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

nature.com

61–70 of 217 posts

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

#61
post #55

Earlier 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. 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.

They expressly state the result is likely because the AI poetry was more simple and direct than the poetry selected, which is more accessible for the average person not interested in poetry. They compare and contrast this with other studies where this was not the case.

Yes, it's comparing apples and oranges; that's the whole point. It doesn't make the experiment itself flawed.

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

#62
post #32
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…

Do you think this is a good poem by any measure? Imo it is terrible.

I think that most people would call it a good poem due to its rhyming and simplistic structure.

It’s definitely not Beowulf. I’m not a poetry expert, but even I can tell it’s at something like a 5th grade level.

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

#63
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…

“Kitschy”. Seems like a perfect word for that!

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

#64
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this line of reasoning is really bizarre, as if there's this straight-line path of progress, and then we stop the second it starts doing shit that we consider "fun". Who is to say that "washing dishes" (to use your example) is a less complicated problem than art, at least in regards to robotics and the like?

> as if there's this straight-line path of progress I think your rebuttal is really bizarre. OP is simply saying what they want AI to do. > Who is to say that "washing dishes" (to use your example) is a less complicated problem than art I think dish washing is a bad example, because we have dishwashers. But until the market brings AI and robotic solutions to market at an affordable cost that actually fulfill most peo…

I guess what I was getting at (and I'll acknowledge that I didn't word it as well as I should), is something along the lines of: "what if automating art is a necessary step if we want to automate the boring stuff?"

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

#65
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this line of reasoning is really bizarre, as if there's this straight-line path of progress, and then we stop the second it starts doing shit that we consider "fun". Who is to say that "washing dishes" (to use your example) is a less complicated problem than art, at least in regards to robotics and the like?

it's not a matter of what's complicated, it's a matter of what it replaces. the quote isn't reflecting on what's easiest to solve, it's reflecting on the impact that it has on culture as a whole. a tangible impact of the current generation of AI tools is they displace and drown out human creations in a flood of throwaway, meaningless garbage. this is amplifying the ongoing conversion of art into "content" that's inte…

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 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.

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

#67
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> as if there's this straight-line path of progress I think your rebuttal is really bizarre. OP is simply saying what they want AI to do. > Who is to say that "washing dishes" (to use your example) is a less complicated problem than art I think dish washing is a bad example, because we have dishwashers. But until the market brings AI and robotic solutions to market at an affordable cost that actually fulfill most peo…

I guess what I was getting at (and I'll acknowledge that I didn't word it as well as I should), is something along the lines of: "what if automating art is a necessary step if we want to automate the boring stuff?"

I think you are probably right. But what is really frustrating about this is the lack of alignment on what people want vs what industries need.

We talk so much about how capitalism is built around people's needs, but that betrays another reality, which is that people only get what capitalism produces.

If we were a planned economy we could skip right to an android in everyone's homes. But we wouldn't even have the tech for the android with a planned economy. So instead, we have to feed capitalism what it needs so it can innovate. Which sometimes is just a net loss for everyone in the meantime.

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

#68

Maybe my logic is choppy but I'm unconvinced that it is useful to use (inexperienced) popular sentiment as a marker of some kind of reference for cultural quality here. The average person has read at most 100 poems; people who really like poetry will be reading quite a bit more, and that experience has relevance in a context such as this. I'm more curious what happens when we look at specifically those humans who eng…

It's completely ideal to get an average person's opinion on something as primal as poetry. Poetry is for everyone, not just poetry connoisseurs. It's a simplified primal expression of language, taking the form of pretty soundbites & snippets, pristine, virginal, uncorrupted by prose and overthinking. Poetry is not the domain of middlebrow academics.

I used to think that, but I think this is only true if you want to measure broad market appeal. Very few things are broadly marketable, and many of them have niches. "Middlebrow academics" are the ones who go to the poetry shelf of their local bookstore and pick up anthologies and they are the ones who go to poetry slams, and so on.

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

#69
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…

This is a great example of a clearly very bad poem that would sound "good enough" to people. Some things rhyme, but there's very clearly no plan.

That definition covers 90% of popular hip-hop, pop and r&b.

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

#70
post #25

Maybe my logic is choppy but I'm unconvinced that it is useful to use (inexperienced) popular sentiment as a marker of some kind of reference for cultural quality here. The average person has read at most 100 poems; people who really like poetry will be reading quite a bit more, and that experience has relevance in a context such as this. I'm more curious what happens when we look at specifically those humans who eng…

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…

This is great, much better than expected. ChatGPT makes LLMs venerated.
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