Earlier quoted context omitted.
Put more simply, he's saying art is the product of, and the expression of, human emotion and experience. Suffering just happens to be a common element of that, but it's not essential. Maybe because it most commonly produces good or great art. People generally don't make art about how their love life is perfectly fine, instead they express their experience of devastating heartbreak. Nike Cave is just one strand of the…
>People generally don't make art about how their love life is perfectly fine, instead they express their experience of devastating heartbreak. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aunVlekXjkE
Nick Cave's thoughts on a ChatGPT poem (2023)
71–80 of 85 posts
Re: Nick Cave's thoughts on a ChatGPT poem (2023)
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Do you know anything about poetry, as an art form? What kind of gatekeeping is this? Parent mentioned they're read poems from their local bookstores, does that mean they don't/do understand it "as an art form"? Does their opinion become more or less valid if they do understand it "as an art form"?
It depends what you want from the poetry. If you want to read something that sounds nice and pretty or if you want something with deeper meaning and substance that requires you to think a bit more about what you're reading. I can see how ChatGPT could produce the former, but I doubt it can manage the latter.
I think the magic is often in how you prompt. The best written art I've gotten from Claude was after a very extended dialogue; eventually, in the same context window, I prompted for an essay, framed by a short poem. The results were, to me, beautiful, and extraordinarily relevant in a cathartic way. Elements of my own personal "meaning and substance" ended up getting synthesized into what I would certainly consider poetry.
If you ask an LLM to "Write me a poem", expect the equivalent of what others are calling analogous to hotel art: generic and inoffensive. However, if you inject your personalized soul and suffering into the context window, there's no reason not to expect the transformation of that soul into indistinguishably human-like prose.
I won't share the full content, because it was personalized to me and my moment.
I am quite curious though, how art without an author will grow into society.
Re: Nick Cave's thoughts on a ChatGPT poem (2023)
#73This happens every time this topic comes up on HN. A lot of commenters here apparently think that all "art" means is having an object that has a pleasing aesthetic. Meanwhile every artist knows that art is defined by _intersubjectivity_... it comes _from_ an experiencing, feeling subject and is interpreted and by other, experiencing, feeling subjects. So it doesn't actually matter if a lot of people who know nothing…
The question of what is art is a philosophical one and does not have one conclusive answer. While I like your definition it is not __the__ definition of what art is nor is it agreed upon by all artists.
I like to think art is anything that speaks directly to us, moves us or inspires us.
Re: Nick Cave's thoughts on a ChatGPT poem (2023)
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
> An imitation of art will never be art. As art is somewhat/sometimes an imitation of life/the world itself, why cannot an imitation of art also be considered art? I don't know the right answer (if there is one), but was the question that appeared when I read that.
You're missing the point. Imitation is the artistic act in question. The act of "creation". The question is what does the imitation bring to the viewer's experience of it? "Starry Night" brings a lot. A photocopy of it probably doesn't. What does the imitation create or express?
Can you please edit out swipes like "You're missing the point" from your HN comments? They degrade the threads and frequently evoke worse from others. (This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.)
Your comment would be just fine without that bit.
Re: Nick Cave's thoughts on a ChatGPT poem (2023)
#75This happens every time this topic comes up on HN. A lot of commenters here apparently think that all "art" means is having an object that has a pleasing aesthetic. Meanwhile every artist knows that art is defined by _intersubjectivity_... it comes _from_ an experiencing, feeling subject and is interpreted and by other, experiencing, feeling subjects. So it doesn't actually matter if a lot of people who know nothing…
The question of what is art is a philosophical one and does not have one conclusive answer. While I like your definition it is not __the__ definition of what art is nor is it agreed upon by all artists. I like to think art is anything that speaks directly to us, moves us or inspires us.
Sure, I’m definitely not claiming to have the one true definition of art.
But I AM claiming that the tech types who have both defined art and declared that AI is good at it are full of shit.
Re: Nick Cave's thoughts on a ChatGPT poem (2023)
#76> Songs arise out of suffering, by which I mean they are predicated upon the complex, internal human struggle of creation and, well, as far as I know, algorithms don’t feel. Data doesn’t suffer. Maybe I misunderstand this part, but it sounds like the author feels like it's required to suffer in order to produce something creative in the first place, and other artists that haven't suffered "enough" but produce things…
Does any artist exist that hasn't suffered, at the very least, from the various limits—technical, physical, psychological, or otherwise—standing in the way of the perfect materialisation of their artistic vision?
I believe this is undoubtedly a part of the human struggle of creation that Nick wrote about.
Re: Nick Cave's thoughts on a ChatGPT poem (2023)
#77> Songs arise out of suffering, by which I mean they are predicated upon the complex, internal human struggle of creation and, well, as far as I know, algorithms don’t feel. Data doesn’t suffer. Maybe I misunderstand this part, but it sounds like the author feels like it's required to suffer in order to produce something creative in the first place, and other artists that haven't suffered "enough" but produce things…
I think he addresses your question immediately following the comma. He's not saying you must have been, e.g., persecuted or downtrodden to create art, he's talking about the struggle of creation itself. He's saying art is hard to make, that if you're not overreaching you aren't making art, and he may be saying that what makes ChatGPT's output not art is that it's created automatically, within the scope of its limitat…
I'm amazed at all this discussion upon a misinterpretation when, exactly as you say, he clarified what he meant by struggle in the same sentence and it is not life struggle, it is creative struggle (to create music, poetry, etc).
(Of course, pretty much everyone experiences hardship in life and some artists have experienced very harsh hardships and drawn upon that in their later art but he is very clearly not saying that that is an essential part of creating art.)
Re: Nick Cave's thoughts on a ChatGPT poem (2023)
#78This happens every time this topic comes up on HN. A lot of commenters here apparently think that all "art" means is having an object that has a pleasing aesthetic. Meanwhile every artist knows that art is defined by _intersubjectivity_... it comes _from_ an experiencing, feeling subject and is interpreted and by other, experiencing, feeling subjects. So it doesn't actually matter if a lot of people who know nothing…
The question of what is art is a philosophical one and does not have one conclusive answer. While I like your definition it is not __the__ definition of what art is nor is it agreed upon by all artists. I like to think art is anything that speaks directly to us, moves us or inspires us.
> I like to think art is anything that speaks directly to us, moves us or inspires us.
Then that would include anything in the natural world that evokes such feelings and this clearly goes against the meaning that 'art' has had over millennia.
Re: Nick Cave's thoughts on a ChatGPT poem (2023)
#79I think he, like many, overemphasizes the phenomenology of creativity. But he's right about the predictability of the pastiche. And after all, isn't it precisely pastiche that gen AIs are built for? Yes, directed pastiche, sometimes even useful. Does insight or critical thought ever come from context-based prediction?
There is this guy who tests every new image generation model by asking it for a pelican riding a bicycle. I found some of the results interesting, because they broke down the subjects to their basic shapes and reordered them geometrically instead of physically. It was a new perspective on how to think about a bicycle, and perhaps the AI's most authentic voice.
And I'm sure the AI was punished for it and trained towards more photorealism, because pastiche is supposed to be the default. But that, too, is a conscious choice made by the trainers and prompters.
Re: Nick Cave's thoughts on a ChatGPT poem (2023)
#80I'd recommend putting some information about you in your About page. It says that the site is for answering questions from your fans, but doesn't say who you are, what you do, or why you have fans. I can Google for "Nick Cave" but I can't tell which one you are.
why don’t you ask chatgpt about it