Nick Cave says “Tupelo” film softened his view of AI
The songwriter calls AI song generators a “soul-destroying humiliation” and warns of their effect on creativity.
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Nick Cave has renewed his attack on AI song generators, calling them a musician’s “final, most soul-destroying humiliation,” while saying an AI-assisted film made to mark the 40th anniversary of The Bad Seeds’ “Tupelo” had softened his view of AI “as an artistic device” to some extent.
In a recent Red Hand Files response prompted by readers’ questions about separating art from artists, Cave argued that art and artists had traditionally been inseparable. Song-generation platforms, he said, change that proposition by removing the artist from the equation. He described AI-generated music as “an imitation of the soul,” risking the removal from music of the lived experience, relationships, heartbreak and joy that inform songwriting.
Cave said such platforms “mock creation itself by rendering humanity unnecessary” and threaten to turn the fruits of human striving into products. He singled out Suno, which he said can produce a song in 15 seconds, as an affront to writers who have lived and struggled in the world. He also called the technology an indication of AI’s “demonic potential,” while acknowledging that AI could save the world, destroy it or lead to an outcome somewhere between those extremes.
Dominik’s “Tupelo” film was sent to Cave as a 40th-anniversary gift. It used AI to animate a series of archival still images. Cave said he and Susie found it a profound, soulful, moving and original interpretation of the song, with animated photographs of Elvis Presley carrying an uncanny, resurrection-like quality. Images of crucifixion and resurrection, he said, were shocking and deeply affecting.
“Tupelo” has been performed at nearly every Bad Seeds concert since it was written. Cave has described the song as combining the storm in John Lee Hooker’s song of the same name with the birth of Presley in Tupelo, Mississippi. Dominik characterised AI as “a tool, like any other,” and Cave said changing one’s mind as new evidence emerges is a strength.
The film sits against Cave’s longer record of resistance to AI songwriting. In 2023, after fans sent him dozens of ChatGPT-produced songs, he called one created in his style “bullshit” and “a grotesque mockery of what it is to be human.” He argued then that songwriting was a “blood and guts business” requiring human vulnerability, rather than mimicry or pastiche.