One afternoon an email arrives that threatens to end my career. Or at the very least, it makes me think seriously about what the end of my career might look like. It comes from a woman in Ely called Camden Woollven who has an interest in my restaurant reviews, a taste for the absurd and perhaps just a little too much time on her hands. Woollven works in the tech sector and has long been fascinated by OpenAI, a company founded in 2015, with investment from among others Elon Musk, to develop user-friendly applications involving artificial intelligence. In November last year, after $10bn worth of investment from Microsoft, OpenAI released ChatGPT3, a tool which has been trained on a vast array of data and allows us to commission articles and have human-like text conversations with a chatbot.

Opinion Quelle surprise – the actor who played Neo in The Matrix is wary of the burgeoning developments in machine learning and artificial intelligence. Speaking to tech glossy WIRED to promote his latest cinema outing, John Wick: Chapter 4, Keanu Reeves had some choice words for The Machines. During the conversation, Reeves, whose character in The Matrix ends up leading a resistance movement against AI-controlled robots that dominate humanity, was asked about a clause in his contract stipulating that his performances couldn't be digitally manipulated without his permission. He said this was because a film "in the early 2000s, or it might have been the '90s" added a tear to his face. "I was just like, 'Huh?!' It was like, I don't even have to be here."

Australian singer Nick Cave came out strongly against an AI-generated track "in the style of Nick Cave" sent to him in January by a fan. It is "bullshit," said Cave. Meanwhile, three female fine artists recently filed a class action lawsuit in the US against several AI companies, charging them with theft of creative ideas. There's no doubt that artificial intelligence is making its way into the art world. While the consequences remain uncertain at this early stage, artists are already concerned about the appropriation of their intellectual property.

It's safe to say ChatGPT is causing chaos. The AI chatbot from OpenAI has only been around for two months and has already amassed more than one million users. Launched on November 30, the chatbot has impressed -- and riled -- many different people. Chatter about the new tech has stretched far beyond the business world and even managed to provoke the disdain of award-winning songwriter Nick Cave. ChatGPT has already been compared with the launch of the iPhone and the crypto boom but while the tech's long-term influence remains to be seen, people are already finding creative ways to use it.

When I heard AI could write decent code, I'll admit it: I got a little shiver down my spine. Every day it seems like AI threatens a new occupation. SEO bloggers are quaking in their boots. Artists watch with horror as users flock to Midjourney's Discord server. I've always been a proponent of the argument that technology does not remove jobs, it adds them.

Nick Cave said something interesting last week. On this occasion, he was reacting to a question from a fan. Cave does this a lot on the Red Hand Files, his online repository where he answers any number and range of enquiries from devotees. This one was about artificial intelligence. There is an open access AI bot, ChatGPT, that some people have been playing with to see if it can create as well as a human. Mark, from Christchurch in New Zealand, fired in a load of Cave's lyrics, got a resulting set of lyrics and sent them to Cave asking for his reaction.

Universities should stop panicking and embrace students' use of artificial intelligence, AI experts say. South Australia's three main universities have updated their policies to allow the use of AI as long as it is disclosed. The advent of ChatGPT, a language processing chatbot that can produce very human-like words, sparked fears students would use it to write essays. Anti-plagiarism software wouldn't pick it up because ChatGPT isn't plagiarising anything, it's producing new work in response to prompts from users. Flinders University, the University of Adelaide and the University of South Australia have adjusted their policies to allow AI use under strict controls.

Nick Cave, the Bad Seeds frontman whose songs are tinged with a healthy dose of death, forlorn love, and religion, is no fan of ChatGPT's lyrical ambitions. The popular AI bot has drawn both praise and concern for its ability to generate conversational and nuanced text responses in simple, clean sentences. Since its release in November by the artificial intelligence lab OpenAI, ChatGPT has written everything from sitcom scripts to literature essays to, now, rather convincing rock songs. This has left people worried about the ramifications for industries across the creative spectrum, and one of those people is Cave himself. In his latest The Red Hand Files newsletter, Cave took on the subject of AI generated music.

But, I don't feel that when we listen to "Smells Like Teen Spirit" it is only the song that we are listening to. It feels to me, that what we are actually listening to is a withdrawn and alienated young man's journey out of the small American town of Aberdeen -- a young man who by any measure was a walking bundle of dysfunction and human limitation -- a young man who had the temerity to howl his particular pain into a microphone and in doing so, by way of the heavens, reach into the hearts of a generation. We are also listening to Iggy Pop walk across his audience's hands and smear himself in peanut butter whilst singing 1970. We are listening to Beethoven compose the Ninth Symphony while almost totally deaf. We are listening to Prince, that tiny cluster of purple atoms, singing in the pouring rain at the Super Bowl and blowing everyone's minds.

Nick Cave is a prolific Australian-born musician, author, composer, and screenwriter, among other things. He regularly answers fan questions at The Red Hand Files. Recently, Peter from Slovenia asked if AI will ever be able to write a good song. Cave's response has been republished in full, with permission, below. In Yuval Noah Harari's brilliant new book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, he writes that artificial intelligence, with its limitless potential and connectedness, will ultimately render many humans redundant in the work place.