Nick Cave says he cannot predict whether artificial intelligence will help or harm the world, but he has a clear objection to platforms that generate songs. In The Red Hand Files, the Bad Seeds frontman connects automated music to a question readers have asked him for years: how much of what we value in a work comes from the person who made it?
Two letters gave Nick Cave a way into the latest argument about artificial intelligence. A reader in Bristol had watched a documentary and wanted to know whether he felt hopeful or alarmed. Another, writing from Porto, asked whether Cave still believed that a work of art could be separated from the person who made it. Cave answered them together in the November issue of The Red Hand Files.
He began with a painting. Caravaggio could make an image that holds someone in place in a museum, Cave observed, even when that viewer knows about the violence in the painter’s life. The example goes to the question the reader in Porto was asking. A work can move an audience, and the facts about the artist can make the experience morally uncomfortable. Cave has returned to that difficulty in earlier letters.
In this one, the advance of song generators changes the terms of the question. Nick Cave argues that a platform can now offer something that resembles the outcome of a songwriter’s work while dispensing with the songwriter. That possibility matters to him because of what he has always considered inseparable from the song: the person who lived long enough to have something to say and then found a way of giving it form.
Cave names Suno in the reply. He contrasts the speed of an automated output with the duration of the experiences he associates with writing a song. The emotions and ordinary stretches of time he lists include loss and boredom. What matters in his argument is that the software can imitate some of the outward signs of those experiences. He questions what is left of the encounter with a song when those signs can be produced on demand.
The letter separates that objection from a forecast about the technology as a whole. Nick Cave says AI could save the world, destroy it or do something between those outcomes. He leaves the larger question open. The part he feels able to answer concerns songwriting, where the apparent convenience of generating a finished track leads him to ask what human effort the listener is being invited to overlook.
His answer also returns to the way audiences discuss difficult artists. Cave suggests, pointedly, that someone eager to remove artists whose behaviour troubles them might welcome a system that can remove the artist from the process entirely. The remark takes the question about Caravaggio to its logical extreme. It is part of his argument about art and its makers, with the historical example giving the reader a different way to think about a new technology.
Nick Cave has objected to generated lyrics before. In earlier exchanges with readers, he considered work produced in imitation of his writing and questioned what it meant to reproduce a style without the experiences that gave rise to it. In the November letter, the issue extends to services that can deliver an entire recording. The finished object may be more convincing, while the question about the person behind it becomes harder to answer.
There is a distinction within Cave’s own public record. He has also described being surprised by Andrew Dominik’s anniversary film for “Tupelo,” in which artificial intelligence was used to animate still images. Watching the film made him reconsider some of his assumptions about AI as an artistic device. His reaction to that film concerned a director making choices about images and movement around a song that already existed.
The example explains why Cave’s views can sound different when he discusses individual uses. In Dominik’s film, there is a filmmaker whose decisions shape what the audience sees. In the letter about song platforms, Nick Cave is concerned with services that offer the song as the output of an automated process. His response to one work gave him a reason to entertain some uses of the technology. It left his doubts about automated songwriting in place.
The Red Hand Files has given Cave a place to take up questions from readers since 2018. The November reply retains that correspondence format. Its argument can be followed from the two questions on the page, through an example from painting, to the experience of hearing a song and wondering what kind of attention went into making it. The path is more specific than a general statement of enthusiasm or hostility towards AI.
For Nick Cave, the question from Bristol remains open in its broadest sense. The question from Porto gives him firmer ground. He can picture the viewer standing before a painting and knowing something of the person who made it. His worry about song generators is that a listener could be offered a recognisable work while losing the chance to have that kind of encounter.
