Nick Cave calls ChatGPT written Nick Cave song grotesque

18 January 2023

A fan of Australian musician Nick Cave, named Mark, asked ChatGPT to write the lyrics to a song “in the style of Nick Cave”, and sent the resulting output to Cave to look at.

Despite disliking the lyrics, Cave, who described the song as “bullshit”, and “a grotesque mockery”, wrote Mark a gracious, informative response, noting this was not the first time someone had asked the AI powered chatbot to perform such a task:

What ChatGPT is, in this instance, is replication as travesty. ChatGPT may be able to write a speech or an essay or a sermon or an obituary but it cannot create a genuine song. It could perhaps in time create a song that is, on the surface, indistinguishable from an original, but it will always be a replication, a kind of burlesque.

ChatGPT may be capable of a good many things, but being truly artistic is not (yet) one of those things.