Nick Cave's thoughts on a ChatGPT poem (2023)
theredhandfiles.com
theredhandfiles.com
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.
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
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.
With enough data and training you might be convinced.
No no, it’s not that the style wasn’t mine, the subject was generic.
ChatGPT did the typical thing that messes people up when they draw: It was drawing a representation of the thing, instead of the shapes it sees. The AI clearly went “AH! That’s a venus flytrap. Here is a drawing of a venus flytrap”. But it wasn’t _that_ venus flytrap :)
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.)
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.
Paraphrased from shoddy memory, the author was asked about how inspiration comes to him, and he said something like:
"My ideas come to me while I'm sitting at the desk in my office every morning between 7 and 11 AM."
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.
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.
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.
That's a common take, but I don't think it's really that accurate, otherwise we wouldn't have The Beach Boys
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.”
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.
(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.)
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.
I believe this is undoubtedly a part of the human struggle of creation that Nick wrote about.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
Your comment would be just fine without that bit.
This is a suno song asked by me: https://suno.com/song/57c5d409-e800-4a64-9fd4-beaa0c17c91a?s.... I like the bridge part.
Yes, directed pastiche, sometimes even useful.
Does insight or critical thought ever come from context-based prediction?
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.
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.
What kind of gatekeeping is this? Parent mentioned they're read poems from their local bookstores, does that mean they don't/do understand it "as an art form"? Does their opinion become more or less valid if they do understand it "as an art form"?
If you ask an LLM to "Write me a poem", expect the equivalent of what others are calling analogous to hotel art: generic and inoffensive. However, if you inject your personalized soul and suffering into the context window, there's no reason not to expect the transformation of that soul into indistinguishably human-like prose.
I won't share the full content, because it was personalized to me and my moment.
I am quite curious though, how art without an author will grow into society.
I am ABSOLUTELY gatekeeping whether their opinion should hold weight when opining on the trajectory of a millenia-old art form.
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.
1. Readers wanting to virtue signal. Either to others or themselves
2. Authors + Publishers marketing
I will bet you thousands of dollars that if I was already a poet with distribution I could publish a book where 80% of it was done with current llms and pass it as an my own original work.
It would still require skill and taste to prompt and filter the corpus but I'm certain it can be done with the current state of llms, let alone future ones.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.