Nick Cave has renewed his criticism of AI song generators, arguing that they remove human experience from music-making. His comments appear in the November 2026 issue 381 of “The Red Hand Files” and attracted renewed coverage on 10–11 November.
The musician directly names Suno. In his view, songs cannot be separated from their creators’ lives and struggles; generating them instantly raises questions about the meaning of creation itself.
A criticism of replacing the creator
Cave does not claim to know AI’s ultimate consequences for society. His objection centres on music generators and the prospect of treating the artist as unnecessary.
His relationship with the technology nevertheless has a nuance. He previously praised Andrew Dominik’s video marking the 40th anniversary of “Tupelo”, which used AI to animate archival photographs, acknowledging that it had softened his attitude towards AI as an artistic tool.
The contrast suggests a distinction between technology used by an author and a system producing in their place. For the music industry, the debate also asks how much audiences value the human origins of a work.
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