Nick Cave - Song Lyrics

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Nick Cave - Song Lyrics

Here are two song lyrics. One is written by a human being, the other by a chatbot, or artificial intelligence.

Which is which? 

And what evidence do you have for your choice?

(assignment 2 in your Reader)

On what evidence do you base your choice?

Lyric 1 was written by a chatbot
(artificial intelligence)

TRUE

FALSE

Some suggestions:

Cliches versus direct phrasing ... In the ChatGPT text, consider phrases like "siren's song", "dance with the devil", "fire of hell" - these have all been used many times, and so have been chosen because they are collocations which are 'poetic' and 'profound'. But do they sound fresh, or do they say anything personal or new?

 

The Nick Cave text uses phrasing which is unpretentious and direct - "I hold this letter"; "go get her / go tell her" - and as such, they may be seen as lacking meaning, but their meaning is made more powerful as we understand the wider context of the broken relationship. In addition, there are phrases which are qualified - "a kind of prayer" indicates thought about what exact meaning is meant by the word, and so the author is questioning the choice of language, not providing language automatically ... and this results in a matrix of overlapping words: "plea" + "petition" + "prayer" which invites the reader to think about the precise nature of the experience.

Some suggestions:

Schematic ideas versus experience ... The ChatGPT text is based on a pattern of opposed ideas ("hunter/prey"; "devil/savior") - which can be seen as a simplistic way of creating apparently intriguing paradoxes. But what do these contrasts actually mean? Is there any explanation, in normal human terms, of how one can be both sinner and saint?

The Nick Cave text is based on evoking a specific human experience: the recognisable experience of loss and regret. The ideas and details are tied together by a clear story which explains the choices: we can empathise with the situation and so understand what the details mean - whereas with the strange paradoxes of the ChatGPT text, one needs some sort of decoding.

Some suggestions:

Symbols versus the concrete ... Almost all of the key words in the ChatGPT text are 'symbolic': they are chosen to evoke black and white ideas of 'good/bad' - e.g. "sinner/saint"; 'darkness/light". This suggests that the meaning of the text, whatever that might be, is simply to evoke surprise by putting together words which are normally considered contradictory. Is this, one wonders, how the algorithm that constructed the text was organised? Just find opposites, and put them together in grammatically correct ways?

The Nick Cave text is based on very simple real-life images which we can picture, such as "the cold, white envelope" (and notice the surprising observation of 'cold' which conveys real remembered experience). There is also the precisely-chosen background - "The sky hangs heavy with rain" and " A wicked wind whips up the hill ". These concrete details refer to shared human experience, and acquire meaning because they are metaphorical of the writer's emotions. They may have been used in similar ways in other writing, and so have a common meaning, but they are so specific that they evoke empathy between (human) writer and (human) reader. They have been chosen because they can be felt, not simply interpreted according to some abstract scheme of good/bad.

Some suggestions:

Rigid rhyme scheme versus flexible rhyme scheme ... The ChatGPT text has a pretty consistent and neat rhyme scheme, which ends up sounding rather mechanical, even forced.

This is in contrast to the Nick Cave text, where there is a rhyme scheme which is not emphasised, and even wobbles and varies at times. This inconsistency suggests that 'neat' rhymes were given less priority than the need to express emotions appropriately, even if this disrupts the 'correct' pattern.

(And incidentally, the Nick Cave text implies and responds to the music which actually accompanies it, with variations and developments - the ChatGPT text suggests a simple, repetitive pattern of music... even if this was ever a factor in the process of composing the text.)

A New Zealander called Mark asked ChatGPT to ‘write a song in the style of Nick Cave’ and sent what it produced to Nick Cave himself, asking for a reaction.

Here is what Nick Cave replied.

read Nick's reply in the reader and answer the questions.