AI poetry is indistinguishable from human poetry and is rated more favorably

I bet AI can write better clickbait titles than human editors.

Eventually for various definitions of eventually (most of which denote a time period longer than your life).

Longer, if they keep diluting the term and selling shit labeled as AI.

> Despite this success, evidence about non-experts’ ability to distinguish AI-generated poetry has been mixed. Non-experts in poetry may use different cues, and be less familiar with the structural requirements of rhyme and meter, than experts in poetry or poetry generation. Gunser and colleagues14 and Rahmeh15 find that human-written poems are evaluated more positively than AI-generated poems. Köbis and Mossink16 finds that when a human chooses the best AI-generated poem (“human-in-the-loop”) participants cannot distinguish AI-generated poems from human-written poems, but when an AI-generated poem is chosen at random (“human-out-of-the-loop”), participants are able to distinguish AI-generated from human-written poems.

This is a huge difference. Writing is a two-step process: idea generation, and selection. The first part is similar to what a randomized algorithm or an LLM might do, in smaller chunks (and indeed, the history of aleatoric processes in creative endeavors is long -- see Oulipo for one example in literature.)

The second step -- selection -- is the heart of creativity. It's about taste. Knowing what is and isn't "good."

When you consider the creative processes of Dada, Duchamp, Brian Eno -- I think it becomes clear that this automation of creative generation is a continuation of existing trends rather than a sudden disruption.

If an LLM were able to, on its own, generate and select poems, independently developing a new style of poetry that resonated with readers -- that would be something else entirely.

Poetry, like humor, involves the use of the reader's expectations, but is typically most effective when subverting those expectations.

There's a lot of bad poetry in the world that just follows readers' expectations. I should know, I've written some of it. Unfortunately, I'd suspect that most readers' understanding of poetry lacks that crucial element of subversion, and so an LLM – which mostly just spits out the most-probable, most-expected next token – looks like what people think poetry is.

An LLM would not have created the curtal sonnet form, because it would've been too busy following the rules of a Shakespearean or Petrarchan sonnet. Similarly, an LLM wouldn't create something that intentionally breaks the pattern of a form in order to convey a sense of brokenness or out-of-place-ness, because it's too locked in on the most-common-denominator from previous inputs. And yet, many of the most powerful works I've read are the ones that can convey a disjointed feeling on purpose – something an LLM is specifically geared not to do.

Poetry aims for the heart, and catches the mind along the way. An LLM does not have the requisite complex emotional intelligence, and is indeed a pretty poor simulation of emotional intelligence.

Consider Auden's Epitaph on a Tyrant, which is powerful because it is so suddenly shocking, as it describes something that sounds perhaps like an artist or author, until it very suddenly doesn't, on the last line:

    Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
    and the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
    he knew human folly like the back of his hand,
    and was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
    when he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
    and when he cried the little children died in the streets.

Maybe my logic is choppy but I'm unconvinced that it is useful to use (inexperienced) popular sentiment as a marker of some kind of reference for cultural quality here. The average person has read at most 100 poems; people who really like poetry will be reading quite a bit more, and that experience has relevance in a context such as this. I'm more curious what happens when we look at specifically those humans who engage in substantial, regular engagement with a given artform.

The study is interesting but that the general public enjoy the most statistically calculated, 50% grey inoffensive, unchallenging & formulaic poetry isn't too novel -- I don't much read poetry and I'm sure I'd be voting for the AI also.