Why Nick Cave knows more about AI than futurists do

Yuval Harrari, in his book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, speaks about an AI knowing us so well, that it knows how to write the perfect song for us to enhance or change our mood. While the science and technology sound intriguing and potentially possible, the very idea of it seems to miss the point of what music is about.

We love songs for the stories they convey, but the stories are often subtle and filled with social cues that go beyond melody and harmony. The story of the artist imbues a song with depth, a song about heartbreak can fill us with even more compassion as we hear the artist’s story writing the song versus just the lyrics. Think of “Dance Me to the End of Love” by Leonard Cohen; it’s a beautiful song made more beautiful by its story of his decades-long love affair with Marianne Ihlen.

Songs are also not solitary or personalised (other than maybe for the artist). It is about a shared experience of the human condition. Other fans provide us with a sense of belonging, sharing music we love with friends makes us feel more connected. Personally, I love it when my kids go to see the Pixies, which is my favorite band. It brings us closer together versus each having our own set of music that is personalised to the point that it has no common meaning.

Nobody says this better than Nick Cave in his response to the question by a fan. Could an AI have written “Smells like Teen Spirit”? Maybe… could it have had the same tragic delivery, frustration and ultimate suicide that give the song its meaning beyond the chords? No. We confuse the aesthetic with the outcome – but that’s not how humans work.

Read his letter below, it’s well worth it:

Nick Cave, answering a Slovenian fan’s question: ‘Considering human imagination the last piece of wilderness, do you think AI will ever be able to write a good song?’

Dear Peter,

In Yuval Noah Harari’s new book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, he writes that Artificial Intelligence, with its limitless potential and connectedness, will ultimately render many humans redundant in the workplace. This sounds entirely feasible. However, he goes on to say that AI will be able to write better songs than humans can. He says, and excuse my simplistic summation, that we listen to songs to make us feel certain things and that in the future AI will simply be able to map the individual mind and create songs tailored exclusively to our own particular mental algorithms, that can make us feel, with far more intensity and precision, whatever it is we want to feel. If we are feeling sad and want to feel happy we simply listen to our bespoke AI happy song and the job will be done.

But, I am not sure that this is all songs do. Of course, we go to songs to make us feel something — happy, sad, sexy, homesick, excited or whatever — but this is not all a song does. What a great song makes us feel is a sense of awe. There is a reason for this. A sense of awe is almost exclusively predicated on our limitations as human beings. It is entirely to do with our audacity as humans to reach beyond our potential.

It is perfectly conceivable that AI could produce a song as good as Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” for example, and that it ticked all the boxes required to make us feel what a song like that should make us feel — in this case, excited and rebellious, let’s say. It is also feasible that AI could produce a song that makes us feel these same feelings, but more intensely than any human songwriter could do.

But, I don’t feel that when we listen to “Smells Like Teen Spirit” it is only the song that we are listening to. It feels to me, that what we are actually listening to is a withdrawn and alienated young man’s journey out of the small American town of Aberdeen — a young man who by any measure was a walking bundle of dysfunction and human limitation — a young man who had the temerity to howl his particular pain into a microphone and in doing so, by way of the heavens, reach into the hearts of a generation.

We are also listening to Iggy Pop walk across his audience’s hands and smear himself in peanut butter whilst singing 1970. We are listening to Beethoven compose the Ninth Symphony while almost totally deaf. We are listening to Prince, that tiny cluster of purple atoms, singing in the pouring rain at the Super Bowl and blowing everyone’s minds. We are listening to Nina Simone stuff all her rage and disappointment into the most tender of love songs. We are listening to Paganini continue to play his Stradivarius as the strings snapped. We are listening to Jimi Hendrix kneel and set fire to his own instrument.

What we are actually listening to is human limitation and the audacity to transcend it. Artificial Intelligence, for all its unlimited potential, simply doesn’t have this capacity. How could it? And this is the essence of transcendence. If we have limitless potential then what is there to transcend? And therefore what is the purpose of the imagination at all. Music has the ability to touch the celestial sphere with the tips of its fingers and the awe and wonder we feel is in the desperate temerity of the reach, not just the outcome. Where is the transcendent splendour in unlimited potential? So to answer your question, Peter, AI would have the capacity to write a good song, but not a great one. It lacks the nerve.

Love, Nick

By Nevo Hadas – Nevo is the Founding Partner of DYDX