Roughly as soon as per week, Nick Cave blogs about music, faith, grief, and the infernal state of world affairs by way of the medium of fan correspondence in his Red Hand Files e-newsletter. His meatier responses turn out to be information tales, and few have traveled thus far, or with such fervor, as his 2023 diatribes eviscerating ChatGPT. First, that January, he portrayed a lyric “within the fashion of Nick Cave” as an omen of the apocalypse and “a grotesque mockery of what it’s to be human.” Just a few months later, Cave elaborated that any lyricists utilizing synthetic intelligence have been “collaborating in [the] erosion of the world’s soul and the spirit of humanity itself.”
However that was earlier than his buddy Andrew Dominik made a music video for Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds’ “Tupelo” that includes a floating AI Elvis. Dominik—a longtime Cave collaborator and the director of Blonde, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and One More Time With Feeling—had been at work on the video behind Cave’s again. Offered with the outcome on the music’s fortieth anniversary, Cave decided it was “a soulful, transferring, and fully unique retelling of ‘Tupelo,’ wealthy in mythos and a touching tribute to the good Elvis Presley.”
Cave discovered that Dominik’s AI-animated pictures of Presley “had an uncanny high quality, as if he had been raised from the lifeless, and the crucifixion-resurrection photos on the finish have been each surprising and deeply affecting.” He and his spouse, Susie Cave, he added, “have been blown away. As I watched Andrew’s surreal little movie, I felt my view of AI as an inventive gadget soften. To some extent, my thoughts was modified. ‘It’s a device, like some other,’ stated Andrew.”
Removed from coming away from this spiritual expertise together with his tail between his legs, Cave emerged with a renewed understanding of his personal brilliance. “I imagine that the flexibility to vary one’s thoughts is the very definition of power,” he wrote. “We pursue the reality wherever it could lead, remaining versatile and humble sufficient to regulate our views as new proof emerges, no matter how uncomfortable which will really feel. It’s in the end a type of resilience, not an indication of weak spot. Rigidity breaks; flexibility endures.” Watch the video under.
