Is AI hypocrisy the final straw? Nick Cave continues to be a disappointment
Nick Cave is a legend, no denying it. To caveat that, he’s a complex legend, and always has been.
To love his work has been a task to keep up with his changes, from the rowdy, violent punk to the sober, stoic poet. But in the last few years, it has also been a task to navigate the various confusing stances he takes—and it’s getting too exhausting.
All of these things take nuance, of course. It is true that, to some degree, people with a large platform have a level of responsibility. Though no rockstar ever truly asked for the role, our celebrities are our public speakers. They’re the voices many hear louder than any other, so there is a demand for them to use it to say something important, given the volumes they can reach. But at the same time, it’s also true that demanding politics from everyone is unfair and admittedly exhausting.
If we zone in solely on Nick Cave to use as an example, it would have been unfair to ask him to spend his Ghosteen tour, when he’s playing a grief-stricken album about his late son, talking about a political election. Understanding that is the nuance I reference, but as we know, that’s tough for some people to consider.
I’ve been giving Nick Cave the benefit of the doubt in this corner. He’s an intelligent guy, I’ve been telling myself, trying my best to understand his reasoning when he’s done things like choosing to attend the King’s coronation, which was admittedly a minor blip in the grand scheme of things, annoying people merely because it’s perhaps the least punk thing you can do. But with each new talking point, it’s getting harder and harder.
There was the coronation. There was Cave piped up during a moment when Kanye West was busy going on rants on social media, spewing antisemitic sentiments and outright admitting to being a nazi, to use him as an example of the benefit of separating art and artist, and picking one of his records as an all-time favourite. There was a time when Cave encouraged musicians not to get involved in boycotts around the time of The Great Escape, advising them not to get involved in social action. There’s his years-long refusal to join artists boycotting shows in Israel and declining to take a stance about the ongoing and ever-worsening genocide.
There have been blips in his career, too, like his work with Andrew Dominik on Blonde, the trauma-porn retelling of Marilyn Monroe’s life, which was dubbed by The New York Times as “the latest necrophiliac entertainment to exploit her.”
But there had always been one hope. If Cave has taken one stance in the last however many years, it was a promising dedication to being anti-artificial intelligence.
“I understand that ChatGPT is in its infancy but perhaps that is the emerging horror of AI – that it will forever be in its infancy, as it will always have further to go, and the direction is always forward, always faster. It can never be rolled back, or slowed down, as it moves us toward a utopian future, maybe, or our total destruction,” he wrote about the tech in 2023 when someone sent him a song ‘in the style of Nick Cave’, which the artist responded, “The apocalypse is well on its way. This song sucks.”
Cave made it adamantly clear back then that AI has absolutely no place in art, and it is the total antithesis of what art is. “What ChatGPT is, in this instance, is replication as travesty,” he said, claiming it would never be anything more than “burlesque” as a machine can never experience human emotion or life to be able to write with a heart.
He wrote about AI in an incredibly passionate and poignant way, as though he really truly cared or was actively afraid of what AI could mean, stating, “It may sound like I’m taking all this a little too personally, but I’m a songwriter who is engaged, at this very moment, in the process of songwriting. It’s a blood and guts business, here at my desk, that requires something of me to initiate the new and fresh idea,” and declaring that AI literally put “the fire of hell” in his eyes.
So, why has Nick Cave just promoted an AI-made music video to all his followers?
“Is changing your mind about things a sign of weakness? Sometimes, it feels that way,” a fan asked Cave on his Red Hand Files and in the latest let down, the artist used the interesting question to talk about changing his mind on AI and then promote a music video that repeat problematic culprit, Andrew Dominik, made to celebrate the anniversary of his song ‘Tupelo’.
Sure, in this new send-out, he plays it off like he was still the anti-AI bastion he’s always been, but all it takes is Dominik to say “suspend your fucking prejudices and take a look,” and he’s in.
“To our surprise, we found it to be an extraordinarily profound interpretation of the song – a soulful, moving, and entirely original retelling of ‘Tupelo’, rich in mythos and a touching tribute to the great Elvis Presley, as well as to the song itself,” he says, gushing about the video as “deeply affecting”, which is exactly what he’d once claimed AI art could never be.
“As I watched Andrew’s surreal little film, I felt my view of AI as an artistic device soften. To some extent, my mind was changed”.
Nick Cave’s change of heart on AI.
“It’s a tool, like any other,” Cave wrote, citing comments made by Andrew Dominik. And just like that, the artist disappoints again, losing his footing on the one clear and important stance he seemed sturdy on and not even just slipping, falling all the way down by promoting this video to his millions of followers and thus co-signing the AI shite.
What do we do with this? Cave has always been an Artist, capital A, reading poetry, celebrating the greats, packing his work with rich and historic references, and clearly being a man who has studied and honed his craft and talks powerfully about creation as work and as something he’d dedicated an incredible amount of time and effort to. What do we do when a man like that softens to the idea of AI? When we now know that two top-level creatives are open to the idea of just feeding a prompt to a machine rather than doing the work themselves?
The answer, I don’t know, and it’s another bitter disappointment for fans of Cave who have been trying to hold out for so long that he’s now not only not the man with the answer, but he’s the one making us ask the question.
Watch the non-AI, human-made original video for ‘Tupelo’ below.
