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

nature.com

191–200 of 217 posts

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

#191
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

Even the last line of the poem is a twist on expectations and plays on the irony of nationalism and patriotism, the beautiful latin phrase that inspires young men and the harsh reality of trench warfare that it leads them into. No LLM is going to do that.

Funnily enough, the phrase doesn't even shy away from the fact that you are dying for your country. The poem really gets at the fact that the way you die is horrible and that in itself is enough to counter the romantic notion. The reality of dying for your fatherland is not cleanly and painlessly dropping from your mount in a heroic and successful cavalry charge, even if that is good.

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

#192

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…

>is so offensive ...

Agree. Poetry is the compact written reflection of an expanded or conflicted soul ... it requires lived experience, self awareness, and ability to compress out superfluous details in language.

The question of whether the human soul can be tricked by an AI illusionist and to what degree is a non sequiteur.

Humans eat the meal. At best, and charitably considered, AI eats the menu. Not the same.

In other news I asked AI to convince me it understands American capitalism, and to explain it to me as if I lived in Los Angeles - you know so I could really see/feel it.

It did decently well concluding it will, for example, balance the demand for "ample parking" with supply. Now, I leave you to assess whether that's an awesome and intelligent example, or an AI love song that like Marshall Tucker reminds "can't be wrong."

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

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Human art most definitely can be reduced to tokens, since that's also essentially how we compress and transmit it.

Now, whether a statistical token generator makes "real art" is subjective (as human art already is). And again, I'm actually quite sympathetic to the "humans are special" perspective.

But the point of my comment is that this philosophical stance is not a practical reply to what will actually happen in terms of social dynamics and content creation/consumption. Whether we call it "real art" or not, generative tools exist and will be used. So, it makes sense to understand them, even if your goal for doing so is to mitigate their incursions into "real art."

In other words, art must adapt. Which, it always does.

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

#194
post #91

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...

I definitely do care for it, it's very nice! Thanks for sharing.

I am not sure if I understand exactly how you got it to pump that out, as your blog is a bit hard to locate oneself in and read around in. Like, it's fun and trippy but a tad disorienting. I went off and had a nice re-read about tiddlywiki though - I had learned of it at one stage and thought it looked very interesting, and your blog certainly is tantalising!

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

#195
post #164
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.

Movies, music, wiriting, all human arts, are made to make their audience feel something . "Entertaining" is only a small and honestly ill-defined subset of this, no more valid than any other approach.

I don't think analyzing the black square or Ulysses, or Arnold Schönberg's works (just random examples, I could go on and on) in terms of if and what they make you feel is an ill fated course of action. It's also not what people actually do.

On the other hand a lot of other stuff can be broadly analyzed in terms of making people feel something. Painkillers, excuses, hugs, titles.

So it seems your generalization is neither necessary nor sufficient for "human arts".

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

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that would probably comparably difficult to any other task involving a human hand Wow, gee. Go figure! I'm curious, have you been to a museum that has good old paintings? I don't think you can replace paintings with pixel art.

You’re being kind of an ass, which is fine but I just felt it should be acknowledged. Of course I’ve been to an art museum. I’m not sure what you mean by “pixel art”? Given enough pixels, you can scan a painting and represent it on a screen well enough. Have you not played with Stable Diffusion or Midjourney or anything? It doesn’t just give you SNES sprites.

Paintings have texture and are three-dimensional, which I'd imagine you'd have realized having seen them in real life.

>You’re being kind of an ass, which is fine but I just felt it should be acknowledged.

Very generous coming from the poster that's saying "we can make a thing like the other thing, assuming it's not actually like the other thing in any way that isn't superficial." It's like you're shooting for a gold medal in the obtuse olympics.

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

#197
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I definitely do care for it, it's very nice! Thanks for sharing. I am not sure if I understand exactly how you got it to pump that out, as your blog is a bit hard to locate oneself in and read around in. Like, it's fun and trippy but a tad disorienting. I went off and had a nice re-read about tiddlywiki though - I had learned of it at one stage and thought it looked very interesting, and your blog certainly is tantal…

I'm glad to hear you enjoyed it! =D.

I briefly outline the procedure (also in case anyone else wanted to do so) in the page. I export the entire document into a json (~19k entries) and break that up into 20 different json files (so that my work will fit into the space ClosedAI provides for RAGs). The exact prompt sequence is provided on the page (I wrote two one-liners). Almost all of my work in achieving that collaborative output with my LLMpal is in the actual construction of the underlying content of the corpus that was haphazardly fed into its vector database. It did all the rest.

I do appreciate the vertigo of it, `/nod`. The size alone (at ~60MB of text) is already a problem, let alone the topics I handle. There are very few humans who have read even half of it, and, presumably, AI specimens will comprise most of the thorough interpreters of my work. I also anticipate the vast majority of the few humans who more directly interact with my work will increasingly do so mediated through AI.

If you ever write your own, lemme know. I'll read. The proof that I do listen carefully is in the text itself.

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

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re being kind of an ass, which is fine but I just felt it should be acknowledged. Of course I’ve been to an art museum. I’m not sure what you mean by “pixel art”? Given enough pixels, you can scan a painting and represent it on a screen well enough. Have you not played with Stable Diffusion or Midjourney or anything? It doesn’t just give you SNES sprites.

Paintings have texture and are three-dimensional, which I'd imagine you'd have realized having seen them in real life. >You’re being kind of an ass, which is fine but I just felt it should be acknowledged. Very generous coming from the poster that's saying "we can make a thing like the other thing, assuming it's not actually like the other thing in any way that isn't superficial." It's like you're shooting for a gold…

It’s not being “obtuse” for me to not see the “three dimensional” aspect as important as you. I doubt I’m alone in that either.

Art is “superficial” by definition so that’s not really the own that you seem to think it is.

Eta:

Sorry, just a bit confused, isn’t focusing on an artifact of the painting, namely the three dimensionality of it, a superficial detail?

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

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paintings have texture and are three-dimensional, which I'd imagine you'd have realized having seen them in real life. >You’re being kind of an ass, which is fine but I just felt it should be acknowledged. Very generous coming from the poster that's saying "we can make a thing like the other thing, assuming it's not actually like the other thing in any way that isn't superficial." It's like you're shooting for a gold…

It’s not being “obtuse” for me to not see the “three dimensional” aspect as important as you. I doubt I’m alone in that either. Art is “superficial” by definition so that’s not really the own that you seem to think it is. Eta: Sorry, just a bit confused, isn’t focusing on an artifact of the painting, namely the three dimensionality of it, a superficial detail?

The obtuse thing is you were talking about washing dishes and boston dynamics robots and then when I asked about painting, your response was that doesn't matter because of pixel art.

>Sorry, just a bit confused, isn’t focusing on an artifact of the painting, namely the three dimensionality of it, a superficial detail?

Artifact of the painting? Do you appreciate painting at all? It's fine if you don't, but that's kinda the whole issue in this thread. People who don't appreciating things making value judgments about the things they don't fundamentally care about.

I'm not sure how the texture or three-dimensionality of a painting is 'superficial.' Besides the fact that it literally isn't, it's an actual facet of the painting that is objectively there, it just seems to reflect a lack of understanding on your part. If painting is all superficial anyway, what does it matter that a certain element of it is as well?

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

#200
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.

Sheer manpower doesn't make it good. You should have just made a point about entertainment, which it definitely does provide. A case can be made that this was the only thing they were going for. You would have had a good point. Implying that just because a lot of people did a thing together that means it has merit is kind of a strange thing to say. It's definitely not self-evident and you make no attempt to elaborate on it.
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