AI poetry is indistinguishable from human poetry and is rated more favorably • Hacker News Board

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

#211

Post by NeutralCrane » Thu, Dec 05, 2024, 1:35 PM UTC

bccdee wrote: post #148

pessimizer wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Suppose I prepared a glass of lemonade and purchased a bottle of vintage wine—one held in high regard by connoisseurs. I would tell you that there have been results about the blind testing of wines held in high regard by connoisseurs that might make you not want to choose that for a comparison.

The blind tasting studies prove that connoisseurs can't discern the price of wine by taste. They can tell whether or not they like it perfectly well. A good bottle, not an expensive one.

Does this not undermine the premise of the original metaphor (i.e. a glass of lemonade is somehow inferior to a fine wine)? Seems like a lot of goal post shifting.

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

#212

Post by NeutralCrane » Thu, Dec 05, 2024, 1:38 PM UTC

8note wrote: post #141

ilaksh wrote: 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?

If only new forms of poetry are valid, doesn’t that invalidate 99.9% of poetry created by human beings?

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

#213

Post by godelski » Thu, Dec 05, 2024, 9:34 PM UTC

jaredklewis wrote: post #133

n4r9 wrote: 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.

It sounds different to me. Poetry is for the enjoyment and enlightenment of the reader. Who reads poems? The question is a little vague. Who reads poems on a birthday card? Everyone. In a children's book? Parents and children. But this study focuses on literary poems specifically, using works by literary heavy weights like Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickinson, Whitman, Byron, Ginsberg, and so on. So the question is who re…

  > Poetry is for the enjoyment and enlightenment of the reader.

Is it?

  If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?
  - Emily Dickinson

Clearly Dickinson believes it is far more than what’s at the surface. It is more than the rhyme and rhythm. They add to the effect, but they are not necessary conditions. It’s generally agreed upon that art is defined by making you feel.

Lay people are often uninterested in poetry because they didn’t study it. There’s nothing wrong with that. Many are put off by elitists, garbage, and the difficulty to parse. But this is true for any subject matter, we see similarities in programming and in science. You see even many from there point to the surface and dismiss despite the importance being underneath. But it also doesn’t have to be for everyone. It’s not about being smart or dumb either, as most people happily get into the depths of the subjects they enjoy. Be it a child’s obsession with dinosaurs, a teen’s obsession in videogames, or an elite academic. We all have that capacity but there are always hurdles to entry and sometimes the point is to stumble. When it is, removing the hurdles harms the domain, even though it’s almost always done with the best of intentions. Eventually you gotta touch the stove top to learn it’s hot

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

#214

Post by bccdee » Fri, Dec 06, 2024, 6:12 PM UTC

NeutralCrane wrote: post #211

bccdee wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The blind tasting studies prove that connoisseurs can't discern the price of wine by taste. They can tell whether or not they like it perfectly well. A good bottle, not an expensive one.

Does this not undermine the premise of the original metaphor (i.e. a glass of lemonade is somehow inferior to a fine wine)? Seems like a lot of goal post shifting.

A glass of lemonade is not inferior. It's a different thing entirely. You can compare good lemonade to bad lemonade, or good wine to bad wine, but asking a group of people who prefer lemonade to compare a glass of lemonade with a glass of wine tells you nothing about the quality of the lemonade or wine in question.

The human poets in the test wrote high-brow poetry, the AI generated low-brow poetry, and the audience of laypeople who were surveyed preferred the low-brow poetry. There's nothing wrong with a straightforward rhyme scheme or anything—it's not bad to be low-brow—but it's not a useful comparison.

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

#215

Post by musicale » Sat, Dec 07, 2024, 4:33 AM UTC

rendaw wrote: post #160

aithrowawaycomm wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Apples are better than oranges. "An orange a day keeps the doctor away?" I don't think so. Newton's orange? Nope. Orange may be the surprisingly successful remains of a former telecom monopoly, but Apple is the most valuable company on the planet.

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

#216

Post by LargoLasskhyfv » Sat, Dec 07, 2024, 9:40 AM UTC

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #181

guappa wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don't know if you refer to the original play or the italian film about it.

Yes you do: Oedipus Rex, also known by its Greek title, Oedipus Tyrannus (Ancient Greek: Οἰδίπους Τύραννος, pronounced [oidípuːs týrannos]), or Oedipus the King, is an Athenian tragedy by Sophocles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oedipus_Rex And I'm perfectly aware that you're trying, hard, to make some sarcastic point, but that's what everybody in the English-speaking world calls it. Or did you want to talk about it…

Uhm. Sorry to bother you with something totally off-topic.

I have an almost lifelong itch, which I couldn't successfully scratch so far.

It's about the meaning of this surename: Κούβελας

Usually it is transcribed in English as Kouvelas, in German as Kouwelas, and in French it can be Couvelas, and AFAIK it is pronounced something like Koo-well-as(s) in Greek.

Does it have any 'speaking'/describing meaning, like Miller, Carpenter, Fisher, Baker and so on, or is it something like 'from a place called this', maybe distorted over generations?

I only get nothing from sites like this https://forebears.io/surnames/kouvelas , and the few people with Greek heritage I knew couldn't tell me either, so far.

Can/would you, If it doesn't bother you?

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

#217

Post by glitchc » Tue, Dec 10, 2024, 4:45 PM UTC

tombert wrote: post #128

freejazz wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paintings aren't made at the "pixel" level and I think your distinction is especially humorous considering the context.

I mean a literal PAINTing is made with paint, obviously. If you were to try and create a robot hand that painted as well as humans that would probably comparably difficult to any other task involving a human hand. I was saying that we solve the AI art problem by skipping straight to an end state (pixels) instead of the same mechanism a human might.

Why? Plotters do this all the time. It's not hard to imagine something like LLaVA hooked up to a plotter generating whatever the LLM imagines on a paper medium at a stroke level.