(Paris) “This song is shit”: Australian singer Nick Cave is far from impressed by the authoring skills of the artificial intelligence ChatGPT, who was asked by one of his fans write a piece by copying his style.
“Songs are born of suffering: they come from a complex and human inner creative struggle, and as far as I know, the algorithms do not feel anything”, tackled the rocker on his site in response to the text that his fan had submitted to him. .
“Thank you for the song, but with all the love and respect in the world, this song is crap,” he added.
Since its launch at the end of November, the prowess of the conversational robot (chatbot) ChatGPT, capable of formulating detailed answers in a few seconds on a wide range of subjects, has aroused the fascination of Internet users.
Nick Cave reproduced on his site the text of a song that one of his New Zealand fans, known as Mark, asked ChatGPT to write, giving him this instruction: “in the style of Nick Cave “.
The computer program gave birth to a text that recalls the dark words and tinged with biblical references characteristic of the 65-year-old Australian: “I am the sinner, I am the saint / I am the darkness, I am the light / I am the hunter, I am the prey/I am the devil, I am the saviour,” the chorus goes.
But for Cave, it’s just a “parodic line”.
“ChatGPT might be able to write a speech, an essay, a sermon or an obituary, but not a real song. From time to time, he may create a song that is at first sight indistinguishable from an original, but it will never be more than a slightly grotesque decal, ”argues the singer.
More generally, he criticizes the very principle of artificial intelligence which, by nature, “must always go further”: it “can never be stopped or slowed down, since it takes us forward towards a utopian future, perhaps , or towards our total destruction”.
Active since the late 70s (notably with his band The Bad Seeds), Cave enjoys a solid fan base. He reached a wider audience in the mid-90s thanks to the ballad Where the Wild Roses Growin duet with another Australian, the pop star Kylie Minogue.