"The songs are born from suffering: they come from a complex and human inner creative struggle, and as far as I know, the algorithms do not feel anything", tackled the rocker on his site in response to the text that his fan had submitted to him. .
"Thank you for the song, but with all the love and respect in the world, this song is crap," he added.
Since its launch at the end of November, the prowess of the conversational robot (chatbot) ChatGPT, capable of formulating detailed answers in a few seconds on a wide range of subjects, has aroused the fascination of Internet users.
Nick Cave reproduced on his site the text of a song that one of his New Zealand fans, known as Mark, asked ChatGPT to write, giving him this instruction: "in the style of Nick Cave ".
The computer program produced a text reminiscent of the 65-year-old Australian's characteristic dark, biblical-tinged words: "I am the sinner, I am the holy/I am the darkness, I am the light/ I am the hunter, I am the prey/I am the devil, I am the saviour," the chorus goes.
But for Cave, it's just a "parody replica".
"ChatGPT may be able to write a speech, an essay, a sermon or an obituary, but not a real song. From time to time, it may create a song that is at first glance indistinguishable from 'an original, but it will never be more than a somewhat grotesque decal,' argues the singer.
More generally, he castigates the very principle of artificial intelligence which, by nature, "must always go further": it "can never be stopped or slowed down, since it takes us forward towards a utopian future, perhaps , or towards our total destruction".
Active since the late 70s (notably with his band The Bad Seeds), Cave enjoys a solid fan base.
He reached a wider audience in the mid-1990s with the ballad "Where the Wild Roses Grow", a duet with fellow Australian pop star Kylie Minogue.
© 2023 AFP