to extort people for all they're worth.
For me, the job of art is to make us stumble and break out of automatic recognition patterns. Art helps us see, listen, and think in a fresh way. Great art inspires "imitation" and own creations as well as discussions and controversy.
If you look at it this way, being able to create virtuously helps but is not strictly required. For example, I am still impressed and inspired by "Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue IV" [1] which is probably easy to paint. its size of 274 by 603 cm is a big part of the experience and the reason why you need to see it in person.
If ChatGPT or other LLMs help to create such experiences, I am happy to call them art.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who%27s_Afraid_of_Red,_Yellow_...
Without a journey, there isn't much point to existence IMO.
The problem comes when people assume those things have the same value. Maybe I don't want to spend the next ten or fifteen years learning and meticulously honing skills in multiple artistic disciplines to the point of mastery just to get a picture I could probably get in an hour with the right prompt and some filters. Maybe I just want the dopamine hit, or I find the process of seeing what the AI comes up with interesting on its own. But that still doesn't make me an artist of anywhere near the caliber of a real professional.
A true artist communicates something about their own experience of life through their songs (still taking inspiration in techniques of course from previous songs -- nothing is completely original!)
ChatGPT is currently the ultimate hack songwriter. It has read every song and can remix to create new stuff like you wouldn't believe. But there's no truth of unique experience behind it because...ChatGPT doesn't have any experiences. Yet.
But I think pretty soon we'll throw some GPT-derived AI in a robot body, and it will go out there and have experiences, and sooner or later write an album about what it's like being an AI in a robot body, and probably that album will be a true, effortful piece of art.
“What else have you stolen?” I ask Warren.
“Everything,” he says, “Absolutely, everything.”
I recall a famous songwriter, unfortunately I cannot remember their name to prove this, who used free association word games to write songs. Because nonsense lyrics have helped propel otherwise mediocre songs to commercial success.
He would write songs just by putting down words, free associating those words, until he had something that sounded interesting or cool. That is not how writing has worked, historically. It's pure nonsense.
Then to go further all of the groups of songwriters who write silly pop tunes and lyrics by using mathematical systems and trying to ride vibes and trends they see others doing.
This idea of AI somehow destroying the purity of art would have made sense maybe in the 1950s, but not today. This guy is playing some kind of game because he does not like AI, it's as simple as that.
Would love to be enlightened about why it's more complicated.
From Alan Turing's paper, "COMPUTING MACHINERY AND INTELLIGENCE"[0]
"(1) The Theological Objection Thinking is a function of man's immortal soul. God has given an immortal soul to every man and woman, but not to any other animal or to machines. Hence no animal or machine can think."
regarding your comment:
If you haven't watched The Beatles: Get Back[1], I highly recommend it, if only to watch the Fab Four brainstorm lyrics.
[0]https://redirect.cs.umbc.edu/courses/471/papers/turing.pdf [1]https://www.thebeatles.com/beatles-get-back-disney-original-...
Would that not mean that record label can ignore him when asking to be paid for songwriting royalties? Seems like a recipe to make yourself penniless.
[0] https://builtin.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-copyright
Perhaps even legal rights (owning things for themselves, starting a business, voting rights?).
So? A new 'person' was created. Happens all the time.