I do appreciate you keeping track of what the Large Language Model billionaire tech oligarchs think about their plagiarism literatures. I just seriously doubt they've actually read any poetry, like, ever.
oh they mostly don't care about this in that sense, no, not at all I think (emphasis on the mostly!) which may be one reason why AI poetry is behind AI capability in other domains
The day a computer writes for no reason, for its own fulfillment, and doesn’t need all of us humans to validate its existence by giving it all of our attention and giving its owners trillions of dollars of our taxes and wasting all of the finite natural resources we have on its storage and hardware, will be the day a computer writes fucking anything. Until then: it’s a goddam glorified abacus. As for the nerds justifying their greed with their engineering brains, and vice versa, why are they all so obsessed with the stuff no one needs them for? Why can’t they fix basic brain shit, for which their brains are built? Administering health care? Redistributing our resources better? This is all such dumb teen angst revenge of the nerds bs driving us off a cliff.
I feel like there's something missing in this notion of a "10" poem, as if what made a poem great was the feeling of 10ness it induced in us, and there is some fixed set of features we can identify that evoke that feeling of 10ness. But I don't think that's right? At least not about writing in general.
Great writing is part of a conversation about what is interesting, or important, or beautiful, about the world around us. It comes from having something you want to say about the world to the people around you. That's not what LLMs are for, at the moment. Right now, do not want to say anything new and interesting and provocative; mostly, they want to cautiously aggregate and apply the current expert consensus.
The chess comparison is trivial. The only respect in which it compares to poetry is a certain complexity of thinking. The goal of chess is to win using a limited number of codes. In this case, it matters little if the opponent is AI or a person. The goal of poetry is never to win at anything - or score a 10 as Altman requires, or for critics to assign points in some sort of aesthetic talent show.
Poetry exists in a different category of human experience. We value a poem in as much as it tells us more about our what it is like to be human. If a poem is not written by a human, it lacks both de facto and de jure authority. So we can admire its cleverness but not its beauty, or dignity, or sadness, or elevation. It has not been 'lived through'. Indeed, the act of writing it, will have had few consequences for the Large Language Model concerned - whereas the act of writing a poem will have all manner of effects upon the poet, from mild relief to catharsis to a sense of freedom or escape.
A poet may even laugh or be humbled at their own inability to capture the elusive nature of the truth they seek. Can we ascribe that degree of self-reflection to AI? If it is trained, like the AI chess master, only to achieve prompted outcomes like a score of 10, why should it bother?
Perhaps the more interesting question is how will we react when AI writes a 12 poem, a 15 poem, a 40 poem? When AI produces that which is well beyond us.
There's nothing interesting about engaging in incoherent nonsense. What is a 12, 15, 40 poem? Can you fathom it? How can you fathom it unless someone's already done it (so it wouldn't be beyond us)? What makes you think that it is only a matter of time that a tool which is already trained in all the literature available online and which becomes more perfect at producing the most mid of outputs the more sophisticated it gets would produce even what is fathomable: a 10?
The questions you raise in your first paragraph are excellent and thought-provoking. I don’t understand the value of the ad hominem attack in your final sentence. We can critique ideas without degrading one another.
Isn’t the whole point of poetry — and art in general — to communicate something profoundly *human* in a particular mode? The arts are not games with fixed rules, like chess, or processes of natural discovery, like the sciences; they are something relayed (more or less successfully) from one human to another.
This is why individuals produce the best art. Just as I’d be surprised to see a committee create a great work of art, I simply fail to believe that any art produced by a machine could be meaningful. It might become excellent at mimicking humanity, but, lacking the ability to feel and experience like us, it has nothing valuable to add here. Maybe my beliefs rooted in my own prejudices, but I find the idea of machine art repellent.
PSYCHOL'OGY, n. [Gr. soul, and discourse.] A discourse or treatise on the human soul; or the doctrine of the nature and properties of the soul.*[[Gen 2:7/KJVLite]]* And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.
*[[Job 12:10/KJVLite]]* In whose hand is the soul of every living thing, and the breath of all mankind.
*[[Psa 42:2/KJVLite]]* My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God: when shall I come and appear before God?
*[[1Co 15:45/KJVLite]]* And so it is written, The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit.
*[[1Co 15:52/KJVLite]]* In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.
*[[1Th 4:17/KJVLite]]* Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.
*[[Joh 8:12/KJVLite]]* Then spake Jesus again unto them, saying, I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.
*[[1Jn 1:7/KJVLite]]* But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin.
*[[Job 32:8/KJVLite]]* But there is a spirit in man: and the inspiration of the Almighty giveth them understanding.
*[[2Ti 3:16/KJVLite]]* All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness:
The whole premise is flawed. AI cannot write a poem; it can only write a simulacrum of a poem. A real poem, especially a good or great poem, requires a human. Wooden fruit has some aesthetic value and may look nice on a table, but it's not the thrill of piquancy and heft and morphology of a ripe peach.
funny how comfortable everyone is with rating poems as a 10 a 9, a 7, but what does it even mean?
forget about Altman et al., what do you people mean when you say it? the tradition-criticism-"common reader" triade is not compelling at all. on these terms, a great poem would be a poem embedded in history and poetic tradition, critically approved at that, and enjoyed by the common reader? is the final score a median, or are those things differently weighted? how bleak. if I am deeply moved by a poem which is none of these things, does it mean that I'm a rube who gets overexcited at the sight of a meager 2?
I get it why ais and the ai crowd would give poems grades and talk about them in these terms. but everyone else—including those who read and love poetry, of all people? to me, it sounds like taking something intimate, personal and meaningful, and turning it into a pound of margarine to be judged in accordance with "criteria" and "rubrics." I mean, you can. but why would you want to?
Poetry is subjective to most people. Because most people, even people who read poetry, don’t know what it takes to craft a poem, it will be sooner than you think. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. AI can write whatever it wants. It’s up to us to reject it.
The measure of a poem is how deeply it affects us, surely. Which I believe comes from how deeply the poet has scoured her/his mind, and allied that to technical.skill. I'm sure AI can do the technical.bit, but are we really going to be moved by secondhand feelings?
I have to say, part of the magnetism of poetry is that there is no rubric, there is no ranking it on some dumbass scale of 1-10. Those numbers mean nothing!!! Institutions, systems, and corporations think that numbers can become representative of value and they are royally missing the point.
The novel ‘Do You Remember Being Born?’ does a pretty good job of asking what it means for a poet to “collaborate” with AI…
it’s a faster converging library of babel. art is emotion and technique. technique without emotion may hit once in a while, but it’ll be essentially an accident and will also likely be buried with in 1000x noise of stuff that’s okay. a huge canon of crap.
What makes you think it ever will? And why do you think the opinion of a proven liar (remember all the things he said about GPT-5 which was a minor improvement to GPT-4?) who doesn't know anything about poems has any relevance whatsoever?
Art is the [conscious] right making of the thing. That is the definition our art philosophy professor used in the Fall of 1993. Since the introduction of AI rendering I have added “conscious” to his definition. Until an AI becomes sentient and chooses to create of its own accord its output is just that… output. There’s an art to the creation of the prompt unless an AI is used to output that as well. That’s what it is for me. Art is a qualitative not quantitative experience. Someone else wants to call filling in a form with the least amount of effort possible and the results “Art” for them it is. But no one has the agency to make anyone else to agree.
I do appreciate you keeping track of what the Large Language Model billionaire tech oligarchs think about their plagiarism literatures. I just seriously doubt they've actually read any poetry, like, ever.
oh they mostly don't care about this in that sense, no, not at all I think (emphasis on the mostly!) which may be one reason why AI poetry is behind AI capability in other domains
The day a computer writes for no reason, for its own fulfillment, and doesn’t need all of us humans to validate its existence by giving it all of our attention and giving its owners trillions of dollars of our taxes and wasting all of the finite natural resources we have on its storage and hardware, will be the day a computer writes fucking anything. Until then: it’s a goddam glorified abacus. As for the nerds justifying their greed with their engineering brains, and vice versa, why are they all so obsessed with the stuff no one needs them for? Why can’t they fix basic brain shit, for which their brains are built? Administering health care? Redistributing our resources better? This is all such dumb teen angst revenge of the nerds bs driving us off a cliff.
I feel like there's something missing in this notion of a "10" poem, as if what made a poem great was the feeling of 10ness it induced in us, and there is some fixed set of features we can identify that evoke that feeling of 10ness. But I don't think that's right? At least not about writing in general.
Great writing is part of a conversation about what is interesting, or important, or beautiful, about the world around us. It comes from having something you want to say about the world to the people around you. That's not what LLMs are for, at the moment. Right now, do not want to say anything new and interesting and provocative; mostly, they want to cautiously aggregate and apply the current expert consensus.
The chess comparison is trivial. The only respect in which it compares to poetry is a certain complexity of thinking. The goal of chess is to win using a limited number of codes. In this case, it matters little if the opponent is AI or a person. The goal of poetry is never to win at anything - or score a 10 as Altman requires, or for critics to assign points in some sort of aesthetic talent show.
Poetry exists in a different category of human experience. We value a poem in as much as it tells us more about our what it is like to be human. If a poem is not written by a human, it lacks both de facto and de jure authority. So we can admire its cleverness but not its beauty, or dignity, or sadness, or elevation. It has not been 'lived through'. Indeed, the act of writing it, will have had few consequences for the Large Language Model concerned - whereas the act of writing a poem will have all manner of effects upon the poet, from mild relief to catharsis to a sense of freedom or escape.
A poet may even laugh or be humbled at their own inability to capture the elusive nature of the truth they seek. Can we ascribe that degree of self-reflection to AI? If it is trained, like the AI chess master, only to achieve prompted outcomes like a score of 10, why should it bother?
Wow. Exactly. You said it so much better than I tried to.
Perhaps the more interesting question is how will we react when AI writes a 12 poem, a 15 poem, a 40 poem? When AI produces that which is well beyond us.
Yes indeed
If. If "ai" (stochastic parrots; there ain't no actual cognition happening there) produces a "poem."
AI got no body, no qualia, no rag and bone shop of the heart.
There's nothing interesting about engaging in incoherent nonsense. What is a 12, 15, 40 poem? Can you fathom it? How can you fathom it unless someone's already done it (so it wouldn't be beyond us)? What makes you think that it is only a matter of time that a tool which is already trained in all the literature available online and which becomes more perfect at producing the most mid of outputs the more sophisticated it gets would produce even what is fathomable: a 10?
You think like a bona-fide simpleton.
The questions you raise in your first paragraph are excellent and thought-provoking. I don’t understand the value of the ad hominem attack in your final sentence. We can critique ideas without degrading one another.
Ad hominem 💀
Here’s a link to home: www.reddit.com
Isn’t the whole point of poetry — and art in general — to communicate something profoundly *human* in a particular mode? The arts are not games with fixed rules, like chess, or processes of natural discovery, like the sciences; they are something relayed (more or less successfully) from one human to another.
This is why individuals produce the best art. Just as I’d be surprised to see a committee create a great work of art, I simply fail to believe that any art produced by a machine could be meaningful. It might become excellent at mimicking humanity, but, lacking the ability to feel and experience like us, it has nothing valuable to add here. Maybe my beliefs rooted in my own prejudices, but I find the idea of machine art repellent.
PSYCHOL'OGY, n. [Gr. soul, and discourse.] A discourse or treatise on the human soul; or the doctrine of the nature and properties of the soul.*[[Gen 2:7/KJVLite]]* And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.
*[[Job 12:10/KJVLite]]* In whose hand is the soul of every living thing, and the breath of all mankind.
*[[Psa 42:2/KJVLite]]* My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God: when shall I come and appear before God?
*[[1Co 15:45/KJVLite]]* And so it is written, The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit.
*[[1Co 15:52/KJVLite]]* In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.
*[[1Th 4:17/KJVLite]]* Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.
*[[Joh 8:12/KJVLite]]* Then spake Jesus again unto them, saying, I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.
*[[1Jn 1:7/KJVLite]]* But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin.
*[[Job 32:8/KJVLite]]* But there is a spirit in man: and the inspiration of the Almighty giveth them understanding.
*[[2Ti 3:16/KJVLite]]* All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness:
The whole premise is flawed. AI cannot write a poem; it can only write a simulacrum of a poem. A real poem, especially a good or great poem, requires a human. Wooden fruit has some aesthetic value and may look nice on a table, but it's not the thrill of piquancy and heft and morphology of a ripe peach.
funny how comfortable everyone is with rating poems as a 10 a 9, a 7, but what does it even mean?
forget about Altman et al., what do you people mean when you say it? the tradition-criticism-"common reader" triade is not compelling at all. on these terms, a great poem would be a poem embedded in history and poetic tradition, critically approved at that, and enjoyed by the common reader? is the final score a median, or are those things differently weighted? how bleak. if I am deeply moved by a poem which is none of these things, does it mean that I'm a rube who gets overexcited at the sight of a meager 2?
I get it why ais and the ai crowd would give poems grades and talk about them in these terms. but everyone else—including those who read and love poetry, of all people? to me, it sounds like taking something intimate, personal and meaningful, and turning it into a pound of margarine to be judged in accordance with "criteria" and "rubrics." I mean, you can. but why would you want to?
Poetry is subjective to most people. Because most people, even people who read poetry, don’t know what it takes to craft a poem, it will be sooner than you think. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. AI can write whatever it wants. It’s up to us to reject it.
The measure of a poem is how deeply it affects us, surely. Which I believe comes from how deeply the poet has scoured her/his mind, and allied that to technical.skill. I'm sure AI can do the technical.bit, but are we really going to be moved by secondhand feelings?
Asking Sam Altman about poetry is a fool’s errand.
I have to say, part of the magnetism of poetry is that there is no rubric, there is no ranking it on some dumbass scale of 1-10. Those numbers mean nothing!!! Institutions, systems, and corporations think that numbers can become representative of value and they are royally missing the point.
The novel ‘Do You Remember Being Born?’ does a pretty good job of asking what it means for a poet to “collaborate” with AI…
it’s a faster converging library of babel. art is emotion and technique. technique without emotion may hit once in a while, but it’ll be essentially an accident and will also likely be buried with in 1000x noise of stuff that’s okay. a huge canon of crap.
"How long until a vibrator/blow-up-doll gives more pleasure to our wives/husbands than us?"
What makes you think it ever will? And why do you think the opinion of a proven liar (remember all the things he said about GPT-5 which was a minor improvement to GPT-4?) who doesn't know anything about poems has any relevance whatsoever?
Art is the [conscious] right making of the thing. That is the definition our art philosophy professor used in the Fall of 1993. Since the introduction of AI rendering I have added “conscious” to his definition. Until an AI becomes sentient and chooses to create of its own accord its output is just that… output. There’s an art to the creation of the prompt unless an AI is used to output that as well. That’s what it is for me. Art is a qualitative not quantitative experience. Someone else wants to call filling in a form with the least amount of effort possible and the results “Art” for them it is. But no one has the agency to make anyone else to agree.