Notes from a Cave on Chat GPT

You might not be surprised that longtime musician Nick Cave, an Australian pioneer of what is thought of today as Goth rock, would pretty much reject the idea that the Chat GPT AI has any role in creating music.

You might be surprised that a large part of Cave's argument rests on the idea that God's resting on the seventh day of creation implies "creation required a certain effort on God’s part, that some form of artistic struggle had taken place." But Cave, one of secular music's few confessed Christians, has been long fascinated with the Old Testament and the struggles found therein.

His argument is simple as he answers a question from a fan who talks about hearing a songwriter praise how fast Chat GPT enables him to create lyrics. If there is no artistic struggle that he suggests is a part of all of creation, then what good is what is produced? You don't have to believe in a six-day creation to follow this idea, either. A good, old-fashioned Big Bang and evolutionary development vision of Earth will work just fine, as long as you entertain the idea that God's hand was at work. Spoiler: I sort of do.

Back in May I made fun of the way the Writers Guild of America strike might produce no noticeable dropoff in the quality of movie and TV writing, and in fact we might be better off if some of the Guild's members reduced their output.

But their reasoning is sound: Among other things, writers don't want studios to replace them with AIs  Even though so very much of modern TV and movies are written by hacks or by people performing an amazing imitation of them, the shows are still being written by people. There is a minute but real probability that whichever wordsmith threw the paint-by-numbers chum onto the screen in one of  Dick Wolf's retreads could get better.

Could Chat GPI? Not in any real way that counts. If someone is more specific in their requests -- a task which suggests a knowledge of language that ought to be put to use on a keyboard instead of a query box -- and if we feed the maw of the disposal more real words and real work, then it might produce something "better" than it does now. But it would be the same as the difference between finding a completely smushed tomato and a miraculously whole one that survived the reducing knives of the InsinkErator. It's still stuff that came out of the drain.

Chat GPI is less messy on your carpet. But like Nick Cave, I believe it robs humans of the work of creating. And, for myself, it involves giving up a piece of the image of God written into all of us, and exchanging it for speed. It won't be a good bargain.