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

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

#151
post #141
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 as…

if im reading the gp properly, theyre saying that an llm isnt capable od inventing new poetry forms. of its easy, can you provide some poetry forms youve coaxed sonnet to create, with some exemplary poems in the form?

I could program even a markov chain to generate a lot of odd unusual potentially interesting stuff, but no one would call any of it a new form of poetry, because establishing something like that requires social status, which robots don't have.

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

#152
post #22
post #6

The headline is misleading. The actual text says: > Notably, participants were more likely to judge AI-generated poems as human-authored than actual human-authored poems There is clearly a significant difference between AI generated poems and human generated poems. A random group of people probably do not read poetry. It would be be interesting to see what people who do read poetry regularly do on this. Also, which t…

As someone who reads poetry regularly and has played around a bit with AI-generated poems, AI poems can be quite impressive, but have a certain blandness to them. I can see them conforming very well to the average person's concept of what a poem is, whereas the human written poems might be less pleasingly perfect and average, more stylistically and structurally experimental etc. The LLM version is less likely to play…

I think when asked to rate poetry as human or ai authored that human poetry does look more like a random smattering of semi-related words which, I assume, is what folks think machine generated poetry would look like.

Perfect grammar and perfect meter doesn't read as AI to most folks yet.

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

#153
post #95

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…

If it was like other poetry generation programs of the 80’s and 90’s, it was generating a lot more crap than gold. People definitely were picking out the most cohesive examples, and probably even improving on them themselves.

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

#154
post #22
post #6

The headline is misleading. The actual text says: > Notably, participants were more likely to judge AI-generated poems as human-authored than actual human-authored poems There is clearly a significant difference between AI generated poems and human generated poems. A random group of people probably do not read poetry. It would be be interesting to see what people who do read poetry regularly do on this. Also, which t…

As someone who reads poetry regularly and has played around a bit with AI-generated poems, AI poems can be quite impressive, but have a certain blandness to them. I can see them conforming very well to the average person's concept of what a poem is, whereas the human written poems might be less pleasingly perfect and average, more stylistically and structurally experimental etc. The LLM version is less likely to play…

LLM’s also have no life experience, so they can wrote poems, but those poems aren’t communicating anything real. Poetry in the vein of Whitman and Dickinson and Plath is very much about a person expressing their very personal experiences and emotions.

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

#155
post #39

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…

Huh, that sounds a little like claiming that AI can draw pictures just as well as humans because they look realistic at a first glance. But not if you check whether the text, repetitive elements, and partially-occluded objects in the background look correct.

Or if you check that any pictures of people have the correct number of fingers, toes, arms, legs, or heads.

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

#156
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the logic of calling superhero movies lesser/unserious like this, it's very snobby. Movies and music are made to be entertaining, the avengers is more entertaining than your "arthouse cinematic masterpiece that nobody likes but it's just because they aren't smart enough to understand it". It's also lazy and ignorant to ignore the sheer manpower that goes into making a movie like that.

> your "arthouse cinematic masterpiece that nobody likes You're reading way too much into my comment. Any block buster from the 80/90s absolutely shits on 90% of block busters released today. I'm not talking about obscure 1950s czechoslovak cinema here... > ignore the sheet manpower that goes into making a movie like that. A lot of work doesn't make something good, especially when cgi quality actually gets worse year…

Well said. There's tons of blockbusters and other popular movies from the 80s/90s that were absolutely made for the "masses", but were genuinely great films, and far better than almost any blockbuster from the last 5-10 years, especially all the comic-book stuff. Alien(s), Back to the Future trilogy, Terminator 1/2, Ghostbusters, Beetlejuice, I could go on and on. And of course the LotR trilogy if you look at the early 2000s. Movies just aren't as innovative or risky these days; something as quirky as Ghostbusters wouldn't be made now (but Hollywood is happy to make remakes and sequels of that franchise now, 40 years later).

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

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> your "arthouse cinematic masterpiece that nobody likes You're reading way too much into my comment. Any block buster from the 80/90s absolutely shits on 90% of block busters released today. I'm not talking about obscure 1950s czechoslovak cinema here... > ignore the sheet manpower that goes into making a movie like that. A lot of work doesn't make something good, especially when cgi quality actually gets worse year…

Film is such a nascent art form. The 90s as “peak blockbuster action” is a valid stance on taste but hard to defend as superior to all that came after. Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight is leagues aways from the 90s Batman, as an auteur friendly and obvious comparison. Pixar another on the animation front. There have been great films made in every era, but the trend towards tighter writing, more legible and compelling…

Random thought outburst, feel free to downvote:

This reminded me so much of Spaceballs! And the yogurt merchandise towards the end! Such a great movie that has so many obvious "flaws" like the mirror under the speeder on the desert planet when they comb the desert. And yet I've actually watched that movie more often than even the actual real Star Wars movies (meaning the first three made - all of which are timeless awesomeness)

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

#159
post #122
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast majority of people seem to prefer Avengers 17 over any cinematic masterpiece, the latest drake song would be better rated than a Tchaikovsky... We should let them play and worship chat gpt if that's what they want to waste their time on

I don't understand the logic of calling superhero movies lesser/unserious like this, it's very snobby. Movies and music are made to be entertaining, the avengers is more entertaining than your "arthouse cinematic masterpiece that nobody likes but it's just because they aren't smart enough to understand it". It's also lazy and ignorant to ignore the sheer manpower that goes into making a movie like that.

what a ridiculous comparison. Of course a superhero movie is more entertaining than a film that is explicitly designed to avoid mass appeal.

The nuance is that movies today is not where the most creative talent is directed anymore. The shift started with prestige TV taking off in the 2000s, and episodic content on streaming services surpassing film as a mass-market artform in the 2010s, with the pandemic driving the nail in the coffin.

I loved the late 2000s / early 2010s superhero movies. Spiderman, The Dark Knight, Iron Man, etc. These were great films. Today, the MCU is just eating its own tail with the most bland, repetitive crap. It's all designed to incentivize the same die hard fans to keep forking over their hard-earned cash with all the cross-film teasers and the need to watch every film to understand all the references and moving parts. I understand the business model—it's actually the same as comic books now—because people don't casually go in to see random movies anymore, they do that at home on Netflix, so they have to target the repeat viewers. It's visually impressive, and the acting is good enough to keep a relatively large subset of the population coming back, but for someone like me who wants at least a little bit of novelty or creativity in the plot or characters, it's just so become so mind-bogglingly boring.

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

#160
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh, that sounds a little like claiming that AI can draw pictures just as well as humans because they look realistic at a first glance. But not if you check whether the text, repetitive elements, and partially-occluded objects in the background look correct.

The more basic problem is that their methodology would conclude Harry Potter is better than Ulysses, AC/DC is better than Carla Frey, etc etc. It is completely fine to enjoy "dumb" art - I like Marvel comics and a lot of the Disney-era Star Wars novels have been pretty fun. But using easiness and fun as a metric of quality is simply celebrating ignorance and laziness.

Why is Ulysses better than Harry Potter?
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