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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

#51

Post by magicalhippo »

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…

> Consider Auden's Epitaph on a Tyrant, which is powerful because it is so suddenly shocking

Not very, given the title...

Should be noted I do my best to avoid trailers, they totally spoil movies/shows for me.

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

#52

Post by lm28469 »

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 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

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

#53

Post by [deleted] »

jackyinger wrote: post #38
MR4D wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just for fun, I had ChatGPT rewrite your comment as a poem. Here’s the result: ———— My logic may be choppy, but I’m not yet sold, That popular sentiment should be the gold, For judging culture's worth or depth or art, When most have seen so little, played no part. The average person, read just a hundred lines, While those who love the craft cross many signs, With pages turned, they gain a richer view, That shapes wha…

Hmm, I’m not convinced. That’s just the comment in the guise of poetry. There are a bunch of dangling implications in this “poem” where a real master would weave the implications together. I guess I’d also say it is not only doing the right thing that counts, one must also be doing it for the right reason. AI “art” is mimicry, burdened by the inevitable mundanity of the majority of its training corpus. The avant gard…

[deleted]

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

#54

Post by HPsquared »

aithrowawaycomm wrote: post #48
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.

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.

It's another case of the impedance mismatch between numbers / KPIs etc and what might be called "lived experience".

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

#55

Post by ksymph »

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…

I don't see how the authors are dishonest about it, or that the rebuttal refutes any of the actual claims made. They make it clear in the paper that they're specifically evaluating people who aren't especially interested in poetry, and talk at length about how and why this is different from other approaches. I suppose the clickbait title gives a bad first impression.

To summarize the facts: when people were asked to tell if a given poem was written by human or AI, people thought the AI poems were human more often than human poems. People also tended to rate them higher when they thought they were created by AI than when they thought they were human-made. It's speculated in the paper that this is because the AI poems tended to be more accessible and direct than the human poems selected, and the preference for this style from non-experts combined with the perception that AI poetry is poor led to the results.

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

#56

Post by Molitor5901 »

My university English professor in teaching Wallace Stevens to us said "It doesn't have to make sense because it makes sense to the author." I guess the magic of poetry is when you decipher what it is the author is trying to avoid saying plainly. It's not just a man making ice cream, it's about life and death.

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

#57

Post by aithrowawaycomm »

HPsquared wrote: post #50
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…

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-defined the problem is. This data really is awful because the subjects aren't interested in reading difficult poetry. It is entirely appropriate for Davis, as someone who actually is interested in good poetry, to make a qualitative stand as to what is or isn't good poetry and try to define the problem accordingly.

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

#58

Post by frumper »

Ylpertnodi wrote: post #40
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…

>There's a lot of bad poetry in the world that just follows readers' expectations. I should know, I've written some of it. Apparently, in 'the good old days (of the internet)', your poetry would be published by yourself, on your webpage - complete with a starry-twinkling background, a 'number of visitors' counter in the bottom right, and in a pink font. I miss those days.

don't forget the auto-playing MIDI music playing in the background

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

#59

Post by aithrowawaycomm »

ksymph wrote: post #55
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…

I don't see how the authors are dishonest about it, or that the rebuttal refutes any of the actual claims made. They make it clear in the paper that they're specifically evaluating people who aren't especially interested in poetry, and talk at length about how and why this is different from other approaches. I suppose the clickbait title gives a bad first impression. To summarize the facts: when people were asked to…

The selection of human poets is cooked to give the result they wanted. I will grant the authors may have lied to themselves. But I don't think honest scientists would have ever constructed a study like this. It is comparing human avant garde jazz to AI dance music and concluding that "AI music" is more danceable than "human music", without including human dance music! It's just infuriating.

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

#60

Post by MR4D »

jamespo wrote: post #35
MR4D wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just for fun, I had ChatGPT rewrite your comment as a poem. Here’s the result: ———— My logic may be choppy, but I’m not yet sold, That popular sentiment should be the gold, For judging culture's worth or depth or art, When most have seen so little, played no part. The average person, read just a hundred lines, While those who love the craft cross many signs, With pages turned, they gain a richer view, That shapes wha…

Was this with a Vogon plugin?

No. Straight ChatGPT. I wasn’t even logged in.
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