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

nature.com

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

#91

Post by h0p3 »

sourcepluck wrote: post #73

Could someone link me to a poem that an LLM did that they personally find in some way remarkable or beautiful or moving? Something with a bit of truth and/or beauty in it? Not something that "rhymes" or has a rough poetic structure. I have only seen complete and utter garbage from LLMs in the poetry realm, not just a bit bad, but jarring and unfeeling. Which is fine, I don't hold it against them personally , ya know.…

I have no idea if you will care for it, but my family and I appreciated what ClosedAI's CustomGPT RAG (and my LLMpal) generated. This is slow loading (the vector database was built from this one big html file), and you can scroll down to see it: https://h0p3.nekoweb.org/#2024.11.20%20-%20Carpe%20Tempus%20...

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

#92

Post by maldusiecle »

Basically an uninteresting conclusion. Of course a "non-expert" reader isn't going to be able to distinguish between AI and Walt Whitman--a "non-expert" reader likely won't even know who Walt Whitman is. "Expertise" is needed to even make the question meaningful.

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

#93

Post by npinsker »

atomsatomsatoms wrote: post #2

Are we just deluding ourselves by thinking this won't happen in every single domain of human endeavor?

I can't think of a single area, other than a subset of games, where domain experts have been outclassed by AI.

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

#94

Post by npinsker »

hgomersall wrote: post #41
ubertaco wrote: post #18

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 mos…

It can be obvious and go to the heart. I'm not sure Wilfred Owen's Dulce et decorum est is anything other than straight down the line, but it made me cry when I first read it. That said, maybe the subversion is in how the reality is contrasted with the marketing.

I see 'subversion' as more broad. In good poetry, subversion is constantly happening at a micro level, through playing with meaning, meter, word choice. I think it's very easy to identify AI-generated poetry because it lacks any of that -- but on the flip side, if you don't understand the rules, you don't understand how to subvert them.

Even in Dulce et decorum est -- though the meaning's straightforward, there are plenty of small, subversive (and pretty) ideas in the meter. For example, the line "He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning" is an unexpected, disruptive staccato that really sounds like guttering, choking, drowning. It's a beautiful poem and is overflowing with such examples.

(I think this applies to art as a whole, not just poetry.)

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

#95

Post by mreid »

The program Racter (which, from what I understand, was a basic MDP) was generating poetry in the 1980s that was published, read, criticized, and presented in museums: https://www.101bananas.com/poems/racter.html

I remember this as one of its poems was used on on the t-shirts of the computing social club that I was part of as a postgrad student:

  More than iron
  More than lead
  More than gold I need electricity
  I need it more than I need lamb or pork or lettuce or cucumber
  I need it for my dreams

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

#96

Post by [deleted] »

salmonfamine wrote: post #16

> 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 fi…

[deleted]

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

#97

Post by ilaksh »

ubertaco wrote: post #18

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 mos…

One could literally take Claude 3.5 Sonnet New or o1-preview and disprove this in an hour or two just by prompting the AI to try to exhibit the type of poetry you want and then maybe asking it to do a little bit of automated critique and refinement.

You can also experiment with having a higher temperature, (maybe just for the first draft).

You claim that LLMs can't make poetry like that. I bet they can if you just ask them to.

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

#98

Post by lukev »

The use of non-experts as judges renders this meaningless.

Imagine an algorithm that drew random shapes. Then ask people who've never engaged with art theory or history to compare its output with what they see in a modern art museum. You'd get results similar to this.

Many forms of art are actually quite inaccessible to novices. What poets see in poems or composers hears in compositions is nothing like what someone from the outside sees or hears. It's a language of its own and if you don't speak the language, you simply won't get it.

This is a statement of fact, I'm not judging if its good or bad or what the layman's opinion is actually worth. But it is empirically how communities of artists operate.

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

#99

Post by HDThoreaun »

aithrowawaycomm wrote: post #34

Ernest Davis has an outstanding and definitive rebuttal of these claims: https://cs.nyu.edu/~davise/papers/GPT-Poetry.pdf The basic problem is that GPT generates easy poetry, and the authors were comparing to difficult human poets like Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, and rating using a bunch of people who don't particuarly like poetry. If you actually do like poetry, comparing PlathGPT to Sylvia Plath is so offensi…

> the human Sylvia Plath is objectively better by any possible honest measure.

Except for arguably the most important one, creating something that people enjoy. Just because you dont like it doesnt make it worthless. I guess the actual question is do the raters actually get any enjoyment out of the ai poem or do they just intensely dislike both?

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

#100

Post by EMIRELADERO »

lukev wrote: post #98

The use of non-experts as judges renders this meaningless. Imagine an algorithm that drew random shapes. Then ask people who've never engaged with art theory or history to compare its output with what they see in a modern art museum. You'd get results similar to this. Many forms of art are actually quite inaccessible to novices. What poets see in poems or composers hears in compositions is nothing like what someone f…

The thing is that, for most of society, art exists to serve a utilitarian purpose (make us feel good/bad/inspired/destroyed/whatever other influence). Essentially just to induce a "vibe". Anything other than what most people intuitively feel after consuming it is secondary and, frankly, unimportant in the grand scheme of things.
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