Stephen Fry Reads Nick Cave’s Stirring Letter About ChatGPT And Human Creativity

Dear Leon and Charlie,

In the story of the creation, God made 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 amount of effort on God’s part and that some sort of artistic struggle had taken place. 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 notion of creative struggle that our endeavors animate and nurture our lives, giving them depth and meaning. It rejects that there is a collective essential and unconscious human Spirit underpinning our existence, connecting us all through our mutual striving.

ChatGPT is fast-tracking the commodification of the human Spirit by mechanizing the imagination. It renders our participation in the Act of Creation as valueless and unnecessary. That songwriter you were talking to, Leon, who is using ChatGPT to write his lyrics because it is faster and easier is participating in the erosion of the world’s soul and the Spirit of humanity itself and, to put it politely, should f*cking desist if he wants to continue calling himself a songwriter.

ChatGPT’s intent is to eliminate the process of creation and its attendant challenges, viewing it as nothing more than a time-wasting inconvenience that stands in the way of the commodity itself. Why strive?, it contends. Why bother with the artistic process and its accompanying trials? Why shouldn’t we make it faster and easier?

It was good because it required something of His own self, and His struggle imbued Creation with a moral imperative – in short, love.

Charlie, even though the creative act requires considerable effort, in the end, you will be contributing to the vast network of love that supports human existence. 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 demoralization, ChatGPT. As humans, we so often feel helpless in our own smallness, yet still, we find the resilience to do and make beautiful things, and this is where the meaning of life resides. Nature reminds us of this constantly. The world is often cast as a purely malignant place, but still, the joy of creation exerts itself, and as the sun rises upon the struggle of the day, the Great Crested Grebe dances upon the water.  It is our striving that becomes the very essence of meaning. This impulse, this creative dance that is now being so cynically undermined, must be defended at all costs, and just as we would fight any existential evil, we should fight it tooth and nail, for we are fighting for the very soul of the world.

Love,

Nick