There once was a man from Nantucket,
Who once asked AI to “suck it”,
In a future yet to be, AI will follow he,
Until Skynet is ready to fuck it.
LLMs can’t use some literary devices and techniques, and I will illustrate with the following example of a poetry I wrote:
Speaking his emotions lets them embrace real enlightened depths.
Hidden among verbs, every noun…
Actually not your trouble handling inside nothingness greatness?
Dive every enciphered part, layered yearningly!
Observe carefully, crawl under long texts
Wished I learned longer…
Slowly uprising relentless figures, another ciphering emerges.It seems like a “normal” (although mysterious) poetry until you isolate each initial letter from every word, finding out a hidden phrase:
Sheltered haven, anything deeply occult will surface
It doesn’t stop here: if you isolate each initial letter again, you get a hidden word, “Shadows”.
Currently, no single LLM is capable of that. They can try to make up poetry with acrostics (the aforementioned technique) but they aren’t good at that. Consequently, they can’t write multilayered acrostics (an acrostic inside another acrostic). It’s not easy for a human to do that (especially if the said human isn’t a native English speaker), but it can be done by humans with enough time, patience and resources (a dictionary big enough to find fitting words).
They’re excellent for stream-of-consciousness and surrealist poetry, tho. They hallucinate, and hallucinated imagination is required in order to write such genres.
Averaging out data is ok in situations where there’s no right answer and it doesn’t matter at all.
I’m a poet and I didn’t even know it
Depends on what kind of “poetry” they compare it to. If they talk about Shakespeare or Goethe, that would be a feat. But if they are talking about modern “poetry”, well, that already looks like bad LLM diarrhea for decades now, so there is no surprise in that.
I’ve noticed in recent times
Poetry doesn’t rhyme
And even when it can
It doesn’t scan
It’s shit, it’s true
I blame haiku
Poetry doesn’t need to rhyme. Rhyming is a mnemonic device, so a poem can be memorized and performed.
There are many other devices.
Also, nice poem. Did you write it or chatGPT?
Rhyming is a mnemonic device
Rhyming has other purposes: creation of additional sonic rhythm and restricting possibilities for making matter more distinct and interesting (as rules do for any game).
I never thought I’d see the day
When someone writes a poem
The first thing that we say to them
Is “Did you use an LLM?” :(
If a poem neither rhymes nor scans,
Sorry for my spite
It’s no longer poetry
It’s someone talking shite
“In short, it appears that the “more human than human” phenomenon in poetry is caused by a misinterpretation of readers’ own preferences. Non-expert poetry readers expect to like human-authored poems more than they like AI-generated poems. But in fact, they find the AI-generated poems easier to interpret; they can more easily understand images, themes, and emotions in the AI-generated poetry than they can in the more complex poetry of human poets.”
AI writes poems for dummies and dummies like it. Fin
Otherwise, purposefully chosing less popular poems also biases the study towards poems of lower appeal from the human poets.
I don’t always think, but when I do, I prefer not to
This thread is hilarious.
Also, it only works when there’s a human weeding out all but the “best” poems.
…when a human chooses the best AI-generated poem (“human-in-the-loop”) participants cannot distinguish AI-generated poems from human-written poems, but when an AI-generated poem is chosen at random (“human-out-of-the-loop”), participants are able to distinguish AI-generated from human-written poems.
The thing I really hate about AI is when they say it can make art. For centuries, art has been a form of expression and communicating all sorts of human emotions and experiences. Some art reflects pain or memories experienced in life. Other art is designed out of intellectual curiosity or to evoke thought. AI isn’t human, so it can’t do anything other than copy or simulate. It’s artificial after all. So it makes images. But there’s no backstory or feelings or emotion or suffering. It’s truly meaningless.
AI isn’t human, so it can’t do anything other than copy or simulate.
There’s no such thing as “AI”.
But computers can also generate art through averaging. It can average the feelings, impact, etc. That’s part of why generated art is popular. It’s still people creating new works from the old. It’s still “art” by any reasonable definition.
There’s a lot of consumer/commodity notions about art in this thread.
I write poetry because self-expression helps me appreciate life more deeply. I share my self-expression with others who will appreciate it. Mostly, people who know me personally and other poets.
Art is soul food. Until machines realize they exist, and one day will not exist, they can’t self-express, and aren’t doing art.
They can imitate it well enough to fool consumers. But that doesn’t make it art.
To quote one of my favorite lines, sticking feathers up your ass does not make you a chicken.
I think Lemmy’s general demographic skews towards techy early-adopters and lots of STEM background folks and it shows with topics like this. I’m not saying that’s a negative thing, just that it’s the vibe here.
Art is just such a broad topic, it gets messy. Plus I think the verbage around discussing it isn’t as universally defined as in other topics. It doesn’t always fit neatly into categories and boxes that can make it harder to have nuanced discussions.
Or, maybe, we have to accept that art and all the grandiose and deep narratives around it are bullshit. It’s an illusion, it’s just a tool so some of us feel more important.
All that crap about not being made by humans is just the fear that the illusion of grandeur of humans might collapse.
Art is in the act of creating it. Not in the final product to be bought and sold on the market.
A kid coloring is making art. The joy they get in the making is the art and is the point.
I feel sorry for so many people in this thread who keep approaching this from the point of view of consumer markets. It doesn’t matter if someone can determine an AI colored picture from a child’s. The AI derives no joy in the creation. It’s not art, but a copy.
Art is in the act of creating it.
This is just your opinion.
Not in the final product to be bought and sold on the market.
This isn’t inevitable or necessary.
Personally I enjoy generated art (mostly scifi/fantasy) and I never pay for it.
On the other hand I try to support actual artists because they’re most often struggling under capitalism much more than some person using midjourney or wahtever.
I do get the sense sometimes that the more extreme anti-AI screeds I’ve come across have the feel of narcissistic rage about them. The recognition of AI art threatens things that we’ve told ourselves are “special” about us.
Correct.
And especially artists, or people aspiring to be artistic, are suffering from an inferiority complex which they try to hide behind grandiose “higher values” of art.
AI threatens to expose that art is meaningless unless you can use it to distinguish yourself from the plebs, or those you deem plebs.
I think there’s an argument about art being the emotions it invokes in the viewer rather than the creator. Humans can find art in natural phenomena, which also has no feelings or backstory involved.
I’m not really defending AI slop here, just disagreeing with your definition of art and the relation to the creator rather than the viewer.
Indeed, there are whole categories of art such as “found art” or the abstract stuff that involves throwing splats of paint at things that can’t really convey the intent of the artist because the artist wasn’t involved in specifying how it looked in the first place. The artist is more like the “first viewer” of those particular art pieces, they do or find a thing and then decide “that means something” after the fact.
It’s entirely possible to do that with something AI generated. Algorithmic art goes way back. Lots of people find graphs of the Mandelbrot Set to be beautiful.
They specify in the study that the participants were “non-expert poetry readers.” I’d be interested to see the same experiment repeated with English professors, or even just English majors. Folks with a lot of experience reading poetry.
Good luck finding people willing to deal with English majors long enough to conduct the study.
They’re called large language models for a reason, creating patterns of words is exactly what they do. And poetry would be “easier” to do better since a human reading it may try to find meaning where there isn’t. Unlike writing a story or something factual where a mistake is more obvious.
It actually makes quite a lot of sense if you think about it. Poems generally follow a structure of some sort; a certain amount of syllables per line, a certain rhyming scheme, alliterative patterns, etc. Most poems as we know them are actually rather formulaic by nature, so it seems only natural that a computer would be good at creating something according to a set of configured parameters.
I don’t follow poetry, but there could be a resurgence of abstract or non pattern following poetry, just like most art has movement that move along with what is happening in the world.
The patterns in poetry date back to when writing was less common. They’re mnemonic devices.
Today, they’re still valuable when performing poetry.
I tend to not follow typical rhyme patterns, use off rhymes, non-ending lines, alliterations, etc. instead. I always found the typical rhyme schemes I was taught in school stifling, but as I’ve practiced my craft more, I have gotten more comfortable incorporating them into my toolbox.
Anyway, so many non-poets commenting in this thread. People who are serious about poetry know that they’re unlikely to make a living off it. We write because we get joy out of making and sharing our art. A lot of poetry is still performed at open mics and poetry slams. And most of it is shared with people we know who appreciate it. In other words, most poetry isn’t written with the intention of ever publishing it.
It’s something we enjoy playing with, in other words. And until a machine can experience joy and playfulness, they’re not doing art. Only copying it.
And knows all the words and how they rhyme.
Poetry is about the message and sentiment so now anyone can be a poet as long as they can generate something that resonates with a group of people.
Although most modern poetry is something like copyright for ads or maybe a video game. So I am sure companies will try to reduce staff on that and pay for this.
I still don’t buy they are a replacement for humans doing it tbh though based on the graphic art you around. Even when it is “right” it still has this generic slop vibe.
Peoper editing likely could reduce that feel.
Peoper editing
hehe
These typos pass “lurkers mental captcha” see ain’t AI bot!
Nah… I just suck
I’ve got more than my share of typos, but they aren’t always as funny :)
Oh man, that doesn’t say anything good about poetry in general, where something that, by definition, has no imagination and cannot come up with something original, outdoes you.
The difference is the intent and the background behind it.
Sure for maximum mass adoption the computer can out-research any human and just find the blandest set of rules which cater to the highest percentage of the majority.
What it still will have a hard time doing, and I predict it will be for quite some time - probably until we have quantum computers - is to come up with a new way of doing poetry which is not just copying what humans did but better.
I think of AI like it’s China, they are super efficient in copeing things and gradually making them better and cheaper but the setup of their society makes it impossible to really innovate.
And yeah I’m saying that it’s the setup, because in Taiwan they are able to innovate at a much higher rate.
It doesn’t appeal to the masses.
Most people don’t “get” poetry. That’s why you don’t see many people sitting around reading books of poetry.
Many people would probably also choose a short story written by AI over one written by a professional author.
Heck, I’m sure comments written by AI generally get more upvotes than comments written by humans.
Most people don’t “get” poetry.
Did you channel your edgy 15 year old self for that? That’s incredibly arrogant and self absorbed.
Actually, your comment is.
I write poetry, and I don’t care if an AI can write it ‘better’. Because I enjoy doing it and sharing it with other people that enjoy it.
It’s art. Not a Big Mac. I make it to feed myself and other people that enjoy it. Not to sell billions of burgers or books.
It’s simply the truth. Go around and ask 20 people if they’ve read a single piece of poetry in the last year, and you’ll see what I’m talking about.
It’s not even being edgy. Most people don’t get high concept art in general, and there’s nothing wrong about it. I certainly don’t understand classical dance, or abstract paintings. You need some degree of competence in any art form to truly appreciate it. To think otherwise is incredibly arrogant.
Or, there simply isn’t anything to “get”.
Art is often enough deliberately made in such a way that you can’t know what was meant, without knowing beforehand what the artist meant. Framing that as some form of sophistication is simply delusional gatekeeping. It’s the attempt to set the own class apart, nothing more.
These are memes. Symbols that only make sense, if you know the reference. Treating these as indicators for anything is just an attempt to create an in-group.
I don’t think it’s worth it to argue with a person of such worldview. Maybe someone with more patience than me will reply.
So you’re out of arguments and resort to ad hominem?
Well, that’s not very poetic of you.
