‘BULLSH*T’

Nick Cave Rips ChatGPT Effort to Write Nick Cave Song

“This song sucks,” the singer wrote.

Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan recently predicted that “AI systems will completely dominate music.” But Aussie singer-songwriter Nick Cave is completely unimpressed with what’s currently available. In his newsletter, The Red Hand Files, the artist responded to a fan who sent him the lyrics of a song “written in the style of Nick Cave” by ChatGPT—the wildly popular artificial intelligence chatbot. Commenting on the lyrics, which included lines like “I walk the streets, with my head held high / I’ve got my demons, but I’ll make them fly,” Cave wrote on Monday: “This song sucks. What ChatGPT is, in this instance, is replication as travesty.” He went on to say that songwriting requires “humanness,” adding of the machine’s effort: “[T]his song is bullshit, a grotesque mockery of what it is to be human, and, well, I don’t much like it.”