The main problem with AI is not that it can or can't write poetry as well as humans. It's that it's the next step in a long process to divorce human experience from art so that we lose one more beautiful facet of human existence. And the reason why that's happening is because technology needs to take away the essence of human experience from production so that we can be more irrelevant and anonymous, which is essential to being cogs in the technological production machine.
AI poetry is indistinguishable from human poetry and is rated more favorably
111–120 of 217 posts
Re: AI poetry is indistinguishable from human poetry and is rated more favorably
#112"Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?" - Choruses from "The Rock"
Re: AI poetry is indistinguishable from human poetry and is rated more favorably
#113Re: AI poetry is indistinguishable from human poetry and is rated more favorably
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't see how the authors are dishonest about it, or that the rebuttal refutes any of the actual claims made. Suppose I prepared a glass of lemonade and purchased a bottle of vintage wine—one held in high regard by connoisseurs. Then I found a set of random bystanders and surveyed them on which drink they preferred, and they generally preferred the lemonade. Do you see how it would be dishonest of me to treat thi…
Sure - but it could still be pretty relevant if we want to ask about the future of beverage making and consumption, especially if new technology enables everybody to mass-produce lemonade (and similar sugary beverages) at home at minimal cost. I'm quite sympathetic to poetry - I actually wrote a blog post about this article last week https://gallant.dev/posts/whither-poetry/ But much like the "debate" between linguis…
Personally, I think this would be a sin. To call something art which has no depth. We have too many things that are shallow. I think this has been detrimental to us as a society. That we're so caught up with the next thing that our leisure is anything but. What is the point of this all if not to make life more enjoyable? How can we enjoy life if we cannot have a moment to appreciate it? If we treat time off as if it is a chore that we try to get done as fast as possible? If we cannot have time to contemplate it? A world without friction is dull. It's as if we envy the machines. Perhaps we should make the world less tiring, so we have the energy to be human.
Re: AI poetry is indistinguishable from human poetry and is rated more favorably
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
I honestly think that there might be some truth to that. If you look at Boston Dynamics, these are some of the very best roboticists on the planet, and it's taken decades to get robots that can walk almost as well as humans. I don't think it's incompetence on Boston Dynamics' end, I think it turns out that a lot of the stuff that's trivial and instinctual for us is actually ridiculously expensive to try and do on a c…
And those robots can paint like a good painter??
Probably not, but the difference is that we can generate art at the "pixel" level instead of the "hand" level. Not really a way to do that for most other stuff.
Re: AI poetry is indistinguishable from human poetry and is rated more favorably
#116The missing clause in the headline is: AI poetry is indistinguishable from human poetry and is rated more favorably ... by people who don't read much poetry.
Re: AI poetry is indistinguishable from human poetry and is rated more favorably
#117The missing clause in the headline is: AI poetry is indistinguishable from human poetry and is rated more favorably ... by people who don't read much poetry.
I would make the claim this paper shows the weakness of AI generated text. People are comfortable with familiar things. We know AI is sampling probability distributions in a latent space and by definition don't sample outside of them. Human poetry is creating net new things. Net new ideas which aren't just rehashes of past ideas. And this can definitely be uncomfortable for people, especially the layman.
In other words, general public is afraid of Jazz, they like pop music. But Jazz is where the new stuff is. AI is creating pop music, not Jazz.
Re: AI poetry is indistinguishable from human poetry and is rated more favorably
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll agree that AI has flooded the internet with low-effort slop. I feel like I can make a pretty strong argument that this isn't new, low-effort SEO spam has been a thing for almost as long as search engines have, but it does seem like ChatGPT (and its ilk) has brought that to 11. > just because something _can_ be automated doesn't mean it _should_ be. I guess agree to disagree on that. If a machine can do something…
> I guess agree to disagree on that. If a machine can do something better that a human, then the machine should do it so that the human can focus on stuff that machines can't do as easily Machines exist for the pleasure of humans, not the other way around This isn't some kind of "division of labour, we both have strengths and weaknesses and we should leverage them to fill pur roles best" situation Machines are tools…
> Machines exist for the pleasure of humans, not the other way around
No one's saying that. And a machine making a painting is never going to stop a human from doing so.
Re: AI poetry is indistinguishable from human poetry and is rated more favorably
#119Ernest 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…
You're making a load of generous claims for yourself without giving your thought process:
> The basic problem is that GPT generates easy poetry
> were comparing to difficult human poets
What's your qualitative process for measuring "easy" vs. "difficult" poetry?
> rating using a bunch of people who don't particuarly like poetry
How do you know these people don't like poetry? Maybe they don't seek it out, but certainly poetry is not just for poetry lovers. Good poetry speaks to anyone.
> the human Sylvia Plath is objectively better by any possible honest measure
Really? Whats your objective measure?
Re: AI poetry is indistinguishable from human poetry and is rated more favorably
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't agree that it's possible to describe a piece of poetry as "objectively" better or worse.
I would say Davis's definition of "objectively better" here is "nobody who reads these poems carefully could possibly conclude that this AI crap is better than Walt Whitman, the only explanation is Walt Whitman is so difficult that the raters didn't read it carefully." The Nature paper is making a bold and anti-humanist claim right in the headline, laundering bullshit with bad data, without considering how poorly-def…
>This data really is awful because the subjects aren't interested in reading difficult poetry.
If the results were the opposite, would the data still be awful?