The fact that you, a human, knows enough about Dickinson to have an educated opinion about her work and prose makes you the type of expert that would have been excluded from the study
The study was essentially trying to prove the main point of AI: The average person with minimal knowledge on a subject will be happy with mediocre, meaningless slop
@@oldrego Reading an online comment on a moving form of visual media is only slightly different from sitting down and willingingly engaging on words upon pages
@@bigoafboulderbrain_it could also be the dark truth that much of poetry itself is often slop that robots can emulate very easily by simply reading a bunch of poems and vomiting it back up.
In my opinion, the biggest problem is that rather than enjoying and reflecting on each other’s poems and the life experience reflected by them, we are in the habit of rating and comparing everything, whereby we assign fame, social status and capital.
Thats why AI doesn't matter. It comes from a civilizational mindset built on sand anyway. We're about to leap away from some team captain telling us what is because we now have a third witness. I won't even talk to a cop without Chat GTP now. And I won't talk to my lawyer either. I trust none of you. Some humans are scared because they know we won't have to trust their "knowledge" anymore.
No I just don't like modern poetry. You erase people like me who genuinely like poems that are relatable and understandable. Your Alienation from every day people is why poetry got to this point.
@@JohnDoe927 isn't it that seeking relatable content is common because modern everyday life is kind of dull, repetitive and meaningless and doesn't let people enjoying things outside our daily struggles? I too like relatable things, but I don't want it to be only that! We are not the only person existing for poetry to be read. It definetely relates to how we are used to personalized content to be rated for ourselves online, where we now basically need to exist in order to be part of our society.
AI poetry is just like Insta-poetry in one key way - it's digestable and cliché. Sadly a lot of readers will gravitate towards it for those exact reasons.
You can't control how others consume media, nor should you seek to. People can and do enjoy things no matter how cliche or mediocre, yourself included. What you should focus on instead, if you feel there's something wrong with the amount of mediocre content online, is making more quality content people enjoy.
Prose became insta for many people. The amounts of times I have seen advice: "don't use long descriptions in the book" is far too many to count. No descriptions, short sentences, no difficult verbiage, thrown instantly into purple prose or: "boasting off knowing thesaurus" - it's just literary McDonalds for masses nowadays.
@morezombies9685 Oh, I agree, I absolutely don't control how people consume content, and I'm not making any moral reflections on it at all! I'm just saying that media and the way we consume it shapes what becomes popular and currently, I think it's sad that it's decentivizing longer or more creative poetry. Nothing inherently wrong with consuming or writing insta-poetry!
i heard the first poem and went, “oh ok this one is 100% ai,” and got jumpscared by the second poem also sounding like ai. i will never forgive you for making me choose one
A less talked about parallel to the fact that people are believing that AI things are human made, is that people are starting to believing human made things are AI. I've already seen this happen across the internet, people have said some of my comments are AI because I happened to write those comments in a similar style that ChatGPT is programmed to, I've seen posts on reddit where images sourced from publications like the new york times are just dismissed by loads of people because they just thought it looked "off".
Same, so then I was like “yk the first one maybe wasn’t so bad, I didn’t pay attention to the text much anyway” only for him to jump scare my by announcing they were BOTH ai
I ended up choosing the first one as real despite the broken opening line simply because the second one felt way less like Dickinson in its voice even though it was actually saying something understandable 😅
As a hobbyist writer who never plans to publish, I'd like to think, naively, that poetry and literature will continue to persist regardless of what technological advancement is going on around them because the desire to create will always be in us. It's not about whether AI can do it better; that's irrelevant, we create because it's in our nature to want to create and express. I take deep issues with AI as it is now, it exists in a grey area where no DOUBT theft of intellectual property from real artists is taking place, but in thirty years when AI becomes more regulated, I don't actually think it matters whether a poem is from an AI or a human artist. If AI can create wonderful poetry as well, let it; what's important is that humans can still be compensated and appreciated commensurately for their work.
You're right. Human creativity will always shine bc each word, each brush stroke, each note, each pass a thumb over clay will ALWAYS have purpose and meaning. That purpose and drive is why our creativity is unmatched. No AI can ever reproduce what the human brain can make. If humans have one purpose it's creation.
I think it will persist. At least good poetry. There will be endless amounts of AI generated pornographic literature tho. Literature and poetry will persist because there's one thing ai can't do: being human and actually living. And you might ask "but can't ai know how life is throught data?". And the answer is no. It already collected literally all human knowledge, books, tv show, news, everything. What's gonna happen is that human literature is going to have to become more especfic. Because ai can already write a sci-fi book about the battle of good vs evil.
I hope you are right about the reaching of regulations. If I look at the Internet, it seems obvious to me that it is a mess compared to what it could have been. I'm worried it will be the same with AI technologies
I knew the first to be AI since I knew the original which goes like this: A Bird, came down the Walk - (359) By Emily Dickinson A Bird, came down the Walk - He did not know I saw - He bit an Angle Worm in halves And ate the fellow, raw,
And then, he drank a Dew From a convenient Grass - And then hopped sidewise to the Wall To let a Beetle pass -
He glanced with rapid eyes, That hurried all abroad - They looked like frightened Beads, I thought, He stirred his Velvet Head. -
Like one in danger, Cautious, I offered him a Crumb, And he unrolled his feathers, And rowed him softer Home -
Than Oars divide the Ocean, Too silver for a seam, Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon, Leap, plashless as they swim. Notice the last two stanzas which - to me - makes this uniquely Dickinson's poetry.
As I was watching the video, one of my first questions regarded the population sampled for the study. The section starting at 5:51 was pretty informative, and aligned with what I expected. People rated AI poetry "better" because they found it easier to engage with. It's the same thing that makes so much of the showerthoughts-adjacent Instagram poetry so popular. It's simple ideas, expressed in an easily digestible way, that asks nothing of the reader. It's easy to process, but it's also easy to forget.
@@JohnDoe927 Absolutely! But just like chicken nuggets, there's little in the way of nutritional value in the slurried, compressed, battered, and fried mess that is Instagram poetry. It's like donuts for dinner. It tastes good when you're eating it, but 30 minutes later you're hungry for something a little meatier. I elaborated in another comment that I think the study was flawed by the ground up. I wonder what their results might have looked like if the the researchers had chosen poetry from more contemporary poets. There are a number of incredibly talented writers today who are creating beautiful works of poetry that are highly accessible to even the average reader. And I really think that most people who would tell you that they don't get poetry, or that it's too hard to understand, or that it's inaccessible -- they've really never given it a fair shake. They've never taken the time to sit down and try to engage with a poem outside of whatever they had to read in their freshman literature survey.
Also! They chose poets of old with styles which are somewhat rigid and feel old to many readers, and more complex simply bcs they use different vocab and grammar than we’re used to. If they had actually used modern poetry .. even the more complex .. I. Believe there would’ve been more understanding, even from nonreaders
Thing is modern, more popular poetry is so shallow and unstructured that I wouldn't be surprised if AI would be even better at masking as human, even to experts
on this point it's important to remember that modern poetry was once seen to be nearly as much of a threat to english language poetry as AI is now--in part because of the abandonment of rigid style and the adoption of free-form poetry. indeed for many modern readers free-form is preferred and the poetic structures now considered archaic are left to wither, even abandoned as casualties by modern proponents of poetry such as yourself. we'll always have this problem in art.
My opinion is this: poetry was dead when people noticed it sat in an uncanny valley: For most of human history, poetry was how most literary works were written. But as time passed, things like the printing press, the opera, the novel, and the gramophone began to separate the spoken word into 2 categories: Storytelling & Music. And with each generation, poetry became more and more uncanny to listeners because it didn’t fit into either category. It was spoken like written word, yet seemed to have rhythm like music without instrumentation. For a lot of people, that’s not mentally palpable, thus uncanny.
with the more AI Poetry i read, i’ve noticed that poetry made by AI oftentimes have very common details in themselves. they rhyme, use cliched language, and they don't say much of anything emotionally impactful to wonder about. poetry is ‘good’ poetry when it expresses complex emotions and/or experiences. …complex emotions and/or experiences that an unthinking, unfeeling, preprogrammed machine couldn’t muster. however, upon watching this video, i am feeling worried. it seems that AI literature is demonstrably getting better, but i still don't believe that poetry can be killed if we continue to learn, teach, talk about, and consume real poetry by real poets, and eat up less AI "art" by people like jason allen, the AI "artist", lol.
The first example literally says something emotionally impactful though. "For in that moment, I did see, The wonder of all things, The world that hums in mystery, And all that it brings" The third line there is brilliant, and if you didn't tell anyone who wrote it then they would agree. It's only when people are told it was AI that they change their mind. The truth is AI can write some pretty good poetry and it will only improve. It's better than that Rupi Kauer woman who wrote Milk And Honey, although that's not a high bar 😂
@@myhatmygandhi6217 i understand where you're coming from, and i agree with you that that's an emotionally impactful segment. but from my own personal standpoint, i see AI poetry as very similar in nature. it regularly has the same format, and as an artist and a poet, i don't exactly appreciate that. fyi, i was meaning to say that after i watched the video i then realized that AI poetry is improving, taking off, and become more favorable by consumers than ever before. (which i don't particularly see as a good thing!!) i acknowledge that my message wasn't clear enough though, and i appreciate your comment. have a pleasant day!
@@myhatmygandhi6217the fact that it was made by IA immediately invalidates it of any meaning or impact. It’s not really poetry. Like a hunter making deer sounds to trick their prey. The hunter has no idea what those sounds mean they just know deer like them
@@myhatmygandhi6217 I'm sorry, but I just have to fundamentally disagree. The stanza and entire poem is cliché, and has no real insights. The barely even rephrased ideas of "All things are filled with wonder" and "the world is filled with mystery" have been repeated ad nauseam to the point where the poem elicits a visceral feeling of disgust in me. I find no brilliance or even slight originality. But this may be party from my personal experience in America and seeing those ideas in American media so often.
AI (in this context) as it stands is the culmination of industrial/mass-produced art. It is still art but just utterly uninteresting as there is no real depth, because as you say there is no purpose to it. AI is liberating in a way in that the production of these degrading-emanations, echoes of prior expressions formulated in the art it plunders are no longer forced unto human-laborers, replacing them with an automation (which was, unknowingly built by them.) basically AI is nothing new, but it is the climax, atleast for now.
Ok so it's more like general illiteracy killed poetry and AI is just willing to lower itself to the level of the masses. Still upsetting but mostly this study tells us that the average person has no idea how to read poetry.
@@pickwick3970 This phenomenon is also known as "I fancy no time to actually comprehending art and desire it all to be immediate, digestible, and requiring me to do no research or ponderation concerning any trascendental matter."
@@pickwick3970 Poetry of the past was meant to record in oral tradition the history of entire peoples. If a "poet" is mad over getting competed by AI, they ought to live as all great poets before their time. Get a job, then write. Greaters writers are great men who just happened to write. People should seek happiness outside their literary careers.
I think a poet that appeals to 95% of people is superior to a poet that appeals to 5% of people. Even if those 5% of people think very highly of themselves.
I think this whole conundrum just shows the real nature of art. Art is not the piece or the product of art, Art is the process and the transformation that it produces on those who take it seriously.
11:00 what gave this away for me is that AI likes to create 'uplifting' and 'hopeful' poems so a lot of them would be about overcoming darkness and even if u give it a prompt such as a poem about heartbreak and how u feel defeatless, there's always gonna be that one or two lines that's like: "but I'll push forward and I'll find a way to move on". AI also likes to use the word 'light' and 'hope'for their poems (and we see them used here in uninteresting or non unique ways)
"The air is heavy, silence crawls, Shadows press against cracked walls. The clock ticks loud, then louder still, Each second bends beneath its will. No dawn awaits this endless night, No solace veiled in muted light. The heart beats slow, a hollow drum, Echoes lost in what won’t come. The mirror whispers shards of truth, Each jagged edge, a stolen youth. No fire burns, no spark remains, Just empty echoes of refrains. Let the void take what it must, Ashes crumble, dreams to dust."
You definitely got me in the beginning. I'm an avid reader of Emily Dickinson's poetry and most of my poetry is inspired by her way of writing. I definitely detected that both are AI generated from the beginning, but when you said it's not and it's from Dickinson, I couldn't believe it, I was devastated lol
Yeah the first poem was obviously trying too hard to be profound and ultimately wrapped around to being nonsense- the second one had this quality where it was just trying REALLY hard to make sure that you got what it was trying to say- to the extent that it ended up telling rather than showing. It felt it was beating me over the head with the point a little, which I just assumed was an artistic choice on Emily's part. I'm glad I was wrong about that
Yea lol for me I just have no clue what Emily's writing is like and was sure both were ai, but was 110% sure the second was AI. So I thought damn this Emily girl can't write.
First thoughts (outside of the general state of peer review) - 1. On the subject of opacity: (good) poetry is not (generally) willfully opaque. Much of the opacity is due to period language. A contemporary reader will find the language unclear in the same way they would find it difficult to see through a two hundred year old pane of glass. The language of a beat poet would be difficult to parse for many readers, and this "issue" also acts as a smokescreen for AI. It can create a facsimile of anachronistic language while simultaneously appearing clearer through the added context of it's modern language training. 2. In that vein, we're not comparing apples to apples. We're comparing human poetry to machine forgery. The actual poetry should be the control; a third group of human forgeries is necessary to draw conclusions on what the study is actually measuring. 3. Which poems were used? A world class poet does not exclusively produce world class poems. Additionally as stated in point 1, one of their critically acclaimed works at the time may currently be too anachronistic for the average reader to enjoy casually (or as casually as you can when you are put in a situation where you are necessarily performing criticism and analysis) 4. Paranoid is not the ideal mental state to read most poetry. The simpler, "easier" to understand "works" generated by AI are safer bets your primary motivation is to not be tricked. As an example: at the opening of this video I considered both works to be AI generated at one point or another. I thought the second poem was better, but in accordance with point 3, a work by Dickinson is not necessarily a *published* work by Dickinson. Was it lifted from a notebook? Was it published on reputation in desperate need of a paycheck? The second poem is better but is that the game? Is the second poem better to trick me into believing it is the genuine article? Can this test be carried out honestly under the scrutiny of observation? Thought provoking video, evidently.
I don't read poetry and I would probably fail this test miserably because I'm not well versed enough in the language of poetry to catch common Chat GPT mistakes. I do, however, enjoy art and your discussion with Sitara reminded me a lot about the way I approach art these days and how with a trained eye I can tell a human drawing vs. AI with large amount of confidence. You said that this little quiz was not an enjoyable way to read poetry, but sadly that's how I interact with art these days. I don't look at the drawing to enjoy it, instead I find that my first reaction is to zoom in and check "Are all fingers in place? Is geometry in the background coherent? Are small details drawn or is it a pixelated mess?". That's not a healthy way to enjoy something. It's really sad.
5:16 Once, a professor told me to rewrite my essay because it was "obvious that you used AI." I wasn’t exactly offended back then, I thought "Wow, I must be so good he thinks I’m an AI!" But yesterday, I saw an artist upset because people demanded proof that she had created her digital paintings from scratch-they didn’t believe she could do such work. AI has introduced a new layer of judgment, one that women have faced for years: the "This is too good to have been done by someone like you" attitude. Except now, it’s not a man they’re praising, but a machine.
@@marikothecheetah9342 men are scrutinised too, but op is referring to the age-old societal attitude of “men are smarter than women, therefore a woman couldn’t have done this,” an attitude which still exists today, only now AI provides an easy outlet of accusation.
@@marikothecheetah9342I think they meant that people are now receiving a class of criticisms that women tended to receive. I don't think they meant to exclude anyone.
2:00 Hand to god, I predicted this exactly. Saw the two poems and before reading them I thought "I bet the twist is both of these are made by AI". Then when you read the second one, I thought. "These two are AI but if not then the second one is really by Emily Dickenson."
chatgpt is very formulaic in its poetry all the time they rhyme and every stanza is 4 lines. and other forumlas like satara stated Its pretty easy to distinguish unless your someone who always use that style. With emily you will just have to know how she uses meter
I feel like it also shows how suggestions can encourage someone to believe its real esp coming from a trusted source. that's an additional layer that can cause even a more conscious reader to get tripped up. In the end, tricks are meant to trick ppl which is why it shouldn't be our sole responsibility to not be manipulated
I can say I did pick it up, too formuliac and not romantic. In poetry, she wouldn't bring something up for no reason like a random bird unless that was a symbol that she was trying to involve. It feels like that joke song of how to write every country song ever... but with eighteen hundreds flair
I write poetry to express myself and to process things I have experienced or that burden me. I don't write poetry to compete and to compare myself. AI can therefore only kill poetry if it kills the people who write poetry for self expression, to express their feelings and thoughts.
Surprise surprise, an average poet cannot compete with either top-tier poets or statistical models used to plagiarise top-tier poets! Everything about AI (both hype and panic surrounding it) goes from exciting or scary to plain stupud the moment you realise it's literally just a statistical model.
The real question here isn't "human poet vs. AI poet," because humans, too, can imitate Dickinson, Eliot, et al. The question should be "human imitation poet vs. AI imitation poet." Do we honestly suspect an AI could produce a Dickinson imitation as convincing as an MFA/PhD published poet deeply versed in Dickinson? And then, the still-larger question: Is that question even interesting? AI poetry can be worthwhile if it is original, speaking from the position of an AI. I might be alone here, but I found "they forgot about me" to be really compelling and actually passionate. It's going to haunt me.
I've been trying to understand all the attention being placed on AI. Sometimes I'll see something it does that turns out fairly well but my opinion of it now is that it reminds me a bit of the early stages of eBook design software. There was so much hype around the tech that allowed you to make eBooks for devices. Over the years since the early 2010s that tech hasn't progressed a whole lot and I wonder if we will see a similar things with AI? Will the AI in five or ten years be vastly better then it is in 2025?
I can’t help but wonder the same thing! It’s frustrating how we’ll have to wait quite a while before we know, haha. In the meantime, we’ll just keep producing the best art we can as humans.
@@roseCatcher_ Reality? I'm curious what you are referring to as reality in this context? I am actually not sure what the reality of AI is. The tech is relatively new and even the leaders in tech have made wildly wrong productions. Bill Gates wrote a book called The Road Ahead I would recommend reading to his how well his technology ideas from the 1990s have aged. The predictions of tech are just that, only predictions.
@@roseCatcher_ I'm curious what you are referring to as reality in this context? I don't know what AI will be in the long run. The tech is relatively new and even the leaders in tech have made wrong productions. Bill Gates wrote a book called The Road Ahead that has sections which haven't aged well. When people say what tech is going to be in future years it is just an opinion.
@@RoughestDrafts There are two opposing types of bias going on. One is that a lot of people can make a ton of money if AI is successful which should make us ask the question - do these investors believe in the tech or do they just want to get paid? The other bias, as you mentioned in the video, is that many people want to believe that human output has value that is greater then a robot. I guess we will find out over time!
Huh? The first poem doesn't even make sense. What does "I watched it with a gentle talk" mean, or "and felt the world amass"? Amass _what?_ They don't even work as allegory, the only way it would be valid is if they were intentionally incongruous, if it was meant to be nonsense like Jabberwocky. I think a lot of people here aren't giving their reading comprehension enough credit and choosing to assume that the first poem is something more than it is, literally gibberish. Trust your instincts on that more.
They are both very crap. For comparison: A Bird, came down the Walk - Emily Dickinson A Bird, came down the Walk - He did not know I saw - He bit an Angle Worm in halves And ate the fellow, raw, And then, he drank a Dew From a convenient Grass - And then hopped sidewise to the Wall To let a Beetle pass - He glanced with rapid eyes, That hurried all abroad - They looked like frightened Beads, I thought, He stirred his Velvet Head. - Like one in danger, Cautious, I offered him a Crumb, And he unrolled his feathers, And rowed him softer Home - Than Oars divide the Ocean, Too silver for a seam, Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon, Leap, plashless as they swim.
after you learned that they were ai i'm sure. for mediums like poetry, generative ai, llms are just as good if not better than people for better or worse.
@@wilthomasNo, absolutely not. I thought they were both really bad before he said they were both AI. I also thought the second one was AI-sounding before he said so, I just had to take his word for it that it wasn't. None of the AI poems in this were good, maybe a couple okay lines in each at max (including the straight-up stolen lines). They were all nothing-burgers that reiterated themselves over and over in cliché ways with no point. There's no "for better or worse, AI is better at poetry 🤪," not EVERYONE is as bad at telling as you. I think you are just not very knowledgeable on poetry. I also think you just can't tell AI from real in general. The generational tells from the AI are blatantly obvious. + There's a lot of unique techniques that go into poetry and is very tailored, it is not a medium that lends itself to LLMs. It doesn't even make sense to suggest otherwise based on the inherent nature of LLMs.
i really enjoyed the interview portion, what a fascinating topic! it’s already been pointed out but it definitely rings a little like insta poetry. but y’know good on people for getting into poetry in some way!
I suppose that if anything, the study may entice malicious attempts of selling AI poetry under the umbrella of being human-made to deceive the readers into providing better reviews, utilising that presented difficulty of differentiating between AI and human-written texts. I will admit, though, that as a non-expert, aka probably what the study meant as people who do not actively engage with poetry, I was pretty touched by the 2nd poem in the intro. I suppose it is that quirk of GPT poetry that it is more schematic and easier to comprehend. As also someone who studies English philology, I am not further surprised I got touched a bit more easily by the AI poems, for I've had to endure some of the poetry shenanigans like 'The Pulley', which we all studied more or less in depth (which is why I probably like Jabberwocky the most - it's a linguistic paradise for imagination, for freedom of interpretation).
Also a non-expert/poetry casual and it's always been my opinion that poems more than prose can be utter dross at times. Usually I could appreciate the novels in my school curriculum, even if a particular style of writing or setting wasn't for me; I could at least see the value in the work and why it was chosen. With some poems, though... I've enjoyed some of these AI poems far, far, far more than I ever appreciated the majority of human poems I was forced to read in class. I found poetry an interesting topic for this AI video because that category of writing is in itself an acquired taste. An AI which writes poems with less imagination and more "consistent internal logic" would naturally appeal to a wider audience...one would think.
As I was watching the video, I couldn't help but wonder if they had anyone consulting on the study who themselves studied poetry. That seems like something that would have been important to have -- an actual expert or two in a relevant field providing consultation. Perhaps helping them to select the range of poets and poems they would include. Because the thing is, even a lot of the very talented poets in my MFA Creative Writing program didn't like or find it easy to engage with Shakespeare or T.S. Elliot or Plath. So, I kind of wonder if the study results would have looked different (both in terms of how readers felt about the poetry, and in terms of how easy it was for the AI to replicate), if the researchers had used more contemporary poets and poetry in the study.
@@gary.h.turner she's just a random girl that likes writing. At least we were told that much in the video. You can't deduce anything about the actual study basing on her qualification, that doesn't make sense
That could be the next study. But generally studies choose samples that can be generalized. So it makes sense because the average person can’t distinguish.
As a poetry specialist, it is fairly easy to distinguish between a poet and AI, both from the point of view of content and expression. It is also easy to judge from the quality of the poem itself. AI can evidently do writers-group poetry stuff, I've still to see anything in any way literary or poetic. If it can't do a 'simple' poet like Dickinson, how would it handle Shakespeare sonnets or anything by Baudelaire, Lorca or Goethe?
Math is a formula, but poetry is an art form. There is no human element to solving math, the answer is the exact same when AI does it too. But when 1s and 0s start creating poems, which EXIST to explore HUMAN emotion, the waters are incredibly muddied.
ARTISTS, DON'T WORRY! AI will always only be able to reinforce, never reinvent, which is why poetry (and all other art for that matter) will not be replaced by such a machine.
Humans are also limited by only really being able to combine ideas from various influences and not really capable of creating anything entirely new from nothing. The AI we are familiar with has generally been designed specifically to copy existing styles, it has been an experiment in blending in and not so much at creativity. We should not assume that AI can't be as creative as us, we just haven't really seen enough yet beside the intentionally generic stuff. A lot of the AI slop we have comes from the a relatively small selection of AI systems, we haven't really explored the potential of AI in general as much as you may think.
As much as I value optimism & I’ll defend this comment any day! I can’t help but be pessimistic especially with with corporate interests devoid of any humanistic values We’ve seen it before, technology that doesn’t create real value but is used to offer convenience at the cost of depth A.I doesn’t need to be as good as humans just 50% is enough to monetize & take up majority of the “market share” most industry’s goals is monopoly. I feel figuring out whether or not A.I is as good as us is a massive intentional distraction, we should be more aggressively pushing for strong regulation & gathering bargaining power for ourselves!
Note the wording here. "Non-experts prefered". So... what? You need to be a damn expert to enjoy poetry? Is that what is precursor to it? I feel like too much of this discussion start to veer into the realm of "stupid people ruining it". The "stupid people" being normal people who aren't exactly massive poetry consumers. This then leads to elitism and feelings of superiority, like if AI is trying to "kill poetry" with it's mediocrity and simplicity. But what it really means is that most poetry is simply a niché and isn't for everyone. It just highlights how unpopular poetry is. I think thihs is mainly due to schools not teaching kids enough about it, ask them to do poetry and learn to read it. But it could also open up a discussion that is similar to "modern art" and how unaproachable and pretentious it can be with poetry.
i was listening to hyperpop the other day - a genre that is already very synthetic sounding in its nature - and spotify auto played me a song that was 100% made by AI. it was from an artist with no description and only one album. the only way i was able to tell that it was AI was through the harshly fake vocals that AI models tend to produce - it almost slipped under my radar during my listening session, and that scares me.
At the start of the video I found the two poems bland, although I did prefer one, I preferred it bc was less on-the-nose (by a minimal margin). And learning they were both generated made entire sense to me. I've always been of the mindset that generative AI will always make the most "common denominator" product-both in text and image. Thanks to me being an artist (hence having a well trained eye) and my dad working in tech since the 80s and being able to teach me how these models work and deliver the results. Glad to see this video analyze that as well as how engaging with every post as possibly generated can hurt how you engage entirely, it's a fine balance that I think many are just grappling with. Also School of Plot was spot on with some of their pattern recognition, a lot of that is a byproduct of how a model is reinforced, I hope people use some of those tips!
It would be interesting to compare results between two different countries: one where poetry is not read by most people, and another where poetry remains a lot more popular.
i wanted to use a generative music program as a tool to help with a song, but not only would anything I made using that tool legally belong to the "AI" company, it was only capable of making extremely generic facebook ad music and couldnt produce anything new or interesting or even very specific.
This is my chance to come out as someone who just generally doesn't "get" poetry. Like that study said, i also tend to find a lot of poetry to be fairly nonsensical BUT that doesn't mean I don't respect it. Poetry is a more abstract way of converting ideas and feelings to the spoken word, often restrained by the choice of style. I think of it sorta like drinking wine as a non sommelier versus someone with training. It's likely the sommelier will identify more specific traits of the wine in a sorta objective way, but I don't think that means either of us would enjoy wine more than the other just because one of us is more trained in appreciating the product, or at least describing our appreciation. I do like cool pretty words in poetry even if I struggle to grasp what the author is going for. 🤷
Poetry is not like wine, and this analogy makes It sound like these are just a few superfluous, fussy details that are being missed, rather than the actual substance and essence of what poetry is. There's depth in there, and if you are just reading at a surface level, and can't get anything more than pretty words, you're missing the poetry. It's more than simply enjoying it, there's value there. Poetry is about engaging the intellect, it's not there to merely be something to read.
A big problem that many people have with poetry is that they're only presented with poems from radically different eras than their own. Modern poetry is (usually) very accessible. However, it does require that the reader spend more time with the words and the scene, which is a kind of reading most people don't do. If you've ever been moved by song lyrics, that is how poetry can often be. The other issue is that poetry isn't a genre, but a medium like movies or video games. There are tons of different genres and styles. Some are more bombastic and straightforward, some are more opaque and mysterious. I prefer to write poetry in familiar language, with little-to-no rhythmic structure and no rhyming. There are some "fancy" academic forms I like, but I don't often use them anymore because I feel like they are usually pretentious and inaccessible. My poems also tend to be very heavy on natural imagery, which some people like and others don't. A lot of successful modern poetry is more confessional, like an incredibly raw and personal look into someone's life and their relationships. Some of that I can't stand and some of it is absolutely brilliant. The elements of poetry I do enjoy are its ability to use metaphor and imagery to have double meanings, the ability to utilize that meaning and imagery without necessarily needing a narrative, the ability to forgo grammar and create your own rules, and the ability to meditate on something without "big concepts" like world building and characters. (These can still be in a poem, but unlike normal stories they don't have to be.) If you want to talk about something in a deep, creative way, it allows you to distill only the most necessary parts and pair it down to the barest it can be. In that way, the topic or point you want to make can be as polished and intense as possible, like music. It also allows crossover with other art like music or visual art, because poetry can have custom rules that regular prose writing cannot. All that to say, I hope you can find some interesting modern poetry to experience some of this medium in a more fun way. Like with movies and games, often the only way to tell if you like a genre is to give it a try, so you may have to read more poetry you don't like until you find some that you do. Luckily, most poems are short so you can sample genres pretty quickly. Find some free literary journals online and stuff published for free from the Poetry Foundation website just to see what people are up to, you may be suprised!
It's so sad that whenever we're trying to enjoy an artform we have to wonder if it was created by a human or stolen from humans by an AI. Art is a way for so many people to find comfort, express their emotions, feel heard and seen. It's such a beautiful way that we have found to communicate with each other and impact each other. I think it's fascinating that humans were even able to discover such a thing. It's a disappointment that now the internet is filled with AI "art", exploitative softwares and people who often disrespect the artforms they try to immitate. What stops me from finding people enjoying AI art to be beautiful is the way it's created. The databases are filled with information of people who didn't even know what they post was used in this way, living artists are often mimicked without their consent, etc. AI art could be beautiful and AI could be a valid and useful tool if these corporations tried to be ethical and respectful and if people tried to be more honest about their usage of AI. It's sad, that AI was built on dishonesty :(( great video as always!!
Why the need to try to see this as a "valid" tool? Why do you cling to the mindset of these developers who try to push these things into everyone's life just for their profit? The only real valid use ai could have is to help you connect with real artists and real art How does "consent" makes the death or art """ethical"""? Is suicide also a good thing only because the one doing it "wants" it?
theres also some big differences between different models, i find that claude is like atleast twice as good as chatgpt when it comes to writing, especially on specific topics and not just grand scale meandering
Hi I literally do not comment on youtube videos but here is the one of the biggest errors of the study in my opinion: That it was asked to write in the "style of" x poet! THAT STYLE WOULD NOT EXIST WITHOUT THOSE HUMAN POETS WRITING AND EXISTING IN THE FIRST PLACE!!!!!!! The only reason GPT could write those poems was because of their human contributions to literature and imo detracts from the findings about "AI poems." Among MANY things, if I were to do this study again (and duh I'm no expert) I would ask GPT to create its "own" poems instead of ones in the style of existing human poets. That would make more sense and be more interesting to me as well as lend more legitimacy to any findings. Just a thought!!
i really love your channel and the thought and nuance you put into discussing potentially complex topics, as well as your overwhelming willingness to allow the words of other people fill in where your expertise is lacking. i look forward to hearing everything you have to say in the coming year ^_^
The problem is that in order to actually comprehend what constitutes even a mediocre poem you need to read. And I don't mean comprehend in an analytical sense, I mean even in the simplest and most intrinsic reactions to poem, that kneejerk response and feeling. It's an inevitable reality that taste only comes to those who consume, and the sad reality is that people just don't read poetry anymore. It's why instagram poetry gets popular, or why a webnovel with incessant cliches and tropes the size of Jupiter can amass thousands of likes. If people do not have taste, which only comes with genuinely consuming a format, it not only denies any ability to differentiate good from bad, but it also stunts their ability to enjoy that thing anyway. Even if many people are saying the AI poetry is better it means so much less to them than the human poetry means to those who read poetry. I'm sorry but 'love' without taste is tolerance at best. I believe that I feel more strongly about books I've given a 5 to than how my friend (who quite literally never reads) feels about the book he said was his favourite when I asked if he had one. Maybe it's obnoxious. I'm okay if it comes across as that, but that's just how it is. In the same way that I have no taste in Formula 1-I don't watch.
I think the point about ChatGPT writing about general subjects is the major reason as to why it’s deemed as better poetry by a layman with no foreknowledge of poetry. On average a random person plucked off the street is more likely to relate to and understand a poem about “hope” or “the stars” or “life” than a more niche human experience that a real author is writing about. It’s generalisation is what makes it appealing, it appeals to the common denominator.
Poetry is about expressing the ineffable in as few words as possible, striking a vivid visions into the mind of the reader. Therefore, for an original poet, say of nondual philosophies there wouldn't really be a problem with AI since AI is incapable of experience.
Human poems are about lived experience i.e. messy, idiosyncratic and many implied but not ‘suface’ meanings. AI is formulaic and sterile. Most people are seduced by extremely bad poetry on the internet that (most certainly in the case of the ‘genre’ of insta poems) are facile and simplistic i.e. like AI so … Robot poetry beautiful - nah - not wise at all just naive. (In the true sense of naive). It’s the same with ‘fine art’ - ask AI to draw or paint something ‘in the style of’ and it fails. I’m not talking about the graphic arts, manga etc but established fine artists. The attitude of ‘all shall have prizes’ just shows absolutely no discrimination I’m afraid. AI is a bit like the ending of the Russian director’s Tarkovsky’s film ‘Solaris’ where the planet tries to replicate and manifest things from the astronaut’s psyche and memory and gets the simulacrum all wrong.
The idea behind the title is very reminiscent of Dead Poets Society’s school poetry text.. the first page of their introduction to be precise, if you know the film. Not good, really not good. 😊
I think there's a level to which both the researchers and people in general overthink why a result like this would happen. Generative AI creates output in a way that's very similar to "design by committee". It's not useful to think of it as "inhumane" because AI can only output what is essentially more and more complicated riffs on human output. At the danger of romanticizing it, AI outputs are "human" because they're products of the aggregate of the human culture on which it was trained, in a kind of Venn diagram of all its training material. Of course the average person would find AI output appealing at some point, when the outputs are themselves an expression of human averages. If anything, the expectation of art is that it shouldn't appeal to the average person, because art is made by individuals, and what works or is appealing to one individual isn't to another. There are no books, paintings, movies or songs that are sublime to all people, and the more personally appealing a work is to one, the less appealing it is likely to be to someone else. An artist of vision and integrity doesn't sit down and contrive works for some amorphous average of the human ape, and the artists that do, tend to produce things that, while perhaps moderately pleasing to a great many, leaves little in terms of lasting and substantive impact on any one individual in particular. Hence, I would expect well-trained AI outputs to be tepidly pleasing to a general audience, because it is on the metrics of generality by which the outputs are determined. In this, I don't see a great distinction between such outputs and the commercialized tripe you see, for example, in a lot of modern Hollywood cinema or AAA video games, which despite being made by humans, are made according to a model that is more or less equivalent - namely the utility of pluralistic averages.
This kind of news really gets my blood pressure up, and makes me long for a real-life Butlerian jihad. For all the promoted applications of AI, and for all the genuine utility of it in the sciences, its biggest effect has been to replace the oldest, most genuinely *human* endeavors, i.e., art, music, and poetry, with shallow simulacra.
Isn't that totally pointless? Poetry is the most basic expression of emotions. Not everyone can paint what they feel or play music but vast majority of people can speak and use written words to express themselves... why would you use AI for that, also if you write detailed prompt isn't that basically expressing emotions in written word?
@@spiralsausageno it's an expression of the ai's accumulation of data, an actual poet writes each line deliberately with a message, brainstorming ideas that are unique and new, full of similes, metaphors, symbols, allegories, allusions, conceits, metonymy and so on.. a poem is not "i am sad" written in flowery language, none of those generated lines have anything to do with you.
as for you, if you can't express yourself, pick up a pen and practice, or write a diary, no need to encroach upon an actual artist or writer's domain, we aren't going around pretending to be doctors or engineers. so we don't need quacks pretending to be artists either.
I was trying so hard to find the AI poem like "hm.. idk.. the second one feels AI?" but then you revealed the first was AI and then the second one too and I was like "well damn!"
That's because people don't understand the point of poetry. The AI can throw words around in a blender, and make them sound nice. But, people can layer intense concepts, and have imaginative scope and cogency AI can never have. We can build concepts through logic, and reach higher principles than the surface.
I love your channel, and the advent of ai has been a source of discouragement across the creative landscape. Ads showing how you can build a business around ai books, clearly ai generated videos from script to VO to editing are getting views on YT, etc. I appreciate your honest thoughts and the throughline (and endnote) of hope :)
No! it will never - speaking about the AI we have today. AI that is trained on the work of others that has no experience itself will never surpass the human experience. We are now in the phase just past the Turing test. It's way too hard to truly tell which is human and which is AI for most things. AI "engineers" are basically like hound dogs trying to trick you and get the last laugh. The difference is that even if a piece of music, art, or literature *is* AI generated, it immediately loses all my interest because I know there is no soul behind it. There is no joy, no suffering, no experience that comes with it.
My first thought was, that in human written poetry, the structure could "suffer" because of the meaning and imagery poet wants to express, with such little imperfections adding to overall experience, giving it a texture so to say, while AI mainly focuses the language part, with any meaning or imagery easily conforming to the structure and thus making it more palatable for non-expert readers.
I'm not worried too much about fake AI poems because AI does not prevent others from engaging with my poetry (which is unpublished as of yet) that I've written to communicate a piece of myself and my experience to another human person. If I hand a poem to a friend, the relationship that we have will be sufficient. I think that the arts will have to really tap into the relational/human element that forms the context for all artistic human expression.
I feel that alot of this comes from a lack of familiarity with the style of AI. In the section of with Sitara, it was interesting to see how much of it was about the 'tells' which make ChatGPT stand out. I realised that my lack of familiarity with ChatGPT led to me misidentifying many of these poems as I expected ChatGPT to act in a different way than it seems to.
I think that one key aspect here is that in producing poems which are easy to understand, have no literary allusions etc., the AI poems have failed to fulfil their task, which is to imitate the poets who don’t have simple or straightforward messages. You mentioned the ‘non-expert’ subjects which plays into this. Whether they’re ‘better’ is a much more unrelated question.
Hmm, ya got me, I thought the second was Dickinson. Pray, or simply sit and fold (like sitting and folding your hands, the action of praying without actually praying) is very evocative imagery. Maybe this means I need to read more poetry.
Imo, ai poem is “beautiful generic” at best. As someone with zero experience with poem. I want to create one for my story. But as I have direction and some keyword in mind. I asked AI to create it. Yikes, it separated my keyword and don’t understand my intentions. So I tried to create one and ask it for better rhyme and grammar. Still yikes, it is the most forced rhyme I ever felt and the words it picked are not even makes sense. So, be very specific. Ai can pretty much can’t do that
Yeah, I did the Shakespeare part of it because he’s the writer whose work I’m more familiar with. I got it all correct, as GPT seems to think Shakespeare only writes about women he likes. Also, ChatGPT uses very simple simile a ton, whereas Shakespeare uses much more complex wordplay, touching on alternate meanings of the words and similar sounds, making his poetry naturally dance around in your mind, floating between the different meanings
I’m only 6 min and I want to weigh in, ha ha. A year or so ago I remember YT being flooded with “artists” bemoaning the fact that they were being replaced by AI. So, I had to check it out and see what beautiful new avenues AI had forged into the visual arts. Well, it turns out, what it was doing was spitting out a bunch of illustration and manga and whatever. Not art at all. Craft maybe? Illustration certainly but not capital A art. I have about as much fear for real poetry being replaced by AI as I do for High Art, Beaux Arts, fine art, call it what you want, falling victim to the same. AGI implies intelligence. Not emotion. I have not seen any/many scientists or developers in the field make any claims to replicating emotion in AGI (artificial general intelligence, which is what I think we are probably talking about here). If you have decent taste, and are fairly literate, you will very likely be moved by only the human stuff. And I think there’s one more thing: remember how cubism developed? Artist realized a machine was doing what they used to do. Reflect/represent reality. Abstract artists decided to move ahead of the camera and show something more about the soul. And we got some of the greatest works in human history. Why do we think poets would react any differently? Anyway, I haven’t finished the vid, maybe OP addresses what I have. Just had to get this in.
AI writing brings me great solace. Any time a social media comment irks me, I just tell myself, "This is a bot," and I can remove myself without feeling the urge to reply
There will always be people who love the human thing more, so i'm sure people will make little writing groups. Human peotry isnt dead because of ai if its rated higher then humans, it may even strengthen it, cause ai can only write cliche stuff (most of the time).
Even if AI peoms can still be distinguished from human-written poems now, it seems plausible that this might not be the case in the near future, or even now, if we use more complcated prompts. If so, what will then be the consequences on the art of poetry?
The main critiques I’ve in this video come from a lack of prompting. It doesn’t do slant rhymes then tell it to do so. It’s too broad… give it a specific subject etc etc
Happy new year RD! I’ve found your videos really insightful and refreshingly nuanced. I’ve learned a lot about poetry where even a year ago I just felt like I wasn’t smart enough for it. Looking forward to more great vids from you in 2025 :)
Kinda confirmed what I already do / thought, which is that the less I can understand a poem the more likely it's made by a human, I actually applied this thinking to the 2 poem purposed in the beginning of the video, before realizing that it was a bait lol
This video raises so many questions for me. I write some poetry, about 2 poems a year on average, and have memorised about a 100 poems from great poets from my native language, mainly early 20th and late 19th century. However, i know virtually nothing about any form of “poetry theory”. Would i be considered an expert or a layman? I personally believe understanding poetry is the same as understanding something like love or beauty in your own life. Would it help to read books on those things? Probably a little bit, but in the end, i would lean towards saying someone who has just spend his whole life reading books and rationally analyzing these aspects of life, would know virtually nothing compared to someone who read nothing at all, but experienced many of the paradoxes, beauties and tragedies in life first hand. Maybe that person would know even a bit more if he had actually also taken some time to read, but even without doing so, he would probably be a lot closer to “understanding” poetry. I could even argue truely understanding poetry is impossible; poetry strives to find words for what is essentially impossible to say. I think it might very well be possible that AI at some point can write poems even so called “experts” would rate better than poems by the greats (Dickinson, Goethe, Dante, Homer, you name it). But maybe poetry is so much linked to communication, that it should not be valued solely on the merits of the isolated artwork. Maybe poetry is actually a sort of cry for help from one person to another: “listener, help me, there is so much mystery i experience! Please understand me, even though my words fall short.” As such, poetry has importance only in the relation of one person to another. Even from this perspective, AI poetry would still have at least some poetic value, as it is created on the basis of the humans who went before it and attempted to write. However, the value is present here only in a very indirect way, compared to poems from real humans, because then, by reading poetry, we actually step into a direct relationship with another human, even if that person has been dead for centuries. I think there is too much a tendency to create poetry as independent artworks. Write to the people you know, to the people you love! And read what those people write to you! Even if they are less skilled writers than some kind of computer program, at least they are real people, who want to be understood and who want to be loved!
I do want to "imagine the hand" and to know that someone expressed themselves to create the poem. In fact, the expression poetry allows is a separate and distinct value, apart from the reception of it.
Their chosen groups were wrong. A person not trained in how to read poetry is, of course, going to favor AI poetry because AI will write to make the cursory reading make sense, but the deeper meaning is absent (as in the case of the first Dickinson poem) or merely accidental (yet still superficial as in the second poem), while a trained poet will write for the deeper meaning to make sense and unfold more meaning the more we consider it, while the cursory reading of their poem may be confusing at first, which nudges us to go deeper. That a deeper meaning is present in a human poem is obvious. No such complexity is present in the AI poetry. My point is that they should only have used poetry experts, these are in the best position to determine whether a poem is from a human or an AI. So no, poetry is not dead. A randomized group, no matter how large, is not what is needed. How many of them have little to no experience with poetry or simply don't like it? At the very least, Only those who read poetry regularly, and thus love poetry, should have been used.
I still think it's a skill prompt issue and they could've created deeper sounding poems (asking it to use older English, use words that are dissonant in parts and don't fully rhyme, especially where there's tension, and other typical poetic techniques). Once you study a lot of poetry it gets predictable
Im a physicist by training. I could never imagine someone making a study claiming non experts could not tell the difference between a physicists writing of a paper and an AIs, implying we no longer needsphysicist, just because the general population cannot tell the difference.
My guess is that most experts in poetry simply would not be fooled by most AI generated poetry. What this all tends to show is that education in poetry appreciation is simply lacking in most people in the same way that most people are also mostly innumerate because they lack a sound education in mathematics.
Capitalism has never been about creating actual art, it just needs marketable slop. Art will never die because most people seek some sort of self expression. What self respecting artist would stop doing art if they didnt get paid for it?
Given the fact that a lot of the arts in current times tend toward "Emperor's New Clothes" levels of nonsense, it's no doubt that AI can produce something better by amalgamating the best that history has to offer. The title to this video should more accurately read "old poetry is better than new poetry" lol.....I suspect the same would happen in architecture, fashion, choreography, and classical music....to name only a few .
I went to school for creative writing, specializing in poetry. I've been messing around with AI for poetry since GPT-2. One thing I've noticed is that ChatGPT is purposefully broken in how it can produce poetry. There is some kind of prompt that forces it to rhyme and do certain predictable structures. It can repeat the rules and techniques used in other poetic forms, but it's hard-coded to be unable to replicate them, ruining its ability to produce modern poetry. It has a similar issue with prose, being forced to write pithy wrap-up summarizing endings. There is also the major problem that it doesn't have a point it's trying to make. It's not creating novel insight into things or adding meaning to memory. It's just imitating form. True style over substance.
Also trying its best to sound less controversial and general, often leading to broad happy endings or if forced to write something sad, very average sad endings, nothing unique or desperate or human, no sudden departures from form, no weird word choices, metaphors or metonymy, impressive observations, etc. It's often very easy to tell, but then again, random people not that good in poetry could also come up with mediocre stuff like that so it isn't absolutely certain.. but yeah I just call them all slop and move on with actual good writing.
Another roughest draft essay to close out the new year! Let’s GO! Hope you have a happy new year, though! Here’s to more poetry (both good and bad) in the new year.
the remarks 24:30 yet - this is because the source corpus is still yet too limited and the prompts too general and unspecific, were one to demand an actual theme or exploration ot one and something broadly and feely avialiable on the internet, the chat could imitate it - but ask it to write an hymn in the ancient Akkadian style - it would fail as it has too little data to do that - but the data it has available grows and grows - in a mere year it would be several time more than it is now
every time i hear about how most people find most poetry confusing and nonsensical and unrewarding i get an ego boost because ive never read a poem i didnt care about
First, All hail the Mighty Algo! Next, I would urge everyone to read Mary Kinzie's A Poet's Guide to Poetry. I learned so much from that book. I think I will read it again. Also, if you want to talk about poetry & rhetoric, check out Writing with Andrew. Great channel. I enjoyed your take & the video. Keep up the good work.
I did the test and only got two wrong (and one of them I really wasn’t sure about) - and I know none of these poets well; a few (Plath, Lasky) not at all. One thing you start to notice is how similar in content all of the AI poems are, regardless of the forms they’re imitating. Several people in the video made a similar point: vague generalities, no telling details, and what I can only call an absence of any signs of refinement. One certainly does not need to be any kind of expert in poetry to pick up on such things; rather, just a relatively developed aesthetic sense (eg, any time I saw stars “twinkling” in a poem, it was instant AI).
The AI's faults do not really mean anything since you can just prompt it to be more accurate. And to the contrary, the poetry will not have any real meaning if it is no conscious mind behind it.
I was so relieved when you revealed both were AI! 😂 the second one is so trite, and the first so clumsy I was beginning to think Emily Dickinson was just not as good a poet as I remembered! 😅
![Felix "Unfair" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Oswujxm2Ag0/mqdefault.jpg)
I hate that reading anything from the internet has become a bunch of mind games trying to figure out if it was made by AI
maybe we are written by AI?
Maybe just don't?
That's a biggest compliment for people creating AI
@@idontknow4350In the same way that mentioning how many people have died to a disease is a compliment to that disease
@@idontknow4350 So long as they ignore the seething hatred I feel for it, sure.
The fact that you, a human, knows enough about Dickinson to have an educated opinion about her work and prose makes you the type of expert that would have been excluded from the study
The study was essentially trying to prove the main point of AI:
The average person with minimal knowledge on a subject will be happy with mediocre, meaningless slop
@@bigoafboulderbrain_ people dont have time to leisurely read anymore
@@sp123 You're leisurely reading this youtube comment section, so you're kind of contradicting yourself.
@@oldrego Reading an online comment on a moving form of visual media is only slightly different from sitting down and willingingly engaging on words upon pages
@@bigoafboulderbrain_it could also be the dark truth that much of poetry itself is often slop that robots can emulate very easily by simply reading a bunch of poems and vomiting it back up.
In my opinion, the biggest problem is that rather than enjoying and reflecting on each other’s poems and the life experience reflected by them, we are in the habit of rating and comparing everything, whereby we assign fame, social status and capital.
this is like a ground level rooted problem, unsolvable
Thats why AI doesn't matter. It comes from a civilizational mindset built on sand anyway. We're about to leap away from some team captain telling us what is because we now have a third witness. I won't even talk to a cop without Chat GTP now. And I won't talk to my lawyer either. I trust none of you. Some humans are scared because they know we won't have to trust their "knowledge" anymore.
No I just don't like modern poetry.
You erase people like me who genuinely like poems that are relatable and understandable.
Your Alienation from every day people is why poetry got to this point.
The only reflection on a bad poem is that it sucks
@@JohnDoe927 isn't it that seeking relatable content is common because modern everyday life is kind of dull, repetitive and meaningless and doesn't let people enjoying things outside our daily struggles? I too like relatable things, but I don't want it to be only that! We are not the only person existing for poetry to be read. It definetely relates to how we are used to personalized content to be rated for ourselves online, where we now basically need to exist in order to be part of our society.
AI poetry is just like Insta-poetry in one key way - it's digestable and cliché. Sadly a lot of readers will gravitate towards it for those exact reasons.
Came to the comments to say this!!
You can't control how others consume media, nor should you seek to. People can and do enjoy things no matter how cliche or mediocre, yourself included. What you should focus on instead, if you feel there's something wrong with the amount of mediocre content online, is making more quality content people enjoy.
Prose became insta for many people. The amounts of times I have seen advice: "don't use long descriptions in the book" is far too many to count. No descriptions, short sentences, no difficult verbiage, thrown instantly into purple prose or: "boasting off knowing thesaurus" - it's just literary McDonalds for masses nowadays.
@morezombies9685 Oh, I agree, I absolutely don't control how people consume content, and I'm not making any moral reflections on it at all! I'm just saying that media and the way we consume it shapes what becomes popular and currently, I think it's sad that it's decentivizing longer or more creative poetry. Nothing inherently wrong with consuming or writing insta-poetry!
The truth is, you've consumed a lot of AI content and you haven't even realized. You can only criticize what you notice after all
i heard the first poem and went, “oh ok this one is 100% ai,” and got jumpscared by the second poem also sounding like ai. i will never forgive you for making me choose one
A less talked about parallel to the fact that people are believing that AI things are human made, is that people are starting to believing human made things are AI. I've already seen this happen across the internet, people have said some of my comments are AI because I happened to write those comments in a similar style that ChatGPT is programmed to, I've seen posts on reddit where images sourced from publications like the new york times are just dismissed by loads of people because they just thought it looked "off".
Same. I was mad at having liked the second poem.
Same, so then I was like “yk the first one maybe wasn’t so bad, I didn’t pay attention to the text much anyway” only for him to jump scare my by announcing they were BOTH ai
I ended up choosing the first one as real despite the broken opening line simply because the second one felt way less like Dickinson in its voice even though it was actually saying something understandable 😅
Yea they both were weird
As a hobbyist writer who never plans to publish, I'd like to think, naively, that poetry and literature will continue to persist regardless of what technological advancement is going on around them because the desire to create will always be in us. It's not about whether AI can do it better; that's irrelevant, we create because it's in our nature to want to create and express.
I take deep issues with AI as it is now, it exists in a grey area where no DOUBT theft of intellectual property from real artists is taking place, but in thirty years when AI becomes more regulated, I don't actually think it matters whether a poem is from an AI or a human artist. If AI can create wonderful poetry as well, let it; what's important is that humans can still be compensated and appreciated commensurately for their work.
You're right. Human creativity will always shine bc each word, each brush stroke, each note, each pass a thumb over clay will ALWAYS have purpose and meaning. That purpose and drive is why our creativity is unmatched. No AI can ever reproduce what the human brain can make. If humans have one purpose it's creation.
I think it will persist. At least good poetry. There will be endless amounts of AI generated pornographic literature tho. Literature and poetry will persist because there's one thing ai can't do: being human and actually living. And you might ask "but can't ai know how life is throught data?". And the answer is no. It already collected literally all human knowledge, books, tv show, news, everything. What's gonna happen is that human literature is going to have to become more especfic. Because ai can already write a sci-fi book about the battle of good vs evil.
humans have been out played in chess and go for years but we still have human tournaments because we are interested in what humans can do.
also we often write for ourselves not others
I hope you are right about the reaching of regulations. If I look at the Internet, it seems obvious to me that it is a mess compared to what it could have been.
I'm worried it will be the same with AI technologies
I knew the first to be AI since I knew the original which goes like this:
A Bird, came down the Walk - (359)
By Emily Dickinson
A Bird, came down the Walk -
He did not know I saw -
He bit an Angle Worm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw,
And then, he drank a Dew
From a convenient Grass -
And then hopped sidewise to the Wall
To let a Beetle pass -
He glanced with rapid eyes,
That hurried all abroad -
They looked like frightened Beads, I thought,
He stirred his Velvet Head. -
Like one in danger, Cautious,
I offered him a Crumb,
And he unrolled his feathers,
And rowed him softer Home -
Than Oars divide the Ocean,
Too silver for a seam,
Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon,
Leap, plashless as they swim.
Notice the last two stanzas which - to me - makes this uniquely Dickinson's poetry.
As I was watching the video, one of my first questions regarded the population sampled for the study. The section starting at 5:51 was pretty informative, and aligned with what I expected. People rated AI poetry "better" because they found it easier to engage with. It's the same thing that makes so much of the showerthoughts-adjacent Instagram poetry so popular. It's simple ideas, expressed in an easily digestible way, that asks nothing of the reader. It's easy to process, but it's also easy to forget.
Turns out people genuinely like chicken nuggets
@@JohnDoe927 Absolutely! But just like chicken nuggets, there's little in the way of nutritional value in the slurried, compressed, battered, and fried mess that is Instagram poetry. It's like donuts for dinner. It tastes good when you're eating it, but 30 minutes later you're hungry for something a little meatier. I elaborated in another comment that I think the study was flawed by the ground up. I wonder what their results might have looked like if the the researchers had chosen poetry from more contemporary poets. There are a number of incredibly talented writers today who are creating beautiful works of poetry that are highly accessible to even the average reader. And I really think that most people who would tell you that they don't get poetry, or that it's too hard to understand, or that it's inaccessible -- they've really never given it a fair shake. They've never taken the time to sit down and try to engage with a poem outside of whatever they had to read in their freshman literature survey.
I like the fact that "better" AI poetry is just explicitly stolen poetry
Hit it in the nail
Uh no. Not at all.
According to the whistleblowers that “disappeared” that is definitely true
@@dirremoire How so lol? Many people would be charged with copyright claims if they published that poetry
Yes
Also! They chose poets of old with styles which are somewhat rigid and feel old to many readers, and more complex simply bcs they use different vocab and grammar than we’re used to. If they had actually used modern poetry .. even the more complex .. I. Believe there would’ve been more understanding, even from nonreaders
Thing is modern, more popular poetry is so shallow and unstructured that I wouldn't be surprised if AI would be even better at masking as human, even to experts
on this point it's important to remember that modern poetry was once seen to be nearly as much of a threat to english language poetry as AI is now--in part because of the abandonment of rigid style and the adoption of free-form poetry. indeed for many modern readers free-form is preferred and the poetic structures now considered archaic are left to wither, even abandoned as casualties by modern proponents of poetry such as yourself. we'll always have this problem in art.
My opinion is this: poetry was dead when people noticed it sat in an uncanny valley:
For most of human history, poetry was how most literary works were written.
But as time passed, things like the printing press, the opera, the novel, and the gramophone began to separate the spoken word into 2 categories:
Storytelling & Music.
And with each generation, poetry became more and more uncanny to listeners because it didn’t fit into either category. It was spoken like written word, yet seemed to have rhythm like music without instrumentation. For a lot of people, that’s not mentally palpable, thus uncanny.
with the more AI Poetry i read, i’ve noticed that poetry made by AI oftentimes have very common details in themselves. they rhyme, use cliched language, and they don't say much of anything emotionally impactful to wonder about. poetry is ‘good’ poetry when it expresses complex emotions and/or experiences. …complex emotions and/or experiences that an unthinking, unfeeling, preprogrammed machine couldn’t muster. however, upon watching this video, i am feeling worried. it seems that AI literature is demonstrably getting better, but i still don't believe that poetry can be killed if we continue to learn, teach, talk about, and consume real poetry by real poets, and eat up less AI "art" by people like jason allen, the AI "artist", lol.
The first example literally says something emotionally impactful though.
"For in that moment, I did see,
The wonder of all things,
The world that hums in mystery,
And all that it brings"
The third line there is brilliant, and if you didn't tell anyone who wrote it then they would agree. It's only when people are told it was AI that they change their mind. The truth is AI can write some pretty good poetry and it will only improve. It's better than that Rupi Kauer woman who wrote Milk And Honey, although that's not a high bar 😂
@@myhatmygandhi6217 i understand where you're coming from, and i agree with you that that's an emotionally impactful segment. but from my own personal standpoint, i see AI poetry as very similar in nature. it regularly has the same format, and as an artist and a poet, i don't exactly appreciate that. fyi, i was meaning to say that after i watched the video i then realized that AI poetry is improving, taking off, and become more favorable by consumers than ever before. (which i don't particularly see as a good thing!!) i acknowledge that my message wasn't clear enough though, and i appreciate your comment. have a pleasant day!
@@myhatmygandhi6217the fact that it was made by IA immediately invalidates it of any meaning or impact. It’s not really poetry. Like a hunter making deer sounds to trick their prey. The hunter has no idea what those sounds mean they just know deer like them
@@myhatmygandhi6217 I'm sorry, but I just have to fundamentally disagree. The stanza and entire poem is cliché, and has no real insights. The barely even rephrased ideas of "All things are filled with wonder" and "the world is filled with mystery" have been repeated ad nauseam to the point where the poem elicits a visceral feeling of disgust in me. I find no brilliance or even slight originality. But this may be party from my personal experience in America and seeing those ideas in American media so often.
AI (in this context) as it stands is the culmination of industrial/mass-produced art. It is still art but just utterly uninteresting as there is no real depth, because as you say there is no purpose to it.
AI is liberating in a way in that the production of these degrading-emanations, echoes of prior expressions formulated in the art it plunders are no longer forced unto human-laborers, replacing them with an automation (which was, unknowingly built by them.)
basically AI is nothing new, but it is the climax, atleast for now.
Ok so it's more like general illiteracy killed poetry and AI is just willing to lower itself to the level of the masses. Still upsetting but mostly this study tells us that the average person has no idea how to read poetry.
nah its more like poets are too pretentious and up their own asses.
@@pickwick3970 This phenomenon is also known as "I fancy no time to actually comprehending art and desire it all to be immediate, digestible, and requiring me to do no research or ponderation concerning any trascendental matter."
@@pickwick3970 i think it's both and poetry is just boring
@@pickwick3970 Poetry of the past was meant to record in oral tradition the history of entire peoples. If a "poet" is mad over getting competed by AI, they ought to live as all great poets before their time. Get a job, then write. Greaters writers are great men who just happened to write. People should seek happiness outside their literary careers.
I think a poet that appeals to 95% of people is superior to a poet that appeals to 5% of people. Even if those 5% of people think very highly of themselves.
I think this whole conundrum just shows the real nature of art. Art is not the piece or the product of art, Art is the process and the transformation that it produces on those who take it seriously.
11:00 what gave this away for me is that AI likes to create 'uplifting' and 'hopeful' poems so a lot of them would be about overcoming darkness and even if u give it a prompt such as a poem about heartbreak and how u feel defeatless, there's always gonna be that one or two lines that's like: "but I'll push forward and I'll find a way to move on". AI also likes to use the word 'light' and 'hope'for their poems (and we see them used here in uninteresting or non unique ways)
Theyre both AI
"The air is heavy, silence crawls,
Shadows press against cracked walls.
The clock ticks loud, then louder still,
Each second bends beneath its will.
No dawn awaits this endless night,
No solace veiled in muted light.
The heart beats slow, a hollow drum,
Echoes lost in what won’t come.
The mirror whispers shards of truth,
Each jagged edge, a stolen youth.
No fire burns, no spark remains,
Just empty echoes of refrains.
Let the void take what it must,
Ashes crumble, dreams to dust."
@@epicow_1973yes I know👍 just saying what gave the second poem away for me
You definitely got me in the beginning. I'm an avid reader of Emily Dickinson's poetry and most of my poetry is inspired by her way of writing. I definitely detected that both are AI generated from the beginning, but when you said it's not and it's from Dickinson, I couldn't believe it, I was devastated lol
Yeah the first poem was obviously trying too hard to be profound and ultimately wrapped around to being nonsense- the second one had this quality where it was just trying REALLY hard to make sure that you got what it was trying to say- to the extent that it ended up telling rather than showing. It felt it was beating me over the head with the point a little, which I just assumed was an artistic choice on Emily's part. I'm glad I was wrong about that
Yea lol for me I just have no clue what Emily's writing is like and was sure both were ai, but was 110% sure the second was AI. So I thought damn this Emily girl can't write.
First thoughts (outside of the general state of peer review) -
1. On the subject of opacity: (good) poetry is not (generally) willfully opaque. Much of the opacity is due to period language. A contemporary reader will find the language unclear in the same way they would find it difficult to see through a two hundred year old pane of glass. The language of a beat poet would be difficult to parse for many readers, and this "issue" also acts as a smokescreen for AI. It can create a facsimile of anachronistic language while simultaneously appearing clearer through the added context of it's modern language training.
2. In that vein, we're not comparing apples to apples. We're comparing human poetry to machine forgery. The actual poetry should be the control; a third group of human forgeries is necessary to draw conclusions on what the study is actually measuring.
3. Which poems were used? A world class poet does not exclusively produce world class poems. Additionally as stated in point 1, one of their critically acclaimed works at the time may currently be too anachronistic for the average reader to enjoy casually (or as casually as you can when you are put in a situation where you are necessarily performing criticism and analysis)
4. Paranoid is not the ideal mental state to read most poetry. The simpler, "easier" to understand "works" generated by AI are safer bets your primary motivation is to not be tricked. As an example: at the opening of this video I considered both works to be AI generated at one point or another. I thought the second poem was better, but in accordance with point 3, a work by Dickinson is not necessarily a *published* work by Dickinson. Was it lifted from a notebook? Was it published on reputation in desperate need of a paycheck?
The second poem is better but is that the game? Is the second poem better to trick me into believing it is the genuine article? Can this test be carried out honestly under the scrutiny of observation?
Thought provoking video, evidently.
I don't read poetry and I would probably fail this test miserably because I'm not well versed enough in the language of poetry to catch common Chat GPT mistakes.
I do, however, enjoy art and your discussion with Sitara reminded me a lot about the way I approach art these days and how with a trained eye I can tell a human drawing vs. AI with large amount of confidence.
You said that this little quiz was not an enjoyable way to read poetry, but sadly that's how I interact with art these days. I don't look at the drawing to enjoy it, instead I find that my first reaction is to zoom in and check "Are all fingers in place? Is geometry in the background coherent? Are small details drawn or is it a pixelated mess?". That's not a healthy way to enjoy something. It's really sad.
5:16
Once, a professor told me to rewrite my essay because it was "obvious that you used AI." I wasn’t exactly offended back then, I thought "Wow, I must be so good he thinks I’m an AI!" But yesterday, I saw an artist upset because people demanded proof that she had created her digital paintings from scratch-they didn’t believe she could do such work. AI has introduced a new layer of judgment, one that women have faced for years: the "This is too good to have been done by someone like you" attitude. Except now, it’s not a man they’re praising, but a machine.
"AI has introduced a new layer of judgment, one that women have faced for years" - so, you think only women are scrutinised for using AI?
@@marikothecheetah9342Can't speak for the commenter but that doesn't seem to be what they were saying, no.
@@marikothecheetah9342 men are scrutinised too, but op is referring to the age-old societal attitude of “men are smarter than women, therefore a woman couldn’t have done this,” an attitude which still exists today, only now AI provides an easy outlet of accusation.
@@wedding2710 so enlighten me what they meant, if not what they wrote. Maybe you read their mind.
@@marikothecheetah9342I think they meant that people are now receiving a class of criticisms that women tended to receive. I don't think they meant to exclude anyone.
2:00 Hand to god, I predicted this exactly. Saw the two poems and before reading them I thought "I bet the twist is both of these are made by AI". Then when you read the second one, I thought. "These two are AI but if not then the second one is really by Emily Dickenson."
Oh. I hate that I fell for the 2nd poem in the very beginning. That's terrifying.
chatgpt is very formulaic in its poetry all the time they rhyme and every stanza is 4 lines. and other forumlas like satara stated Its pretty easy to distinguish unless your someone who always use that style. With emily you will just have to know how she uses meter
In your defense, I did my best to try and trick you, haha
i knew it was a trick question, but i still believed him when he said it was real🥲
I feel like it also shows how suggestions can encourage someone to believe its real esp coming from a trusted source. that's an additional layer that can cause even a more conscious reader to get tripped up.
In the end, tricks are meant to trick ppl which is why it shouldn't be our sole responsibility to not be manipulated
I can say I did pick it up, too formuliac and not romantic. In poetry, she wouldn't bring something up for no reason like a random bird unless that was a symbol that she was trying to involve. It feels like that joke song of how to write every country song ever... but with eighteen hundreds flair
I write poetry to express myself and to process things I have experienced or that burden me. I don't write poetry to compete and to compare myself.
AI can therefore only kill poetry if it kills the people who write poetry for self expression, to express their feelings and thoughts.
Surprise surprise, an average poet cannot compete with either top-tier poets or statistical models used to plagiarise top-tier poets!
Everything about AI (both hype and panic surrounding it) goes from exciting or scary to plain stupud the moment you realise it's literally just a statistical model.
By this logic your brain is just a statistical model
@ictogon Your comment is a non sequitur, devoid of logic in the first place. Maybe _your_ brain is just a statistical model?
rich coming from a pile of amino acids
@@ictogon maybe, but your brain has WAY more input information that AI can only dream of.
Oh OK, I've just paused at 2:05 and am somewhat relieved they're both AI because neither struck me as very Dickinson. Hated having to choose!
The real question here isn't "human poet vs. AI poet," because humans, too, can imitate Dickinson, Eliot, et al. The question should be "human imitation poet vs. AI imitation poet." Do we honestly suspect an AI could produce a Dickinson imitation as convincing as an MFA/PhD published poet deeply versed in Dickinson? And then, the still-larger question: Is that question even interesting?
AI poetry can be worthwhile if it is original, speaking from the position of an AI. I might be alone here, but I found "they forgot about me" to be really compelling and actually passionate. It's going to haunt me.
I've been trying to understand all the attention being placed on AI. Sometimes I'll see something it does that turns out fairly well but my opinion of it now is that it reminds me a bit of the early stages of eBook design software. There was so much hype around the tech that allowed you to make eBooks for devices. Over the years since the early 2010s that tech hasn't progressed a whole lot and I wonder if we will see a similar things with AI? Will the AI in five or ten years be vastly better then it is in 2025?
I can’t help but wonder the same thing! It’s frustrating how we’ll have to wait quite a while before we know, haha. In the meantime, we’ll just keep producing the best art we can as humans.
It's super amusing to actually live and see the process of people convincing themselves against reality with the funniest of copes.
@@roseCatcher_ Reality? I'm curious what you are referring to as reality in this context? I am actually not sure what the reality of AI is. The tech is relatively new and even the leaders in tech have made wildly wrong productions. Bill Gates wrote a book called The Road Ahead I would recommend reading to his how well his technology ideas from the 1990s have aged. The predictions of tech are just that, only predictions.
@@roseCatcher_ I'm curious what you are referring to as reality in this context? I don't know what AI will be in the long run. The tech is relatively new and even the leaders in tech have made wrong productions. Bill Gates wrote a book called The Road Ahead that has sections which haven't aged well. When people say what tech is going to be in future years it is just an opinion.
@@RoughestDrafts There are two opposing types of bias going on. One is that a lot of people can make a ton of money if AI is successful which should make us ask the question - do these investors believe in the tech or do they just want to get paid?
The other bias, as you mentioned in the video, is that many people want to believe that human output has value that is greater then a robot. I guess we will find out over time!
Those poems are scary similar for someone like me who doesn’t know a lot about poetry
They couldn't be more different. The only similarity is that it's lines broken into stanzas.
@@TheCompositeKing you are no fun huh.
I had the same thought 😅
Huh? The first poem doesn't even make sense. What does "I watched it with a gentle talk" mean, or "and felt the world amass"? Amass _what?_ They don't even work as allegory, the only way it would be valid is if they were intentionally incongruous, if it was meant to be nonsense like Jabberwocky.
I think a lot of people here aren't giving their reading comprehension enough credit and choosing to assume that the first poem is something more than it is, literally gibberish. Trust your instincts on that more.
I thought both of the “Dickinson” poems were crap
They are both very crap.
For comparison: A Bird, came down the Walk - Emily Dickinson
A Bird, came down the Walk -
He did not know I saw -
He bit an Angle Worm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw,
And then, he drank a Dew
From a convenient Grass -
And then hopped sidewise to the Wall
To let a Beetle pass -
He glanced with rapid eyes,
That hurried all abroad -
They looked like frightened Beads, I thought,
He stirred his Velvet Head. -
Like one in danger, Cautious,
I offered him a Crumb,
And he unrolled his feathers,
And rowed him softer Home -
Than Oars divide the Ocean,
Too silver for a seam,
Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon,
Leap, plashless as they swim.
after you learned that they were ai i'm sure. for mediums like poetry, generative ai, llms are just as good if not better than people for better or worse.
@wilthomas nah they were both crap at the outset, those are not good poems
@@wilthomasNo, absolutely not. I thought they were both really bad before he said they were both AI. I also thought the second one was AI-sounding before he said so, I just had to take his word for it that it wasn't. None of the AI poems in this were good, maybe a couple okay lines in each at max (including the straight-up stolen lines). They were all nothing-burgers that reiterated themselves over and over in cliché ways with no point. There's no "for better or worse, AI is better at poetry 🤪," not EVERYONE is as bad at telling as you. I think you are just not very knowledgeable on poetry. I also think you just can't tell AI from real in general. The generational tells from the AI are blatantly obvious. + There's a lot of unique techniques that go into poetry and is very tailored, it is not a medium that lends itself to LLMs. It doesn't even make sense to suggest otherwise based on the inherent nature of LLMs.
@@JJ-nf3jr of course sure
i really enjoyed the interview portion, what a fascinating topic! it’s already been pointed out but it definitely rings a little like insta poetry. but y’know good on people for getting into poetry in some way!
I suppose that if anything, the study may entice malicious attempts of selling AI poetry under the umbrella of being human-made to deceive the readers into providing better reviews, utilising that presented difficulty of differentiating between AI and human-written texts.
I will admit, though, that as a non-expert, aka probably what the study meant as people who do not actively engage with poetry, I was pretty touched by the 2nd poem in the intro. I suppose it is that quirk of GPT poetry that it is more schematic and easier to comprehend. As also someone who studies English philology, I am not further surprised I got touched a bit more easily by the AI poems, for I've had to endure some of the poetry shenanigans like 'The Pulley', which we all studied more or less in depth (which is why I probably like Jabberwocky the most - it's a linguistic paradise for imagination, for freedom of interpretation).
Also a non-expert/poetry casual and it's always been my opinion that poems more than prose can be utter dross at times. Usually I could appreciate the novels in my school curriculum, even if a particular style of writing or setting wasn't for me; I could at least see the value in the work and why it was chosen. With some poems, though...
I've enjoyed some of these AI poems far, far, far more than I ever appreciated the majority of human poems I was forced to read in class. I found poetry an interesting topic for this AI video because that category of writing is in itself an acquired taste. An AI which writes poems with less imagination and more "consistent internal logic" would naturally appeal to a wider audience...one would think.
i wish such studies actually asked students of poetry and literature, instead of random people.
As I was watching the video, I couldn't help but wonder if they had anyone consulting on the study who themselves studied poetry. That seems like something that would have been important to have -- an actual expert or two in a relevant field providing consultation. Perhaps helping them to select the range of poets and poems they would include. Because the thing is, even a lot of the very talented poets in my MFA Creative Writing program didn't like or find it easy to engage with Shakespeare or T.S. Elliot or Plath. So, I kind of wonder if the study results would have looked different (both in terms of how readers felt about the poetry, and in terms of how easy it was for the AI to replicate), if the researchers had used more contemporary poets and poetry in the study.
Even the interviewed Satara in this video admits that her exposure to poetry is "very limited", so not an expert in sight!
@@gary.h.turner she's just a random girl that likes writing. At least we were told that much in the video. You can't deduce anything about the actual study basing on her qualification, that doesn't make sense
That could be the next study. But generally studies choose samples that can be generalized. So it makes sense because the average person can’t distinguish.
You've already lost the battle if average people fail this Turing Test
As a poetry specialist, it is fairly easy to distinguish between a poet and AI, both from the point of view of content and expression. It is also easy to judge from the quality of the poem itself. AI can evidently do writers-group poetry stuff, I've still to see anything in any way literary or poetic. If it can't do a 'simple' poet like Dickinson, how would it handle Shakespeare sonnets or anything by Baudelaire, Lorca or Goethe?
Doubting poetry will die. Its like asking if math would die since calculators that can solve integrals in depth exist.
this is one of the smartest comment i read about AI, i'm gonna screenshot it
Math is a formula, but poetry is an art form. There is no human element to solving math, the answer is the exact same when AI does it too. But when 1s and 0s start creating poems, which EXIST to explore HUMAN emotion, the waters are incredibly muddied.
ARTISTS, DON'T WORRY! AI will always only be able to reinforce, never reinvent, which is why poetry (and all other art for that matter) will not be replaced by such a machine.
How do you know this
Humans are also limited by only really being able to combine ideas from various influences and not really capable of creating anything entirely new from nothing. The AI we are familiar with has generally been designed specifically to copy existing styles, it has been an experiment in blending in and not so much at creativity. We should not assume that AI can't be as creative as us, we just haven't really seen enough yet beside the intentionally generic stuff. A lot of the AI slop we have comes from the a relatively small selection of AI systems, we haven't really explored the potential of AI in general as much as you may think.
"Cars will never be able to replace horses! Horses are far more nimble and inventive."
This is pure cope bruh
As much as I value optimism & I’ll defend this comment any day!
I can’t help but be pessimistic especially with with corporate interests devoid of any humanistic values
We’ve seen it before, technology that doesn’t create real value but is used to offer convenience at the cost of depth
A.I doesn’t need to be as good as humans just 50% is enough to monetize & take up majority of the “market share” most industry’s goals is monopoly.
I feel figuring out whether or not A.I is as good as us is a massive intentional distraction, we should be more aggressively pushing for strong regulation & gathering bargaining power for ourselves!
Note the wording here. "Non-experts prefered". So... what? You need to be a damn expert to enjoy poetry? Is that what is precursor to it?
I feel like too much of this discussion start to veer into the realm of "stupid people ruining it". The "stupid people" being normal people who aren't exactly massive poetry consumers.
This then leads to elitism and feelings of superiority, like if AI is trying to "kill poetry" with it's mediocrity and simplicity. But what it really means is that most poetry is simply a niché and isn't for everyone. It just highlights how unpopular poetry is. I think thihs is mainly due to schools not teaching kids enough about it, ask them to do poetry and learn to read it.
But it could also open up a discussion that is similar to "modern art" and how unaproachable and pretentious it can be with poetry.
i was listening to hyperpop the other day - a genre that is already very synthetic sounding in its nature - and spotify auto played me a song that was 100% made by AI. it was from an artist with no description and only one album. the only way i was able to tell that it was AI was through the harshly fake vocals that AI models tend to produce - it almost slipped under my radar during my listening session, and that scares me.
At the start of the video I found the two poems bland, although I did prefer one, I preferred it bc was less on-the-nose (by a minimal margin). And learning they were both generated made entire sense to me.
I've always been of the mindset that generative AI will always make the most "common denominator" product-both in text and image. Thanks to me being an artist (hence having a well trained eye) and my dad working in tech since the 80s and being able to teach me how these models work and deliver the results.
Glad to see this video analyze that as well as how engaging with every post as possibly generated can hurt how you engage entirely, it's a fine balance that I think many are just grappling with. Also School of Plot was spot on with some of their pattern recognition, a lot of that is a byproduct of how a model is reinforced, I hope people use some of those tips!
It would be interesting to compare results between two different countries: one where poetry is not read by most people, and another where poetry remains a lot more popular.
It would also be interesting to see how reading comprehension would affect the numbers.
i wanted to use a generative music program as a tool to help with a song, but not only would anything I made using that tool legally belong to the "AI" company, it was only capable of making extremely generic facebook ad music and couldnt produce anything new or interesting or even very specific.
Suno used popular producer tags when asked to create trap music.
What is a "producer tag" that suno used? @@sp123
This is my chance to come out as someone who just generally doesn't "get" poetry. Like that study said, i also tend to find a lot of poetry to be fairly nonsensical BUT that doesn't mean I don't respect it. Poetry is a more abstract way of converting ideas and feelings to the spoken word, often restrained by the choice of style. I think of it sorta like drinking wine as a non sommelier versus someone with training. It's likely the sommelier will identify more specific traits of the wine in a sorta objective way, but I don't think that means either of us would enjoy wine more than the other just because one of us is more trained in appreciating the product, or at least describing our appreciation. I do like cool pretty words in poetry even if I struggle to grasp what the author is going for. 🤷
Poetry is not like wine, and this analogy makes It sound like these are just a few superfluous, fussy details that are being missed, rather than the actual substance and essence of what poetry is. There's depth in there, and if you are just reading at a surface level, and can't get anything more than pretty words, you're missing the poetry. It's more than simply enjoying it, there's value there. Poetry is about engaging the intellect, it's not there to merely be something to read.
@TheCompositeKing k
A big problem that many people have with poetry is that they're only presented with poems from radically different eras than their own. Modern poetry is (usually) very accessible. However, it does require that the reader spend more time with the words and the scene, which is a kind of reading most people don't do. If you've ever been moved by song lyrics, that is how poetry can often be.
The other issue is that poetry isn't a genre, but a medium like movies or video games. There are tons of different genres and styles. Some are more bombastic and straightforward, some are more opaque and mysterious.
I prefer to write poetry in familiar language, with little-to-no rhythmic structure and no rhyming. There are some "fancy" academic forms I like, but I don't often use them anymore because I feel like they are usually pretentious and inaccessible. My poems also tend to be very heavy on natural imagery, which some people like and others don't. A lot of successful modern poetry is more confessional, like an incredibly raw and personal look into someone's life and their relationships. Some of that I can't stand and some of it is absolutely brilliant.
The elements of poetry I do enjoy are its ability to use metaphor and imagery to have double meanings, the ability to utilize that meaning and imagery without necessarily needing a narrative, the ability to forgo grammar and create your own rules, and the ability to meditate on something without "big concepts" like world building and characters. (These can still be in a poem, but unlike normal stories they don't have to be.) If you want to talk about something in a deep, creative way, it allows you to distill only the most necessary parts and pair it down to the barest it can be. In that way, the topic or point you want to make can be as polished and intense as possible, like music.
It also allows crossover with other art like music or visual art, because poetry can have custom rules that regular prose writing cannot.
All that to say, I hope you can find some interesting modern poetry to experience some of this medium in a more fun way. Like with movies and games, often the only way to tell if you like a genre is to give it a try, so you may have to read more poetry you don't like until you find some that you do. Luckily, most poems are short so you can sample genres pretty quickly.
Find some free literary journals online and stuff published for free from the Poetry Foundation website just to see what people are up to, you may be suprised!
@@TheCompositeKingpoetry is pretty words
@@iamjustkiwi Ah yes, enlightening us with your estimation of poetry after admitting you don't comprehend it. Generous!
It's so sad that whenever we're trying to enjoy an artform we have to wonder if it was created by a human or stolen from humans by an AI. Art is a way for so many people to find comfort, express their emotions, feel heard and seen. It's such a beautiful way that we have found to communicate with each other and impact each other. I think it's fascinating that humans were even able to discover such a thing. It's a disappointment that now the internet is filled with AI "art", exploitative softwares and people who often disrespect the artforms they try to immitate. What stops me from finding people enjoying AI art to be beautiful is the way it's created. The databases are filled with information of people who didn't even know what they post was used in this way, living artists are often mimicked without their consent, etc. AI art could be beautiful and AI could be a valid and useful tool if these corporations tried to be ethical and respectful and if people tried to be more honest about their usage of AI. It's sad, that AI was built on dishonesty :(( great video as always!!
Why the need to try to see this as a "valid" tool? Why do you cling to the mindset of these developers who try to push these things into everyone's life just for their profit? The only real valid use ai could have is to help you connect with real artists and real art
How does "consent" makes the death or art """ethical"""? Is suicide also a good thing only because the one doing it "wants" it?
theres also some big differences between different models, i find that claude is like atleast twice as good as chatgpt when it comes to writing, especially on specific topics and not just grand scale meandering
Hi I literally do not comment on youtube videos but here is the one of the biggest errors of the study in my opinion: That it was asked to write in the "style of" x poet! THAT STYLE WOULD NOT EXIST WITHOUT THOSE HUMAN POETS WRITING AND EXISTING IN THE FIRST PLACE!!!!!!! The only reason GPT could write those poems was because of their human contributions to literature and imo detracts from the findings about "AI poems." Among MANY things, if I were to do this study again (and duh I'm no expert) I would ask GPT to create its "own" poems instead of ones in the style of existing human poets. That would make more sense and be more interesting to me as well as lend more legitimacy to any findings. Just a thought!!
i really love your channel and the thought and nuance you put into discussing potentially complex topics, as well as your overwhelming willingness to allow the words of other people fill in where your expertise is lacking. i look forward to hearing everything you have to say in the coming year ^_^
The problem is that in order to actually comprehend what constitutes even a mediocre poem you need to read. And I don't mean comprehend in an analytical sense, I mean even in the simplest and most intrinsic reactions to poem, that kneejerk response and feeling. It's an inevitable reality that taste only comes to those who consume, and the sad reality is that people just don't read poetry anymore. It's why instagram poetry gets popular, or why a webnovel with incessant cliches and tropes the size of Jupiter can amass thousands of likes. If people do not have taste, which only comes with genuinely consuming a format, it not only denies any ability to differentiate good from bad, but it also stunts their ability to enjoy that thing anyway.
Even if many people are saying the AI poetry is better it means so much less to them than the human poetry means to those who read poetry. I'm sorry but 'love' without taste is tolerance at best. I believe that I feel more strongly about books I've given a 5 to than how my friend (who quite literally never reads) feels about the book he said was his favourite when I asked if he had one.
Maybe it's obnoxious. I'm okay if it comes across as that, but that's just how it is. In the same way that I have no taste in Formula 1-I don't watch.
I think the point about ChatGPT writing about general subjects is the major reason as to why it’s deemed as better poetry by a layman with no foreknowledge of poetry. On average a random person plucked off the street is more likely to relate to and understand a poem about “hope” or “the stars” or “life” than a more niche human experience that a real author is writing about. It’s generalisation is what makes it appealing, it appeals to the common denominator.
Poetry is about expressing the ineffable in as few words as possible, striking a vivid visions into the mind of the reader. Therefore, for an original poet, say of nondual philosophies there wouldn't really be a problem with AI since AI is incapable of experience.
Human poems are about lived experience i.e. messy, idiosyncratic and many implied but not ‘suface’ meanings. AI is formulaic and sterile. Most people are seduced by extremely bad poetry on the internet that (most certainly in the case of the ‘genre’ of insta poems) are facile and simplistic i.e. like AI so … Robot poetry beautiful - nah - not wise at all just naive. (In the true sense of naive). It’s the same with ‘fine art’ - ask AI to draw or paint something ‘in the style of’ and it fails. I’m not talking about the graphic arts, manga etc but established fine artists. The attitude of ‘all shall have prizes’ just shows absolutely no discrimination I’m afraid. AI is a bit like the ending of the Russian director’s Tarkovsky’s film ‘Solaris’ where the planet tries to replicate and manifest things from the astronaut’s psyche and memory and gets the simulacrum all wrong.
Thank you
The idea behind the title is very reminiscent of Dead Poets Society’s school poetry text.. the first page of their introduction to be precise, if you know the film.
Not good, really not good. 😊
hope it’s just 28 minutes of you saying no
I think there's a level to which both the researchers and people in general overthink why a result like this would happen.
Generative AI creates output in a way that's very similar to "design by committee". It's not useful to think of it as "inhumane" because AI can only output what is essentially more and more complicated riffs on human output. At the danger of romanticizing it, AI outputs are "human" because they're products of the aggregate of the human culture on which it was trained, in a kind of Venn diagram of all its training material.
Of course the average person would find AI output appealing at some point, when the outputs are themselves an expression of human averages.
If anything, the expectation of art is that it shouldn't appeal to the average person, because art is made by individuals, and what works or is appealing to one individual isn't to another. There are no books, paintings, movies or songs that are sublime to all people, and the more personally appealing a work is to one, the less appealing it is likely to be to someone else.
An artist of vision and integrity doesn't sit down and contrive works for some amorphous average of the human ape, and the artists that do, tend to produce things that, while perhaps moderately pleasing to a great many, leaves little in terms of lasting and substantive impact on any one individual in particular.
Hence, I would expect well-trained AI outputs to be tepidly pleasing to a general audience, because it is on the metrics of generality by which the outputs are determined. In this, I don't see a great distinction between such outputs and the commercialized tripe you see, for example, in a lot of modern Hollywood cinema or AAA video games, which despite being made by humans, are made according to a model that is more or less equivalent - namely the utility of pluralistic averages.
This kind of news really gets my blood pressure up, and makes me long for a real-life Butlerian jihad. For all the promoted applications of AI, and for all the genuine utility of it in the sciences, its biggest effect has been to replace the oldest, most genuinely *human* endeavors, i.e., art, music, and poetry, with shallow simulacra.
I got that they both were AI. The giveaway was that the meanings of the lines were too vague or made no sense.
Isn't that totally pointless? Poetry is the most basic expression of emotions. Not everyone can paint what they feel or play music but vast majority of people can speak and use written words to express themselves... why would you use AI for that, also if you write detailed prompt isn't that basically expressing emotions in written word?
A person writing a prompt to wrote a poem ≠ the said person writing the poem. In the first case, there's a middle man that twists and turns
@@littlehorn0063 but the middleman expresses my own feelings better than I could. It's still an expression of my emotions
"write poem anbout bird similar to xyz poet here"
@@spiralsausageno it's an expression of the ai's accumulation of data, an actual poet writes each line deliberately with a message, brainstorming ideas that are unique and new, full of similes, metaphors, symbols, allegories, allusions, conceits, metonymy and so on.. a poem is not "i am sad" written in flowery language, none of those generated lines have anything to do with you.
as for you, if you can't express yourself, pick up a pen and practice, or write a diary, no need to encroach upon an actual artist or writer's domain, we aren't going around pretending to be doctors or engineers. so we don't need quacks pretending to be artists either.
I was trying so hard to find the AI poem like "hm.. idk.. the second one feels AI?" but then you revealed the first was AI and then the second one too and I was like "well damn!"
Really lucky to have found your channel, awesome content everytime
That's because people don't understand the point of poetry. The AI can throw words around in a blender, and make them sound nice. But, people can layer intense concepts, and have imaginative scope and cogency AI can never have. We can build concepts through logic, and reach higher principles than the surface.
I love your channel, and the advent of ai has been a source of discouragement across the creative landscape. Ads showing how you can build a business around ai books, clearly ai generated videos from script to VO to editing are getting views on YT, etc. I appreciate your honest thoughts and the throughline (and endnote) of hope :)
No! it will never - speaking about the AI we have today. AI that is trained on the work of others that has no experience itself will never surpass the human experience. We are now in the phase just past the Turing test. It's way too hard to truly tell which is human and which is AI for most things. AI "engineers" are basically like hound dogs trying to trick you and get the last laugh. The difference is that even if a piece of music, art, or literature *is* AI generated, it immediately loses all my interest because I know there is no soul behind it. There is no joy, no suffering, no experience that comes with it.
My first thought was, that in human written poetry, the structure could "suffer" because of the meaning and imagery poet wants to express, with such little imperfections adding to overall experience, giving it a texture so to say, while AI mainly focuses the language part, with any meaning or imagery easily conforming to the structure and thus making it more palatable for non-expert readers.
I'm not worried too much about fake AI poems because AI does not prevent others from engaging with my poetry (which is unpublished as of yet) that I've written to communicate a piece of myself and my experience to another human person. If I hand a poem to a friend, the relationship that we have will be sufficient. I think that the arts will have to really tap into the relational/human element that forms the context for all artistic human expression.
Bro I KNEW the first two were AI. I didn’t believe you when you said it was Dickinson’s.
I feel that alot of this comes from a lack of familiarity with the style of AI. In the section of with Sitara, it was interesting to see how much of it was about the 'tells' which make ChatGPT stand out. I realised that my lack of familiarity with ChatGPT led to me misidentifying many of these poems as I expected ChatGPT to act in a different way than it seems to.
I think that one key aspect here is that in producing poems which are easy to understand, have no literary allusions etc., the AI poems have failed to fulfil their task, which is to imitate the poets who don’t have simple or straightforward messages. You mentioned the ‘non-expert’ subjects which plays into this. Whether they’re ‘better’ is a much more unrelated question.
Hmm, ya got me, I thought the second was Dickinson. Pray, or simply sit and fold (like sitting and folding your hands, the action of praying without actually praying) is very evocative imagery. Maybe this means I need to read more poetry.
this is one of my favorite videos of yours, extremely well made and researched! thank you!
Imo, ai poem is “beautiful generic” at best.
As someone with zero experience with poem. I want to create one for my story. But as I have direction and some keyword in mind. I asked AI to create it.
Yikes, it separated my keyword and don’t understand my intentions. So I tried to create one and ask it for better rhyme and grammar.
Still yikes, it is the most forced rhyme I ever felt and the words it picked are not even makes sense.
So, be very specific. Ai can pretty much can’t do that
Yeah, I did the Shakespeare part of it because he’s the writer whose work I’m more familiar with. I got it all correct, as GPT seems to think Shakespeare only writes about women he likes. Also, ChatGPT uses very simple simile a ton, whereas Shakespeare uses much more complex wordplay, touching on alternate meanings of the words and similar sounds, making his poetry naturally dance around in your mind, floating between the different meanings
I’m only 6 min and I want to weigh in, ha ha. A year or so ago I remember YT being flooded with “artists” bemoaning the fact that they were being replaced by AI. So, I had to check it out and see what beautiful new avenues AI had forged into the visual arts. Well, it turns out, what it was doing was spitting out a bunch of illustration and manga and whatever. Not art at all. Craft maybe? Illustration certainly but not capital A art.
I have about as much fear for real poetry being replaced by AI as I do for High Art, Beaux Arts, fine art, call it what you want, falling victim to the same.
AGI implies intelligence. Not emotion. I have not seen any/many scientists or developers in the field make any claims to replicating emotion in AGI (artificial general intelligence, which is what I think we are probably talking about here). If you have decent taste, and are fairly literate, you will very likely be moved by only the human stuff.
And I think there’s one more thing: remember how cubism developed? Artist realized a machine was doing what they used to do. Reflect/represent reality. Abstract artists decided to move ahead of the camera and show something more about the soul. And we got some of the greatest works in human history. Why do we think poets would react any differently?
Anyway, I haven’t finished the vid, maybe OP addresses what I have. Just had to get this in.
AI writing brings me great solace. Any time a social media comment irks me, I just tell myself, "This is a bot," and I can remove myself without feeling the urge to reply
There will always be people who love the human thing more, so i'm sure people will make little writing groups. Human peotry isnt dead because of ai if its rated higher then humans, it may even strengthen it, cause ai can only write cliche stuff (most of the time).
Even if AI peoms can still be distinguished from human-written poems now, it seems plausible that this might not be the case in the near future, or even now, if we use more complcated prompts. If so, what will then be the consequences on the art of poetry?
54% of Americans read below a 6th grade level.
They probably prefer The Çat in the Hat to Whitman
The 1/3 pounder failed because people thought the 1/4 pounder was bigger. This is what we're dealing with.
This right here is it. Never underestimate human stupidity.
The main critiques I’ve in this video come from a lack of prompting. It doesn’t do slant rhymes then tell it to do so. It’s too broad… give it a specific subject etc etc
Happy new year RD! I’ve found your videos really insightful and refreshingly nuanced. I’ve learned a lot about poetry where even a year ago I just felt like I wasn’t smart enough for it. Looking forward to more great vids from you in 2025 :)
Kinda confirmed what I already do / thought, which is that the less I can understand a poem the more likely it's made by a human, I actually applied this thinking to the 2 poem purposed in the beginning of the video, before realizing that it was a bait lol
This video raises so many questions for me. I write some poetry, about 2 poems a year on average, and have memorised about a 100 poems from great poets from my native language, mainly early 20th and late 19th century. However, i know virtually nothing about any form of “poetry theory”. Would i be considered an expert or a layman? I personally believe understanding poetry is the same as understanding something like love or beauty in your own life. Would it help to read books on those things? Probably a little bit, but in the end, i would lean towards saying someone who has just spend his whole life reading books and rationally analyzing these aspects of life, would know virtually nothing compared to someone who read nothing at all, but experienced many of the paradoxes, beauties and tragedies in life first hand. Maybe that person would know even a bit more if he had actually also taken some time to read, but even without doing so, he would probably be a lot closer to “understanding” poetry. I could even argue truely understanding poetry is impossible; poetry strives to find words for what is essentially impossible to say. I think it might very well be possible that AI at some point can write poems even so called “experts” would rate better than poems by the greats (Dickinson, Goethe, Dante, Homer, you name it). But maybe poetry is so much linked to communication, that it should not be valued solely on the merits of the isolated artwork. Maybe poetry is actually a sort of cry for help from one person to another: “listener, help me, there is so much mystery i experience! Please understand me, even though my words fall short.” As such, poetry has importance only in the relation of one person to another. Even from this perspective, AI poetry would still have at least some poetic value, as it is created on the basis of the humans who went before it and attempted to write. However, the value is present here only in a very indirect way, compared to poems from real humans, because then, by reading poetry, we actually step into a direct relationship with another human, even if that person has been dead for centuries. I think there is too much a tendency to create poetry as independent artworks. Write to the people you know, to the people you love! And read what those people write to you! Even if they are less skilled writers than some kind of computer program, at least they are real people, who want to be understood and who want to be loved!
The best quote I heard was: i wanted an ai to do my chores so i can do arts but ai makes arts and i still have to do my chores
Poetry is about the human experience… hence, no AI will be able to replace it. No need to worry.
@ you sound a little gloomy. There are billions of people, each and everyone unique. The trick is to not think in absolutes.
I do want to "imagine the hand" and to know that someone expressed themselves to create the poem. In fact, the expression poetry allows is a separate and distinct value, apart from the reception of it.
Their chosen groups were wrong. A person not trained in how to read poetry is, of course, going to favor AI poetry because AI will write to make the cursory reading make sense, but the deeper meaning is absent (as in the case of the first Dickinson poem) or merely accidental (yet still superficial as in the second poem), while a trained poet will write for the deeper meaning to make sense and unfold more meaning the more we consider it, while the cursory reading of their poem may be confusing at first, which nudges us to go deeper. That a deeper meaning is present in a human poem is obvious. No such complexity is present in the AI poetry.
My point is that they should only have used poetry experts, these are in the best position to determine whether a poem is from a human or an AI.
So no, poetry is not dead. A randomized group, no matter how large, is not what is needed. How many of them have little to no experience with poetry or simply don't like it? At the very least, Only those who read poetry regularly, and thus love poetry, should have been used.
I still think it's a skill prompt issue and they could've created deeper sounding poems (asking it to use older English, use words that are dissonant in parts and don't fully rhyme, especially where there's tension, and other typical poetic techniques). Once you study a lot of poetry it gets predictable
Im a physicist by training. I could never imagine someone making a study claiming non experts could not tell the difference between a physicists writing of a paper and an AIs, implying we no longer needsphysicist, just because the general population cannot tell the difference.
i am so relieved i guessed correctly, though the only reason that i thought of was that the words make no sense
“Hope” is the thing with feathers is such a famous poem John green can’t stop quoting it if his life depended on it
My guess is that most experts in poetry simply would not be fooled by most AI generated poetry. What this all tends to show is that education in poetry appreciation is simply lacking in most people in the same way that most people are also mostly innumerate because they lack a sound education in mathematics.
Capitalism has never been about creating actual art, it just needs marketable slop. Art will never die because most people seek some sort of self expression. What self respecting artist would stop doing art if they didnt get paid for it?
I love the fact that art forms that are considered the most sophisticated (like poetry and jazz) are also the easiest for AI to replicate.
Given the fact that a lot of the arts in current times tend toward "Emperor's New Clothes" levels of nonsense, it's no doubt that AI can produce something better by amalgamating the best that history has to offer. The title to this video should more accurately read "old poetry is better than new poetry" lol.....I suspect the same would happen in architecture, fashion, choreography, and classical music....to name only a few .
I was freaking out wondering which poem was fake given that neither has Dickinson's random punctuating dashes.
I went to school for creative writing, specializing in poetry. I've been messing around with AI for poetry since GPT-2. One thing I've noticed is that ChatGPT is purposefully broken in how it can produce poetry. There is some kind of prompt that forces it to rhyme and do certain predictable structures. It can repeat the rules and techniques used in other poetic forms, but it's hard-coded to be unable to replicate them, ruining its ability to produce modern poetry.
It has a similar issue with prose, being forced to write pithy wrap-up summarizing endings.
There is also the major problem that it doesn't have a point it's trying to make. It's not creating novel insight into things or adding meaning to memory. It's just imitating form. True style over substance.
What do you mean it's able to repeat the rules and techniques but not replicate them?
Also trying its best to sound less controversial and general, often leading to broad happy endings or if forced to write something sad, very average sad endings, nothing unique or desperate or human, no sudden departures from form, no weird word choices, metaphors or metonymy, impressive observations, etc. It's often very easy to tell, but then again, random people not that good in poetry could also come up with mediocre stuff like that so it isn't absolutely certain.. but yeah I just call them all slop and move on with actual good writing.
Another roughest draft essay to close out the new year! Let’s GO! Hope you have a happy new year, though! Here’s to more poetry (both good and bad) in the new year.
the remarks 24:30 yet - this is because the source corpus is still yet too limited and the prompts too general and unspecific, were one to demand an actual theme or exploration ot one and something broadly and feely avialiable on the internet, the chat could imitate it - but ask it to write an hymn in the ancient Akkadian style - it would fail as it has too little data to do that - but the data it has available grows and grows - in a mere year it would be several time more than it is now
i feel like such a megamind for not falling for the trick at the beginning
every time i hear about how most people find most poetry confusing and nonsensical and unrewarding i get an ego boost because ive never read a poem i didnt care about
1:36 Completely randomly I noticed that you can also sing it along with Through The Fire And Flames from Dragonforce. 😂
Great video! Please add the quiz you made in the description, would love to take it.
Thanks for reminding me! Should be linked at the bottom of the description now
First, All hail the Mighty Algo!
Next, I would urge everyone to read Mary Kinzie's A Poet's Guide to Poetry. I learned so much from that book. I think I will read it again.
Also, if you want to talk about poetry & rhetoric, check out Writing with Andrew. Great channel.
I enjoyed your take & the video. Keep up the good work.
I did the test and only got two wrong (and one of them I really wasn’t sure about) - and I know none of these poets well; a few (Plath, Lasky) not at all.
One thing you start to notice is how similar in content all of the AI poems are, regardless of the forms they’re imitating. Several people in the video made a similar point: vague generalities, no telling details, and what I can only call an absence of any signs of refinement. One certainly does not need to be any kind of expert in poetry to pick up on such things; rather, just a relatively developed aesthetic sense (eg, any time I saw stars “twinkling” in a poem, it was instant AI).
The AI's faults do not really mean anything since you can just prompt it to be more accurate. And to the contrary, the poetry will not have any real meaning if it is no conscious mind behind it.
I was so relieved when you revealed both were AI! 😂 the second one is so trite, and the first so clumsy I was beginning to think Emily Dickinson was just not as good a poet as I remembered! 😅