Watch Stephen Fry read Nick Cave’s open letter on artificial intelligence and art
With artificial intelligence increasingly becoming more commonplace in art and society, with The Beatles recently landing their 21st number one single thanks to ground-breaking technology, Letters Live figured it was apt for Stephen Fry to read Nick Cave‘s open letter on the matter.
Back in August, via his Red Hand Files forum, the Australian musician and writer was presented with an AI facsimile of a song “in the style of Nick Cave”. The track contained the lyrics: “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.”
Cave responded by stating: “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,” he continued. “It can never be rolled back, or slowed down, as it moves us toward a utopian future, maybe, or our total destruction.“
Far Out recently spoke to AI expert Michele Darling, chair of Electronic Production & Design at the Berklee College of Music, who explained the process around The Beatles‘ much more favourable use of AI, stating: “It’s all John. It’s his voice from the original recording. It’s just been taken from the bad recording with the use of AI machine learning and then enhanced and sweetened with noise reduction tools and other processing that are typical in music production these days.“
But will the way it has been deployed for ‘Now and Then’ become a cost-effective effort that heralds a new future for music’s past? “Well, what if you could improve the quality of an old recording?“ Darling asks.
However, as Cave notes, there is a big difference between that and AI actually creating art. This concern was also reflected when Ryan Dann, the ambient musician behind the Holland Patent Public Library, was asked about his thoughts as an emerging artist. “I don’t think that AI is going to replace art because I think the core of art is that you feel like you are connecting with somebody else,” he said.
“That there is a person on the other end of the art, and they are trying to communicate something. When you connect with a piece of art, you’re connecting with a person. You’re not just connecting with images, you know what I mean?“ he continued. “When you look at the lilies in a Monet painting, you’re seeing the fact that the guy was going blind, and he’s trying to pull in the very last bits of light he was going to ever have access to and put it in a painting. Even if AI created something similar, you wouldn’t feel anything because, like, who cares?”
You can read Cave’s thoughts on the matter read by Stephen Fry below.
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