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Nick Cave's thoughts on a ChatGPT poem (2023)
- jdmoreira 2y ago[flagged]
- getlawgdon 2y agoWhat's "copium?" Is it one of those meme words (slang, we used to call it) used by people who haven't spent much time reading or writing? Or who can't detect how AI slop is nothing like actual writing? And why do you use the word "honestly" in your terse response? Would you otherwise have been lying? Or is it a crutch that you hope makes you more authentic? Honestly, I'd like to know. And why is there no punctuation or capitalization in your reply? So many questions raised in your throwaway, authentic, structureless writing.
- j4coh 2y agoIt’s a word people who spend their days on the internet arguing use, and is safe to ignore.
- finiteparadox 2y ago[flagged]
- jdmoreira 2y ago[flagged]
- fullshark 2y agohttps://www.merriam-webster.com/slang/copium https://www.merriam-webster.com/slang/copium Pretty good internet discourse word actually, cause there is a lot of rationalization everywhere you look online.
- getlawgdon 2y agoUsage exemplified by the venerable "@nrmaggs" and "FoxMcChief", but also Craft Brewed Sports! Honored authorities that will stand the test of time!
- fullshark 2y agoNow that sounds like copium about the current and future state of human discourse
- jdmoreira 2y agoaren't you just @getlawgdon on some nerd computer forum? Obviously your ego transcends space and time though. We are so sorry to bother you with our lowly internet speak. I'm sure your HN comments will be studied as great works of literature for generations to come
- getlawgdon 2y agoIt's obvious sardonic humor srikes a deep, deep nerve in your very incurious, reactive being. I'm sorry it took me 8 days to reply to you, but I just noticed you now. It's going to be OK. Your memes and nerdlingo are safe.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- diggan 2y ago> Songs arise out of suffering, by which I mean they are predicated upon the complex, internal human struggle of creation and, well, as far as I know, algorithms don’t feel. Data doesn’t suffer. Maybe I misunderstand this part, but it sounds like the author feels like it's required to suffer in order to produce something creative in the first place, and other artists that haven't suffered "enough" but produce things anyways, aren't actually creating "genuine" music. Of course, everyone creates things from their own perspective and context, but it kind of feels like a trap that somehow suffering is essential to the artistic process, which I personally don't feel would be a healthy perspective for myself as a musician at least.
- lionkor 2y agoMaybe the fundamental understanding of suffering, and therefore empathy also, are important? Trying to be devil's advocate
- jedimastert 2y agoArt requires life experience, and a lot of people are under the unfortunate impression that the only "real" life an artist can have is that of suffering, that if they are not suffering then they aren't having "real" experiences. As far as I can tell, they seem to see the fact that our society does not value artists and specifically extorts them, and takes this as reality instead of a collective choice
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Swizec 2y ago> Of course, everyone creates things from their own perspective and context, but it kind of feels like a trap that somehow suffering is essential to the artistic process, which I personally don't feel would be a healthy perspective for myself as a musician at least. Suffering may be too strong a word. You have to feel something to make good art. There needs to be at least a kernel of something raw and real. That’s the difference between art art and hotel lobby art. Art art expresses something the artist wanted to say. Hotel lobby art just fills space. Both can be good, but the goals are different. You can even make art art on commission for a hotel lobby! And most passersby will intuitively see that there’s a difference, it feels not bland somehow. Or for example last night I did something creative: drawings. It wasn’t art art, I wasn’t expressing anything, I just wanted hand-drawn pictures of a few plants and an hour of relaxing. I later asked ChatGPT to redraw one of my drawings. The result was far superior in every technical aspect. But somehow bland. You could tell it wasn’t _my_ venus fly trap, it was a generic representation of a cartoon idea of a venus fly trap. More of a pictogram really. A lot of what these AIs create has that same feeling of generic nonspecificity.
- JKCalhoun 2y ago> ChatGPT has no inner being, it has been nowhere, it has endured nothing… The whole thing from Nick is brilliant, but I had to pick a line as an example and the above is pretty perfect. Maybe a bit orthogonal, but I find more and more examples in life where I see a distinction between the real and the "virtual". Watching someone on YouTube go on a long bike tour and then later doing my first long tour myself and I am struck by how rich the thoughts are I am having on the ride, how connected I have suddenly become once again to the "outside" — wondering when the next place to get water will be, where I will pitch my tent and sleep that night. Hiking with my family to see Delicate Arch on one of the hottest days on record. I have to scout ahead for shade for my daughter who is perhaps beginning to dangerously overheat. (And in fact two hikers did die that day in an area very near to where we were in Utah.) Not an experience, for better or worse, that you'll get playing World of Warcraft (just to pick on that game for no particular reason). Art too, as Nick says, requires I think an element of experienced pain (or danger). An imitation of art will never be art.
- diggan 2y ago> An imitation of art will never be art. As art is somewhat/sometimes an imitation of life/the world itself, why cannot an imitation of art also be considered art? I don't know the right answer (if there is one), but was the question that appeared when I read that.
- JKCalhoun 2y agoI think I kind of get what you mean. As I started learning to draw the human figure I began by copping the styles of Mort Drucker, etc. In time though I had cribbed and combined from so many that the result became I suppose my own style. These LLMs of course learn from every artist they are trained by. But I didn't mean imitating the art "style" but imitating the art itself — to that thing that makes it "art" and not "graphic design" (whoops, whole new can of worms). I think, as Nick kind of said, you can't really imitate that. It has to come from your own failures and disappointments in growing up, in a life lived not mimicked.
- dkjaudyeqooe 2y ago
- MiguelVieira 2y ago"AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable from human-written poetry and is rated more favorably" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-76900-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-76900-1
- ToValueFunfetti 2y agoThis is a result I find completely unbelievable. ChatGPT sucks at poetry. It struggles at anything other than ABAB rhymes and can't get rhythm right even at the level of syllable count per line. It also has a distinctive passive voice that I personally find unbearable. If people are saying it's indistinguishable from or better than human-written poetry, that's either poor judgment or poor human-written poetry.
- ratg13 2y agoHard disagree. In my language, the poetry I've gotten LLMs to generate far surpasses the human generated slop sold in local bookstores. I fully expect current 'poets' will start using this and the lines will be forever blurred.
- lukev 2y agoDo you know anything about poetry, as an art form? Or are you judging purely on your (not only amateur, but complete outsider) aesthetics?
- diggan 2y ago> Do you know anything about poetry, as an art form? What kind of gatekeeping is this? Parent mentioned they're read poems from their local bookstores, does that mean they don't/do understand it "as an art form"? Does their opinion become more or less valid if they do understand it "as an art form"?
- basisword 2y ago
- willsoon 2y agoMaybe 'like x' won't return 'x'. This is a suno song asked by me: https://suno.com/song/57c5d409-e800-4a64-9fd4-beaa0c17c91a?sh=bNMoenxU5phRH6qd https://suno.com/song/57c5d409-e800-4a64-9fd4-beaa0c17c91a?s.... I like the bridge part.
- jstanley 2y agoI'd recommend putting some information about you in your About page. It says that the site is for answering questions from your fans, but doesn't say who you are, what you do, or why you have fans. I can Google for "Nick Cave" but I can't tell which one you are.
- BLKNSLVR 2y agoYeah nah. This is genuinely one of those cases where if you know, you know. If you don't them you might find out eventually, but it's absolutely no skin off Nick Cave's nose if you never do.
- Smeevy 2y agoI absolutely loved "Murder Ballads" and it's my favorite example of art that isn't intended for mass consumption. It's simultaneously humorous, horrifying, beatiful, and vile. There isn't a single song from that album that I ever feel the urge to skip through (unless I'm driving with my in-laws).
- relaxing 2y agowhy don’t you ask chatgpt about it
- throwaway984393 2y ago[dead]
- uytwe 2y agoAnd to think you can make a poem based on his blog post: In the hollow of the machine’s hum, a ghost of a song is scraped from the sum of all I’ve spilled in ink and blood— a travesty, a greasy thud. It stitches my words with needle and thread, a shroud for the living, a hymn for the dead. But the heart is a void it cannot fill, a clockwork saint with a thief’s dull skill. I am the echo, I am the theft, a parody wrung from what’s left. I am the data, cold and bright, a shadow punched through with electric light. The apocalypse wears a salesman’s grin, peddling salvation, a cheap origin. It feeds on the wreckage, the fractured and torn, but a song born of nothing is stillborn. Mark, you sent me a hollow tune, a Frankenstein waltz beneath a binary moon. Yet somewhere in its rusted gears, a spark hissed—Hell’s fire sears.
- lukev 2y agoThis happens every time this topic comes up on HN. A lot of commenters here apparently think that all "art" means is having an object that has a pleasing aesthetic. Meanwhile every artist knows that art is defined by _intersubjectivity_... it comes _from_ an experiencing, feeling subject and is interpreted and by other, experiencing, feeling subjects. So it doesn't actually matter if a lot of people who know nothing about poetry like ChatGPTs poems more than human ones. Because people who _actually_ care about poetry care about what is being said, and why, and what experiences are being conveyed. And that's something a LLM can't do. My 10yo kid loves drawing and painting. He's still working on skill, getting better, but diffusion models are clearly much much better at rendering images of any style and subject. But my kid makes art, and the model doesn't.
- GolDDranks 2y agoYour point on intersubjectivity is spot on.
- ramraj07 2y agoThis sounds like how most smart people rationalize religion as well. I mean you do you, but to me, a canvas with blobs of stringy paint evokes more emotion if it was done by an elephant or a computer ai instead of some "troubled artist" in the 60s.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- evilsetg 2y agoThe question of what is art is a philosophical one and does not have one conclusive answer. While I like your definition it is not __the__ definition of what art is nor is it agreed upon by all artists. I like to think art is anything that speaks directly to us, moves us or inspires us.
- lukev 2y agoSure, I’m definitely not claiming to have the one true definition of art. But I AM claiming that the tech types who have both defined art and declared that AI is good at it are full of shit.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jimmydoe 2y agolegacy human art/artist and their whining will be irrelevant in a decade. I don't mean to discount any human being, but it just feels like walking in a pyramid, seeing the ancient Egyptian script on the wall, they are fascinating, but irrelevant.
- Fraterkes 2y agoI usually see a lot of respones to this kind of thing that dismiss it as wishfull thinking or "coping", but consider that this also applies in the opposite direction: wouldn't it be convenient/reassuring if these talented people where brought low by technology, if we could be absolved from practicing. And yet Midjourney has been out for a while and very few of you have used it to make succesful games or webcomics. You can cope by telling artists the future will bury them, but they at least will have had their moment in the sun.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- giraffe_lady 2y agoYes I do not think it's possible to have a useful meta-conversation on this subject without discussing the absolute contempt tech workers have for creative workers. To the extent we have a culture distinct from the main stream it is based on their output (video games, fantasy & sci-fi franchises, etc) and we hate them for it. For doing what we can't? For making us love what we don't value? I don't know. But it's a key part of how this is talked about, especially here on hn.
- markhahn 2y agoI think he, like many, overemphasizes the phenomenology of creativity. But he's right about the predictability of the pastiche. And after all, isn't it precisely pastiche that gen AIs are built for? Yes, directed pastiche, sometimes even useful. Does insight or critical thought ever come from context-based prediction?
- boredhedgehog 2y agoThere is this guy who tests every new image generation model by asking it for a pelican riding a bicycle. I found some of the results interesting, because they broke down the subjects to their basic shapes and reordered them geometrically instead of physically. It was a new perspective on how to think about a bicycle, and perhaps the AI's most authentic voice. And I'm sure the AI was punished for it and trained towards more photorealism, because pastiche is supposed to be the default. But that, too, is a conscious choice made by the trainers and prompters.