Writer's Block

Journalists see artificial intelligence bots like ChatGPT as a potential threat and an opportunity

- By Joe Pompeo

NICK CAVE, IN his idiosyncratic fan correspondence newsletter, recently critiqued a “song in the style of Nick Cave” created using ChatGPT. At a glance, the lyrics evoked the dark religious overtones that run through Cave’s oeuvre. Upon closer inspection, this ersatz Cave track was a low-rent simulacrum. “I understand that ChatGPT is in its infancy but perhaps that is the emerging horror of AI—that it will forever be in its infancy,” Cave wrote. “It can never be rolled back, or slowed down, as it moves us toward a utopian future, maybe, or our total destruction. Who can possibly say which? Judging by this song ‘in the style of Nick Cave’ though… The apocalypse is well on its way. This song sucks.”

Cave’s ChatGPT takedown hit a nerve online, which probably says less about the influence of an underground rock icon than it does about the sudden omnipresence of “generative artificial intelligence.” When ChatGPT debuted on November 30 from the San Francisco–based company OpenAI, it immediately stood out as the most frighteningly proficient entrant in a growing field of robotic writing tools. The resulting AI arms race now includes online search veterans Microsoft and Google, whose Bard chatbot got off to a rocky start when it botched a question during the company’s own product demo.