Nick Cave calls Suno 'the Great Cancellator' in Red Hand Files #381, and says song generators 'mock creation itself'

Nick Cave has a new name for Suno: “the Great Cancellator”.

He used it in Issue #381 of The Red Hand Files, the newsletter where he answers fans’ questions, on November 9, 2026. Cave wrote that Suno “produces an imitation of the soul – a song – in fifteen seconds flat”, and that song generators “mock creation itself”.

Australia’s theMusic picked up the letter the next day.

What Nick Cave wrote about Suno in Red Hand Files #381

Two fans wrote in. Nuno from Porto asked whether Cave still thinks you can’t separate the art from the artist. Catherine from Bristol had just watched a documentary on AI and asked if he’s a “doomer or boomer”.

Cave answered both in one letter. On Nuno’s question, his view hadn’t moved: art and artist are “as inseparable as the waves from the sea they rise from”, and “for me, the matter was settled.”

Then he wrote “Until now”, and turned to song generators. This is the paragraph:

Suno, he wrote, “has never loved or laughed or grieved”, and what it makes is “an affront to any songwriter who has lived and struggled in this world and earned the right to create a song.”

So why “Cancellator”? The answer is in the last line of the letter.

Why Nick Cave calls Suno “the Great Cancellator”

Nuno’s question was about problematic artists, the kind people try to cancel. Cave’s point is that a song generator takes the artist out of the song completely: “the artist – that flawed, messy, broken, woeful, joyful problem – can be removed from the equation altogether, like so much dross.”

He closed the letter on the people who want problematic artists gone: “For those eager to rid the world of problematic artists – for these censorious forces remain persistent – it is surely cause for celebration, as these platforms promise to rid the world of artists altogether.”

On AI in general, Cave told Catherine he doesn’t know which way it goes. Song generators are where he draws his line:

“

They mock creation itself by rendering humanity unnecessary, taking the fruits of human striving and reducing them to mere products.

It isn’t the first time Cave has written about AI and songs, and his position has moved around over the last 3 years.

What Nick Cave has said about AI songwriting since 2023

Here is how his comments have gone, in order:

• January 2023: a fan named Mark sent him a ChatGPT song “in the style of Nick Cave”. In Issue #218, Cave called it “a grotesque mockery of what it is to be human”.
• August 2024: he told The Australian that Suno was “utterly banal” with “no soul or spirit”, and said “I find it all unbelievably disturbing,” as Euronews reported.
• July 2025: director Andrew Dominik made a video for “Tupelo” with AI-animated photos of Elvis Presley, for the song’s 40th anniversary. Cave wrote that watching it, he felt his “view of AI as an artistic device soften”, mxdwn reported.
• November 2026: Issue #381 names one platform, Suno, and goes after song generators specifically.

His own songs are part of the training-data fight too. In June 2026, Cave was among the Australian artists reported to have songs in the datasets The Atlantic made searchable, which led to an open letter from Australia’s music industry. In October, ICMP showed Google’s Gemini reproducing his lyrics.

Suno, meanwhile, has a busy month in court. On November 6, Elvis Presley Enterprises and Eminem’s publisher Eight Mile Style sued Suno in 2 separate cases. A few days earlier, Suno asked a Boston court to throw out Jason Isbell’s identity lawsuit, arguing that using an artist’s name to describe a style of music is protected by the First Amendment.