Nick Cave hasn’t always held artificial intelligence in the highest regard. Back in 2023, a fan sent him a song that ChatGPT had generated “in the style of Nick Cave,” to which the musician bluntly responded: “The apocalypse is well on its way.”
But Cave’s opinion has changed somewhat after the filmmaker Andrew Dominik used AI to create a new music video for “Tupelo” on the occasion of the song’s 40th anniversary. “As I watched Andrew’s surreal little film, I felt my view of AI as an artistic device soften,” Cave wrote on his “Red Hand Files” site in response to a fan question. “To some extent, my mind was changed. ‘It’s a tool, like any other,’ said Andrew.”
Cave and the Bad Seeds released “Tupelo” as their second single in 1985 and it’s been a staple of his live sets ever since. The song uses John Lee Hooker’s track of the same name, about a devastating flood in Tupelo, as a jumping off point for an apocryphal tale about Elvis Presley’s birth in the same Mississippi city.
Dominik — who’s directed such films as The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Blonde, and Cave’s documentary, One More Time With Feeling — leans into the Elvis mythos in the video. The clip takes a bunch of old still photos of the King and uses AI to animate them.
Or as Dominik put it, according to Cave, “I’ve taken a series of still archival images and brought them to life using AI.”
Cave said he wasn’t aware that Dominik was working on the project until he shared the final cut. And the musician admitted he was skeptical when the filmmaker first described video due to his previous reservations about AI.
Cave stated he’s still concerned about “writers using ChatGPT and other language models to do their creative work,” as well as “song-generating platforms that reduce music to a mere commodity, by eliminating the artistic process and its attendant struggles entirely.”
Still, Cave said Dominik encouraged him to “suspend [his] fucking prejudices and take a look.” And after watching his “Tupelo” visual a few times, he admitted that he and his wife, Susie, were surprised at how much they liked it.
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“[W]e found it to be an extraordinarily profound interpretation of the song — a soulful, moving, and entirely original retelling of ‘Tupelo’, rich in mythos and a touching tribute to the great Elvis Presley, as well as to the song itself,” Cave wrote. “The AI-animated photographs of Elvis had an uncanny quality, as if he had been raised from the dead, and the crucifixion-resurrection images at the end were both shocking and deeply affecting. Susie and I were blown away.”
Cave ended his letter by ruminating on the importance of being able to “change one’s mind,” calling it “the very definition of strength.” He continued, “We pursue the truth wherever it may lead, remaining flexible and humble enough to adjust our views as new evidence emerges, regardless of how uncomfortable that may feel. It is ultimately a form of resilience, not a sign of weakness. Rigidity breaks; flexibility endures.”
