Nick Cave has shifted his stance on AI after filmmaker Andrew Dominik created a new music video for “Tupelo” using AI technology to animate archival photographs of Elvis Presley.
The Australian musician previously held strong reservations about AI in creative contexts. In 2023, when a fan shared a ChatGPT-generated song “in the style of Nick Cave,” he responded with characteristic bluntness, declaring “The apocalypse is well on its way.”
However, Cave’s perspective has evolved following Dominik’s work on the “Tupelo” video, created to mark the song’s 40th anniversary. Writing on his Red Hand Files site, Cave admitted his views on AI as an artistic device had changed after watching the filmmaker’s interpretation.
“As I watched Andrew’s surreal little film, I felt my view of AI as an artistic device soften,” Cave wrote in response to a fan question. “To some extent, my mind was changed. ‘It’s a tool, like any other,’ said Andrew.”
The collaboration emerged without Cave’s initial knowledge. Dominik completed the video before sharing it with the musician, who remained sceptical when the filmmaker first described the project. The director had taken still archival images of Elvis and used AI to bring them to life, creating what Cave described as an “uncanny quality, as if he had been raised from the dead.”
Released as the second single by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds in 1985, “Tupelo” draws inspiration from John Lee Hooker’s track about a devastating flood in Tupelo, Mississippi. Cave’s version weaves an apocryphal tale around Elvis Presley’s birth in the same city, making Dominik’s Elvis-focused visual treatment particularly resonant.
The filmmaker, known for directing The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Blonde, and Cave’s documentary One More Time with Feeling, encouraged the musician to “suspend [his] fucking prejudices and take a look.”
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After multiple viewings with his wife Susie, Cave found himself genuinely impressed by the result. He described it as “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.”
The video’s crucifixion-resurrection imagery particularly affected the couple, with Cave noting these sequences were “both shocking and deeply affecting.”
Despite this newfound appreciation for AI in specific artistic contexts, Cave maintains concerns about broader applications of the technology. He remains troubled by “writers using ChatGPT and other language models to do their creative work” and “song-generating platforms that reduce music to a mere commodity, by eliminating the artistic process and its attendant struggles entirely.”
Cave concluded his reflection by emphasising the importance of intellectual flexibility, describing the ability to change one’s mind as “the very definition of strength” and “ultimately a form of resilience, not a sign of weakness.”
