Nick Cave Fights the Machine

In the story of the creation, God makes the world, and everything in it, in six days. On the seventh day he rests. The day of rest is significant because it suggests that the creation required a certain effort on God’s part, that some form of artistic struggle had taken place.

It was strange to hear those words come out of the mouth of an avowed atheist, but these weren’t Stephen Fry’s words. The actor and comedian was reading in front of an audience from Nick Cave’s The Red Hand Files. Cave was replying to a letter from Leon about the use of Artificial Intelligence (in the form of ChatGPT) by songwriters to write lyrics. It was much quicker and nearly effortless, so why not utilize this new tool?

Cave’s answer was as jaw-droppingly incisive as we’ve come to expect from him. I can also see why Stephen Fry may have chosen this particular letter to read, having had his own recent run-ins with AI. His voice has been cloned without his permission and used to narrate a documentary. Cave drills down on why removing the effort from creating is far more dangerous than we realize.

This struggle is the validating impulse that gives God’s world its intrinsic meaning. The world becomes more than just an object full of other objects, rather it is imbued with the vital spirit, the pneuma, of its creator. ChatGPT rejects any notions of creative struggle, that our endeavours animate and nurture our lives giving them depth and meaning. […] Why strive?, it contends. Why bother with the artistic process and its accompanying trials? Why shouldn’t we make it ‘faster and easier?’

When the God of the Bible looked upon what He had created, He did so with a sense of accomplishment and saw that ‘it was good‘. ‘It was good‘ because it required something of His own self, and His struggle imbued creation with a moral imperative, in short love. […] There are all sorts of temptations in this world that will eat away at your creative spirit, but none more fiendish than that boundless machine of artistic demoralisation, ChatGPT.

This is where my algorithm says, “insert BOOM here.”

Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man’s mind. (The Orange Catholic Bible, from Frank Herbert’s Dune.)

It’s not like we haven’t been warned about all this before. For well over a century, writers and thinkers and movie-makers have been vividly illustrating, in books, and in giant images projected on screens graphically depicting the dangers of Artificial Intelligence. Metropolis to Tron, 2001 to Terminator, even Pixar warns us what happens when we hand over too much agency to something we’ve made. After all, we’ve met us. Folks balk at the idea of low anthropology until they step out their front door. Or looked in their morning mirror. Efficiency is great until we are deemed to be part of the problem. We already knew that part. Having farmed out being the director of solutions to those problems, we can turn into victims, quickly and with ever greater efficiency, Isaac Asimov’s Four Laws notwithstanding.

Cave’s insistence on the importance of struggle being intrinsic to creativity and the dangers of farming it out points to a kind of law, a cause and effect. If we hand over that great privilege, willingly, eagerly, for greater ease, less effort, and more profit potential, we will suffer. Avoiding the effort will cause more pain, both in the short and especially the long term, far more than we thought we were originally saving. Because of the ubiquity of AI, it will, by its very nature, cause a collective suffering. The computing power used to create this new reality may, instead, make a much less pleasant one for us.

In Story and Promise, theologian Robert Jenson describes what the sundering of creativity from reality can do. It’s not simply bad for the artist, it’s bad for the rest of us; it’s a shared reality.

When the past and future disconnect in our communicating, scientists become barbarians and artists nihilists. We send men to the moon, arrange for them to speak back to earth, and have them address us with stilted and pompous instant cliches, at about a sixth grade level of experience and sensitivity. The situation of artists is more complicated. The artist has the task of reconciling what is with what shall and must be; the thing he makes is to be at once a reflection of reality and a step toward a new reality. When past and future disconnect in our language, the artist is torn apart.

Lest I sound a bit like the nihilist Jenson warns about, I want to bring in another actual real-life human being’s perspective, our friend, Pastor Mandy Smith. We have been having a conversation over the years on the reality of the creative struggle, so she was the perfect person to, er, interface with.

I remember a conversation with a young composer. He said he wasn’t sure he was interested in heaven because there’d be no striving or conflict there and that sounded uninteresting. He knew that his best work came from pain. I thought for a second–I also see the connection between the imperfection of this world and our creativity and at the same time, I believe that whatever God has for us in the next life grows from his understanding of our deepest human longings. It came to me that things don’t feel true to us in this life when they’re too perfect because that simply is not an honest reflection of our current reality. When reality changes we’ll want something which is an honest reflection of that reality. It’s just so hard for us to believe that one day reality might not include brokenness. Which reminds me of something I heard myself say last week: “Under pressure art comes out of me.” If you looked at my life you’d see a prolific writer and artist.

My study is crowded with collage and ink work and editing of manuscripts. To someone else it looks like creativity. But I know it’s just survival, what I have to do to make sense of this world. And now, as I write, I wonder if this creative expression from pain is how we join God in his making all things new. The final resolution of all things is not something we passively await but something we help make possible. What a grace if the pain of this sad world brings the very creative expression which restores this sad world?

Mandy points to the ultimate reality of God as we are looking at the wind and waves of a future seemingly in the hands of a creation out of our control. Never was in our control. Because the Creator reconciled on the cross what is, was and shall be, entirely connected to the past and present by creating a new reality, what had been torn asunder is now one in Christ. The processing power needed just to contemplate all the implications of the word “is” in the previous sentence easily outstrips us, and we have brains (still) far more powerful than today’s supercomputers. Fortunately for us, it’s a non-artificial reality, one I couldn’t make that up if I tried!

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