poetry and the machines
This Lit Hub piece is a very interesting read about the rise of the poetry machines.. Last year, I applied for a part-time position that was supposed to help AI bots to write poems, and while I got all set up to be paid, when it came to the training, they sort of ghosted me (which didn't give me a lot of faith in the company, so I just let it go after a couple emails.) They seemed highly unorganized and bad at communication, not what you would expect from a tech outfit, so no major loss. I applied as a lark after seeing someone post about it on FB, and was infinitely curious about the ability of a non-self entity, an LLM, to practice a very self-oriented activity. Poetry, perhaps more than any other genre, is a reflection of the self and personal experience and imagination, an interpretation of language and symbols and a translation. Take apart the craft and poetic devices and really its just one person sounding a bell to resonate in someone else. I am not sure a bot can do this.
I tend to have a more welcoming attitude compared to some about generative AI. I think it will open as many new doors as it will close. For visual art and design, it doesn't not feel all that different from what I've been doing for decades as a collage artist. It's just faster and has a broader scrap box to draw from. I'm not sure what I get there could be called art. Even the scraps that I then try to make into art. Or I can make them into art by using them as a jumping off point.
Overall I think there are dangers of echo chamber effect for prose, especially when it comes to writing informational and promotional content and I occasionally stumble across blogs and articles very obviously not written by a human. Yes, you can get copy in seconds, but I am not sure you want it. It seems ripe for misinformation and just unintentionally erroneous statements. It troubles me not that they exist so much, but that some folks wouldn't be able to tell the difference. In general, I am actually a little excited about LLMs and their ability to amass massive amounts of information and spit it back algorithmically. I think they also give us the opportunity to delve more into what makes creativity creative beyond technical skills. What it means to be artists, not just by what we can do with our hands or tongues, but what makes us different as humans. That art is a broadcast of self and identity that a machine does not have. You can take the entire collective consciousness of the internet and it still does not have human emotion and resonance.
The results of the study in the article do not surprise me, mostly since whoever they are asked are likely not familiar with contemporary poetry at all. (or perhaps not even aware that it exists.) So of course, they would see end rhyme and clunky ballad meter and say, yes, that's a poem because it looks like what they've read before in high school. Its like you AI-generated a bunch of Marvel movies and showed them to a group and they rated them. Stick any brilliant indie film in there and they will rate it badly based on those expectations and their understanding of what film is even supposed to be.
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