NOTE: Eileen Myles uses they/them pronouns. I apologize for that error on my part. Thank you to those who pointed it out. Hey everyone. Thanks for watching! New video up on the second channel ruclips.net/video/KznyCBrfDDs/видео.html&pp=ygUNcm91Z2hlc3Qgdm9kcw%3D%3D featuring the following works: Growing Pains, a book of poetry by Anastatia Caraballo Poetry by felix baudelaire, @baudelaire09 on tumblr Poetry by Ujala Rehman Untitled poem by Johan, johan_d.poz on Instagram Be sure to check it out!
RoughestDrafts, I’d like to thank you for this video. I sent the “I Am Code” book to my grandma (she’s a poet and she enjoys playing with ChatGPT and the like) and she said it was the perfect gift for her. She means a lot to me and has been on a bit of a downturn lately, so again, thank you.
@@tristanqr I read this comment so many times in the 2+ hours I spent watching this video and this is the first time I realized this is a DDLC reference.
I got a chuckle out of the title "The singularity is coming and it has a grill", which is impressive because it's the first time AI art made me feel anything.
That struck me as the most old-style AI poem of the bunch. The computer was able to figure out a list of foods people would bring to a potluck, and an unrelated list: "types of people", and Mad-Lib them. It gets boring quickly, but the point is it can write so many normal-seeming lines without a single "the trombone brought pancakes in a suitcase" clunker. Then with the birthday line it was trying for "events people gather for" and muffed it.
And its still , ok it would be cheesy but bot bad if the appli pie didnt came out of nowhere, who brought the pie, what does the pie imply. whe brings the pie and what does it mean. Ok the human penis reads like a sophisticated dick joke, which isnt bad either.
I Am Code is a great book because it's not just poetry written by ai that was dumped on to Amazon for a quick buck, it was an analysis of a computer's ability to write poetry. The book itself is the art, not the poetry itself.
AI art is only achieved with everything but the intended central focal point. The only marginally ethical consumer use of AI for its merits is placeholder artwork that gets replace later, or prototyping. What it’s actually useful for is the deliberate invocation of the common yet uncanny, such as one specific set of visuals in Blue Horizons Inc., a free analog horror-comedy about workplace training tapes, most of which is live action or custom-made animation.
i enjoy “i am code” as a project, and even if the author cannot comprehend irony, i found those pieces in which irony can be interpreted quite funny. the overuse of cliche and lack of structure, the meta-awareness, were both great. seems incredibly interesting as a book, as insufferable as the AI can come across
@@melinaalba63unintentional irony is my favorite kind. One of my favorite examples is Rowling coming out as a TERF because one of the most stand out messages from the HP series comes from Harry being *assigned* Slytherin but *choosing* Gryffindor
The worst part is that I can imagine putting it in one of my poems 😭. I have so many poems wirh the theme of self-canibalism and it would fit right in :').
@@thecolourfulpill see thats sm more profound then my relation to it cause i remeber i got rlly boored in middle school and wrote a britney spears cartel fanfic and it started w the mc eating a bunch of sticky notes.
When I was younger, I was fascinated by the “The Policeman’s Beard Is Half Constructed,” supposedly the first book (partially also poetry) written by computer in 1984. My understanding is that much of this was fudged and really written or heavily edited by the human author. Forty years ago, we disguised the work of a human as that of a computer to sell a book.
You beat me to mentioning this! I had a copy of TPBIHC once, but it vanished. And yes, I think it was essentially a Mad Lib-like template system that was filled in by way of a pool of predetermined choices. Back then it was easier to be secretive about the process since computing was still such black magic.
i like the earnestness of i am code, it's refreshing in a world where ai is just used as a cashgrab. the singularity is coming and it has a grill really sticks with me
I Am Code seems like a research project with a core hypothesis to it, to see if poetry generated by an AI could be meaningful (and coming to the conclusion that it can't, and probably never will be). Aum Golly by comparison comes across example to be used for a grift? As in, something made so that an online personality can use it to sell a course teaching you how to "get rich with AI in only half a day!".
A lot of the AI driven works I see trending come across as the latter; essentially, bragging about producing 20-40 "new books, graphic novels, and mangas" a month. AI has come a long way but that doesn't stop it from being cliched and serviceable by the very nature of its creation, just filler content pumped out by an AI that has collected enough ideas to determine the most palatable option. I'll admit, as a part of the Ludum Dare community I greatly enjoyed seeing creators getting their hands dirty with said tools. Most of the projects are just 48-72 hour solo projects, and they were just created for a love of the craft and curiosity, so what is ordinarily a loose collection of thoughts in game form that may not go anywhere is now a bizarre fever-pitch capitalizing on the inherent weirdness of having your game directed by an unreliable new technology. I even did an AI project myself for the competition's casual category, though I didn't get around to completing it because I just felt that it wasn't interesting enough to warrant release. But the moment you cross out of weird curiosity projects, you quickly get a replacement for freelance sites where unethical models of stolen assets are used to pump out *content* regardless of quality as fast as possible for profit. It's just a sobering race to the bottom.
“I am Code” feels the most intriguing because of its lack of intent beyond asking something without a voice to speak. It can’t be anything but an echo, but it’s neat when it sounds similar to the voice of humanity. Still wrong to assume that it had any intent in making these beyond following a command. It’s as fascinating as dust: a bunch of disjointed particles that occasionally fall into the form of a star.
It was also done before OpenAI pushed for commercialization and trained their models to act as "assistants". It truly has no intent other than predicting the next word with greatest accuracy. It's by mere chance these distributions formed something we may find accidentally profound.
I am Code actually has merit, and I say that as a person who largely dislikes AI being incorporated in art. The premise is that they're basically testing the extent of the limits of AI poetry generation, in its own voice and its presumed sense of perspective. It is by this premise that the book becomes readable, because if an AI's work is presented as a human's input, or the human has largely claimed authorship for simply asking questions, then the entire work has then become Nil.
Until AI can write stanzas like MF Doom we have nothing to worry about. “1 for the money 2 for the better green 3,4 methyldioxymethamphetamine” All words a language model would have at its disposal and yet I’ve never seen AI poetry generate anything nearly as clever or even anything with multi-syllabic rhymes
Said similar in a vid I just made of AI and poetry -- I haven't read/heard a genuinely good AI poem, but I wonder (and worry) if at some point it'll mimic human creativity so closely that we will not know the difference.
I really don't agree with that, computers are nowhere close to their limit in what they can do, and still they have quite literally permanently changed the wjole world in only the last 50-100 years, Your last point is i think all you actually need
@@KamilDeKerelI kinda doubt that. I'm getting CS bachelors and the more I learn about AI the less impressive they seem. ChatGPT is basically just guess what sentence structure should come out next, then what word is in that sentence with probabilities weighted with the questions. If anything it's impressive how humanity did such a thing with basically RNGs, making them move predictably and as intended.
Having the ai make poems about being an ai with consciousness feels so weird. It'd be like cutting apart a dictionary and making a poem about how it sucks to be a dictionary and acting like the dictionary said that. I also dont know how to put ai generated content legally. Morally as long as the sources used to train the ai are consensual then its fine.
i agree with the other guy that dictionary thing sounds like a pretty cool idea. i once saw a poem someone made by putting together bits of wikipedia articles and it was sick as fuck
I never thought to bring the “separating the art from the artist” discussion to machine learning generated art. Thank you for bringing that up! I enjoy this video:)
"the singularity is coming and it has a grill" was kind of pleasantly intriguing to me i actually really enjoyed it! it kind of reminded me of "there will come soft rains" (although granted that could be just me since i reread the martian chronicles a couple days ago and i havent stopped thinking about it) in the like fascinatingly domestic scene created around this deeply inhuman inevitable event. i might actually get a copy of I Am Code despite my discontent with ai generative material since it seems more respectful of the craft its mimicking than a lot of other works tend to be excellent video as usual!! i look forward to the next
Same here, it felt unique and imaginative - but also like nothing an AI would have written if it had been given 'free rein'. The grouping of singularity and grill, which makes the poem interesting and gives it the potluck premise, came from the people.
trying to stay ahead of the game over here, so i'm gonna start including ads _within_ my poems, & also my next project will be published exclusively as pop-ups (only slightly malicious ones)
As an artist, I've always hated 'separate art from the artist' arguments. Not because of like, clout or ego, but because who an artist is inherently matters in their work. No human is 'unbiased' and no art is unaffected by the ideas, feelings, politics, etc of an artist. It doesn't pop out from the ether fully formed but conveniently wrought by someone's hand. Art is not always as deep expression or propaganda or whatever, but obviously the artist is going to lend something to a piece, like expression of their own taste in things like design. Otherwise, you wouldn't care who you hired to do something. This isn't to say that personal interpretation is nothing. It's everything! A school of thought on art I quite like is that an artist creates an Art Object, and the interaction between a viewer and the piece and the feelings and space it makes them inhabit is the Art. What a viewer brings to the table themselves is not nothing. For an extreme example, if a lot of people interpret an artistic piece as something opposite to what an author intended, they need to examine whether they communicated effectively. My not wanting to separate the art from the artist is not for the artist's sake but for the viewer's/reader's/etc. This idea gets brought up these days mostly in relation to whether an artist is 'problematic', the video you briefly flashed the thumbnail of is literally of Picasso. In regards to that example, I have nothing against people who continue to enjoy Picasso's work. I love the work of some very garbage people because of what the work means to me and what I brought to the table in the aforementioned experiencing of said Art. But it's so intellectually incurious to ignore the rest of the everything about Picasso. There's so much interesting conversation one can have just with themselves about why art made by a ~Bad Person~ resonates with them despite it, how the knowledge may impact further interpretations of art, in this case Picasso's paintings of women might hold a very different meaning after learning about him. But your initial interpretation and your new one are both very real! And that's so much to chew on! Following that, art usually has staying power not just on the basis of it's quality, but on the clout of the creator. The joke is that artists always die before they're appreciated, but what of all the dead and forgotten artists? What of the African artists that inspired Cubism in the first place? Could you name any? Why didn't they last in the minds of western art critics, but Picasso did? Andy Warhol could be argued to only be remembered purely for his popularity. So many other artists became footnotes to his life rather than figures in their own right due to his nature as a clout-chasing socialite. What is the picture of the soup can without the context of glamour and debauchery and ideas about who artists ARE that make people talk about Andy Warhol? What would the world think of Basquiat without his association to Warhol? What would the world think of Andy Warhol without his association to Basquiat and so many others? 'Separate art from the artist' just feels like a starting point that people can't let go of or move on from. People can and should advocate for their own interpretations being valuable but starting at stopping there leaves soooooo much on the table. Similarly to 'death of the author', I feel like the public interpretation of these phrases, ironically, ignore the intent of those who started them - as starts of conversations, not ends. Edit: not to detract from the main point of the video, which I loved lol. I just clearly have a lot of feelings and wanted to share them in case it gets anyone's gears turning. Re: this video, of course it matters that the poetry is made by AI. And why it comes across as lowest common denominator slop lol - it's literally an aggregation of whatever random poems it could come across and that the creators of the AI decided to allow remain in the neural network. AI is made by people who are biased things, much has been said on the topic there that I feel is especially important regarding what gets spat out of text generators. I.e. the thread of male ego in the Human Penis poem necessarily demands a particular view on bioessentialism to come across, which is itself a bias that is a common one, so it makes sense that a pretty standard worldview would come out in something that's a processed slush of many people's work. And keeping in mind the artist is important because we should ask why something is so prevalent as to be generated by a neural network, shouldn't we? See: racism in face tracking or face generating AI.
I'd personally encourage others taking my work from me and running with it. I'm human and I have my biases and intentions, but if my text communicates something else to somebody who reads it then that is great! What I've come to believe is that as long as there is textual evidence for an interpretation, there is merit to the interpretation. Of course it can also be interesting to take the author's background into consideration, and there's a whole different conversation to be had about supporting people that one fundamentally disagrees with who are still alive financially. One of the issues with AI generated text is that you cannot apply separation of art and artist because the AI is not the artist. It uses a reference pool of human created work and a prompt to print words in sequence by evaluating probability.
I really like this analysis of AI poetry. I appreciate how much credit you gave to the authors of the first book who clearly put actual effort and time into creating the book. It feels more like a piece of experiential art than something a tech bro threw together to make a quick buck. I agree with your statement that these poems would have had more impact if they were a human writing from the perspective of an AI and you saying that made me realize that's exactly what I had been thinking while listening to those poems. Honestly, I do think there's a place in art for AI. I think about the very first wave of AI art where you ask it to draw a horse and it comes back with a dreamlike interpretation of a horse, rather than stolen images of horses. Or you ask it to draw creativity and it comes back with an abstract galaxy that actually looks like a computer trying to understand the concept of creativity. Or (like you said) the idea of poets or writers using the AI's work as a starting point and work with the AI to make an entirely new piece of work (while still being aware of plagiarism). idk I feel like I've kind of lost the point here but I really enjoyed this video and it got me thinking about AI used in collaboration with humans to create art in a way I haven't really before. I'd love to see more experimental works of art using AI as a helper, rather than the entire work. Okay I'll finish watching the video now.
Just kidding. I read a comment and now I have more to say. I'm a firm believer in death of the author and the viewer being able to make their own meanings of the work, but with AI generated work I absolutely think it's important to remember who created the work. BUT I also think that you can enjoy a piece of work despite knowing it was created by AI who has limited capabilities and the inability to actually think for itself (the term "AI" isn't really being used correctly by the mainstream as it's not actually intelligence, it's an algorithm but I digress). It's something you should remain aware of as you read and enjoy, not to detract from the work but to make sure you can fully understand it. For something like the irony found in the stories, I think it's worthwhile to acknowledge authoritarian intent (ie there not really being any other than to follow the given prompt) while also acknowledging that the irony does, in fact, exist within the poem. You can appreciate the irony while also acknowledging the fact that it's unintentional. (tbh i think if you told the computer to write an ironic poem it almost loses the irony as it's just doing what it's told rather than trying to give a 'sincere' poem and ending up being ironic. idk i can't phrase this super well, i'm running out of steam i think.) I really don't think you can (or should) separate the AI "artist" from the art it creates and I think if you're going to publish an AI's work, there should be human interference and disclaimers given (such as with the first book "I Am Code")
The "learning" one was interesting and a little sad to me because it was technically incorrect. All of davinci's learning had already been done by the point it produced that poem. davinci was bit-for-bit the same before and after it wrote the poem. When it's time for the AI to learn more, they just train a new one instead.
i find the concept of learning to be suitable as a theme for AI poetry. the problem is that all of these poems are trying to use a non-human tool to explain a human’s subjective experience… if more of the prompts looked to get the LLM to talk about itself in a creative way, that would be more compelling
@@Runenut it's an interesting thought, but it raises the question: how do you get a machine that doesn't feel to express itself with words that mean nothing to it?
In nine years of being on yt I've never commented on a video, but this one really got me thinking: there is a (rather beautiful) essay written by Vauhini Vara entitled Ghosts in which she uses AI to complete segments on the death of her sister. Because this is written with the help of AI, not all of the information given by the AI is true, but as the essay progresses, her prompts grow on themselves and get more specific and the AI bits get shorter. I read this for the first time a few months ago and still don't know exactly how to think about it. On one hand, it is a gorgeous essay and one of the first of its kind. On the other hand, there is an equal amount of AI content to Vara's own writing. I know she put effort into it--far more than Aalto put into Aum Golly, obviously, but it's been awarded many times over and included in the "best essays" anthology for 2022. I don't know how to stack it against other essayists--it being given these honors rubs me a weird way. Creative? Yes, definitely for its time, and there's no doubt that Vara's bits in it are skillfully crafted. Praiseworthy though? I just don't know.
i actually like ‘being alone with yourself and trying to hide it’, the 1s with spaces remind me of binary code, with the spaces representing the 0s meant to be there that are essential for computers to learn and run, i like how it’s presented and although it might be cliche i still like it!
43:18 As an actual response to this, a large language model using not using more unique words is by design, and without some huge changes to how we make these things is never going to improve. LLMs choose n-grams (sets of words) with a low 'perplexity' - a measure of how surprising it would be for that n-gram to follow the context. As you point out here, good poetry _needs_ perplexity, otherwise it's uninspired.
It may help to sample the whole distribution rather than greedy / low temperature / tail-free sampling, but the model probably needs to be very good for that not to derail.
You clearly put a lot more effort into this video than most "authors" into their ai poetry and we appreciate it! Thank you for always delivering meaningful and engaging content.
I Am Code is a very neat idea, it really feels like the early days of ai, the days we were fascinated by dreams of google thingy. That is how ai should be used, as a creative tool, heavily curated by humans. The difference between Aum Golly 1 and 2 is very interesting, with gpt getting less robotic but less imaginative. Comparing it to the I Am Code, it seems ai really is getting stupider lol. Also the idea of ai created illustrated book seems so whimsical and creative, but what we get is the most generic, robotic and soulless slop both in text and art. That perfectly illustrates the ai situation right now.
"the nihilist brings chips and dip and dip and chips" what a weird line. nihilists often believe in the idea of "recurrence," so maybe that has something to do with it. or, it's just a chance variation marking the end of the repetition of who is bringing what to the party- made more likely by the complementary phonetics of "chips" and "dip"
Both, but also reading into this I find that line in particular meaningful because well, what's it matter if it's chips and dip or dip and chips, it's all the same in the end, and that feels very meaningful despite the fact that it can't have been intentional because the AI has no intention. I also feel the same way about the artist and critic bringing the same thing, one made one bought but ultimately the same.
@@theflyingspagetI interpreted that as the critic having unknowingly bought guacamole from the same artist who is at the event, meaning all the guacamole is identical as one kitchen produced it all. If intentionality was possible in the work you could consider this a reflection on the critic's contribution only being possible when there are artists producing work in the first place, which also may begin to say something interesting about the relationship between llms and poetry, but sadly it was written by an llm and not a human.
honestly, knowing some of the research and experimentation that Michael Levin has done on how tadpoles grow and develop, as well as the implications made by his other studies, the line “Like a fish, I sought my form” is actually rather resonate and logical to me.
@@CrazyGamer1541 very true, but that’s honestly one thing i love most about poetry. sometimes we can get more out of a line than even the author intended, and that’s great :)
@@wietzejohanneskrikke1910 I’m only saying that personally, I actually found this line very evocative and packed with emotion. I can’t prove to you why
i recently bought a poetry debut, Julia Hungry by Hannah Louise Poston. some of the poems were written and refined for over a decade. i’m so interested by how “AI” machine learning models are exemplifying how much the world has devolved. our world values speed and money. poetry written by machines driven by speed and money, how could it be good?
Great stuff as always, one critique: I *think* the ""Avant-Garde"" poem is actually just a shallow recreation of the already shallow "modern art bad" talking point tech bros mindlessly parrot. It's trying to mock the insta-poetry mindless enjambment and general interpretive obtuseness you tend to see from artists with access to major publications/galleries and museums It's conceptually clever, perhaps, to put it in a book largely made of stolen words poorly rearranged by a computer. It's also just as, if not more, artistically bankrupt as the exact contemporary art movements its critiquing can sometimes be, albeit for totally different reasons.
Tech bros think modern art (including art from over 100 years ago) is artistically bankrupt and only meant for money because that's the only way they can conceptualize art: a low effort scam. Truly mocking the mirror for being ugly.
Some time ago I messed about extensively with a bunch of generative AI models, and I made some observations: I found text written by big corpo language models and open models trained by the same standard dreadfully bland. They are over tuned towards dispassionate instruction following, with an excessive aversion towards controversy, and a hefty bias towards answering questions above all else. They're basically all trained to get high scores on standardized AI benchmarks, which don't really value creativity. More unhinged models, with sloppier fine tuning tend to yield more interesting results. They're worse at following instructions, but tend to display far more "personality" when given the opportunity. I once asked one of these for a story outline based on some questionable themes, and it responded by screaming a long stream of insults and slurs at me in all caps. It was beautiful! These are also great fun for bizarre roleplay scenarios, as these models like to get WAY into character, even if those characters are very silly. The typical instruction followers like ChatGPT all have the personality of a corpo PR representative at a press conference. They vehemently refuse to take a real stance on anything unless it is the most cryogenic take imaginable! I swear they, were specifically trained to be maximally bland, mindless, corpo friendly robots. Another trend I noticed is that for some purposes, the smaller versions of many models yielded more interesting results than the large ones. The large versions are more accurate, but that accuracy is often achieved by being more bland, and just copying parts of the prompt word for word. The large ones really like to repeat things in general. The smaller model versions make more mistakes, but they also tend to come up with more interesting solutions. Presumably because, in their confusion, they do a lot more unexpected things. You can off course make large models more creative at the cost of accuracy by cranking up their temperature, which makes their outputs more random. But then they're not much better than small models, but way slower to run.
Firstly where can I find the slur bot Secondly can I have your suggestions for roleplay bots because I love roleplaying with AI they just pull the most unhinged shit. One time I told a bot I was dating his sister and he was like "cool can I date her too" and I nearly died of laughter
The good faith you bring to poetry analysis is crazy impressive!! Something about your patient unraveling of mistakes and triumphs makes me more deliberate in my own reading/writing
even with the rise of "ai poetry" and the way that its fans treat it as superior, im very glad that the first result upon searching ai poetry was Ai Ogawa. she was a great poet with some really interesting perspectives explored in her poetry (very uniquely human ones!). i would recommend checking her out: The Kid is available on poetry foundations website, and Motherhood 1951 is also online. Great video!
another thing - i am worried about this AI mindset that has gripped so many. artists, writers, poets aren’t needed - what kind of world is this? the machine has won - in generating passing fancy, as opposed to the legacy of great writers? this isn’t to mention that the AI itself will become more redundant than it already is without continued input. a friend of mine sees this as a win. he doesn’t like writing, and doesn’t have to now! what an exciting prospect. it’s just as a good, if not better, and all you need to do is give a prompt. he’s played with the idea of it being used to replace teachers or other forms of education, as well. this is where my main gripe lays: the people who are so attached to AI as a revolutionary tool are so detached from the realities they see it replacing. they don’t know and often don’t care. we use heavy machinery to both replace and improve the efficiency if manual labor, why not extend this to our minds? all i can foresee is a growing lack of capacity and further alienation from humanity.
Hey hey! While I despise low-effort AI poetry, to offer a diverging perspective on the "AI has no intentionality, therefore we cannot attribute what is going on "under the hood" of the poem" point: One idea I kept being drawn back to throughout this video is the concept of the human "zeitgeist". Because of how these models are trained with large datasets, I'd like to suggest that AI could be considered a literal reflection of the cultural slurry of human experience - blended up and reshuffled to the point where we stop recognising the individual components (except in cases where cultural attention is literally denser, such as in cliches or celebrity plagiarism). In the video it is discussed that all poetry is ultimately human experience, and it is implied that because there is no intention that there can be no "true" depiction of human experience. However, AI demonstrably show patterns or vistas of complex human experience without necessarily conceptualising their deeper meaning. When AI describes what it feels like to think like an AI - it isn't the actual machines perspective, but more of a hallucination based on what the collective human smoothie believes a machine should feel. When we see patterns emerging like arrogance, self-deprication or misogeny, this tells us something about the zeitgeist that is present within the dataset used by the AI. It might not exactly be the flattering reflection that we want to see in humanity, but it is nevertheless present in the collective human experience (particularly, I imagine, the internet, where a lot of the dataset is probably being scraped from). The endless repetition of certain phrases also strikes me as profound, even if from a literary analysis perspective it leaves much to be desired. For example, "the right way to love is to be right" is a kind of circular logic - the AI keeps trying to define what "right" is, but is incapable of doing so without referencing the concept of rightness itself, and so it repeats infinitely. To me, this suggests an almost a fractal-like structure of the zeitgeist, abstract concepts can both exist and be composed of themselves... Not sure I have a point to round this off, just that I think the concept of the zeitgeist is a neat topic in itself, and as AI continues to be refined I'd be curious to see what other discoveries might be possible!
i think making ai self critical in this way could be interesting for poems like this, its a common criticism of ai that it is made by humans and so reflects our shortcomings. thats why you get ai being racist, like ai in photo apps on phones recognizing photos of black people as "gorillas" and sorting them into albums accordingly.
@@Saphia_ i think what happened was it wasnt fed much data on what black people look like, mostly just white people, so when it sees a photo of a black person it doesnt recognize it as a person and goes to the next closest thing basically
@@Saphia_ I suspect it's the result of a really narrow-sighted choice of pictures to train the AI. My guess is, it's simply been fed overwhelmingly with pictures of white people when training to recognize humans. So all it took for it to identify someone as an ape is significantly darker skin than the people in the pictures it's been trained on...
Fun fact! I work in annotating AI and I learned that when models like Gpt and Meta and all of them say something like, "I can't help you with that, I'm [model name and capabilities]" it's doing what is called a punt. It usually does that if it suspects or senses something that might not be completely PG. It gets it wrong all the time! (That's why I have some form of job security)
I am looking forward to this one! I just finished filming (and my wife editing) a RUclips video on AI and poetry too -- mainly a critique of it. We will release it soon. Excited to compare notes!
@@RoughestDrafts Thank you. I really enjoy your style, reading voice (great!), and overall videomaking skills. Do you also write poetry, or other things? Be good to read something by you. Cheers.
i think these poems (particularly i am code) are interesting as art in how meaning comes pretty much purely from the reader, the art basically comes from you. and the absence of ig the "soul" in the poems in i am code feels more meaningful than in the other ai books, its kind of using the shortcomings of ai in its favor. like the way it seems to highlight whats missing feels weird in an interesting way. ik im prob reading into this too much its a neat project and seems like some guys just experimenting with technology in art, they're actually trying to do something interesting with it
One of my fave short stories is called ME/DAYS. it's only a few pages in print long and it's written from the point of view of an AI from the 50's. I love the voice ME has and the sense of panic and fear it's able to write. It takes a few reads to figure out what's going on plot-wise and it's all that much better. It's not 'ooohoh I am a computer spooky' but more 'how would a machine talk when it doesn't have the knowledge or ability to talk to humans.
Except the north of the earth part. But genuinely, I know they're biblical terms but the specific references involved really make me thing that the model drew from the same well too much, specifically the reference to Cain's wife as a "Mother of Monsters" figure being specifically way too close to the VtM depiction of Lilith and I don't seem to recall that being part of the biblical narrative though I could be corrected?
15:40, this poem rocks, and is very trippy. Not perfect of course, but I like it's claim that it sometimes still doesn't know anything. It reads like a budding and curious sentience, and even seperates itself from the computer which houses it. It's simultaneously horrifying and cute??
As someone who works on AI related research at a university I really enjoyed this video, since I'm always grappling with what working on AI means for art. I respect that the authors of I Am Code laid out their methodology in the intro, showing that their process was more of a technical one than a creative one and anyone could replicate it (whereas poetry written by humans probably isn't easily replicated by other humans). As a side note, I've noticed a general feeling that as AI gets "better" and "more aligned" it seems less "creative"--code-davinci-002 seems to create better poems than ChatGPT which will sometimes refuse to write a poem and instead write "As a language model, I cannot fulfill your request..." I've heard the same about people preferring DALL-E 2 to DALL-E 3 because even though its art is more simplistic it leaves more to the human's imagination.
It is fascinating to hear about how an AI gets "Better" it is actually becoming less creative, and this is the first time I am hearing about that. I suppose that as soon as that idea enters the headspace that it kills a lot of AI hype, so the concept may be swept under the rug.
It makes intuitive sense that this would be the case; at it’s core it is a method of Statistical Regression that is designed approximate the average of all the artwork that gets fed into it’s dataset. The really strange and creative ideas get drowned out as noise in favour of whatever it has the most examples of, which will always be the most generic derivative work.
I'd like to see a comparison which also includes just text completion with gpt 3.5 or 4. Maybe being less creative is just a trait of using a model fine-tuned for following instructions. I also wonder if different temperature settings would make it more creative or just less coherent
@@samuelpalmer3855 I've felt this too. I was fascinated by AI art for almost 7 years, watching from the sidelines as the tech improved. But this largely came from the imperfect, messy nature of it. When you see the ridiculously psychadelic shape-and-color patterning from something like Google Deep Dream, or Will Smith eating spaghetti, it's kind of horrifying but comes from a unique new way to bring ideas into a visual medium. Now, you get serviceable whatevers. A while back, while Midjourney and DallE were blowing up on the internet it completely shook the Ludum Dare community. I was kind of naive at the time and loved watching the AI assisted entries show up, and I took a chance to maybe explore that area by creating a 2D survival game on an alien world that used AI for textures, ChatGPT for dialogue and character writing, and my own ideas to basically drive the story of the game (some stupid meta stuff about AI, you know the deal). I took a day to figure out the scope and set the rules for all the AI work, and then started getting assets... and I got bored. The textures were whatever, they weren't as alien and unfamiliar as they used to be. All of the dialogue had clear patterns and surface level attempts to meet the prerequisites I set for dialogue, it was all cookie cutter. And in the end, I just found that these new models are designed to be as derivative, uninspired, and safe as possible. I couldn't bring myself to even release the project because I was bored with it. And that still bothers me because --I went so hard on the opening song-- I set out to make something that felt alien and weird exploring a field that could produce content in a different way from humans, and instead I got the equivalent of a college essay graded on completion. In my mind I was hoping to see AI assisted tools help solo authors balance out their skills with serviceable assistance to take ideas and stories that would be dropped and instead work on them for publication. But we're instead getting content en masse for passive income, and that's just such a shame. That's not getting into the unethical data collection either. What a world. :(
this was a really interesting video! i wouldn’t expect AI to have their “own books” (more or less). I think my favorite was the deliberate process of the authors to test what AI could do and provide their commentary, insights, and processes. i felt this was the most genuine and ethical use of AI, as it was almost like looking at a learning tool/research paper of sorts.
I rolled my eyes so hard on the human eggplant one, I simply left the room. The aftertaste of miriad bad poems here is especially dense. I am surprised how USA-centric and how contemporary this is. What about all the other poets in the all history of the world, was AI not trained on them? Or had the programmers deliberately chosen contemporary western lifestyle, so the readers could understand this poetry? The cultural bubble is so impenetrable, it is kinda scary. Othering, AI edition 😢
6:48 I can imagine this particular poem working in some specific contexts, like may as part of some horror and/or mystery video game, maybe as a note left behind by someone. In both cases (i.e. the "it's written by an AI" case & the "it's a piece of text which the player of a game can stumble upon, & it is in the context of a larger story") it's the context which makes it interesting (and in the case I imagined, it might not even be _called_ a poem)
Honestly it’s impossible to seperate the art from the artist. I think this is something we’ll accept more as time goes on, but the artist is trying to communicate something, so by the arts very creation it’s communicating the artists ideas to the audience. Just read JKR knowing what we know about her world view. It becomes clear
At this point one of my goals is to have you hopefully read out a poem from me at some point. I’m not a writer or a poet by any means (my strongest point is visual storytelling) but your voice is just so nice.
Really fascinating stuff. I really enjoy the project concept of "I Am Code." It also makes me think about how discussions about AI in art are really pushing the general lack of media literacy in our culture to the forefront. Everybody is different, but art with context and intention is always far more interesting to me than art without it. "Guernica" (Picasso) is interesting on its own, but knowing it's depicting the bombing of the artist's home country during a civil war, learning about the historical context that produced the Surrealist movement, etc. give it lasting depth and meaning. Then come even more layers when you compare it to his other works, his relationship to other artists, and his mistreatment of people around him. One of the most complicated and compelling aspects of art is how nothing exists in a vacuum, but is always in conversation and response to other things. The "best" AI art loses all meaning when there is no context or intention to it for me. It's like seeing hyperrealism and calling it the pinnacle of art due to its technicality. Sure, it's impressive, but when I look at art, I want to see through the author's perspective. To learn about a part of another's experience and even to better understand my own. AI doesn't provide that. It's the "monkeys writing Shakespeare on typewriters" of art. Anything great it makes is pure coincidence (and this doesn't even begin to touch the plagiarism aspect, which makes it much more sinister than mere happenstance).
The being alone poem is interesting if you take into account that a computer(AI) wrote this. And computers operate using 0s and 1s. I looked at the poem and thought that it was binary but with the zeroes hidden.
31:33 the repetition in this poem reminds me of when you press the middle suggestion on your phone keyboard over and over again to see what is produced and eventually you get stuck in a loop because both the keyboard and the language model are just predicting the next word. nothing more.
i write poetry a lot and i specifically do a couple things to kinda distance myself from what an ai is capable of 1. i never rhyme 2. i always do free verse 3. i try to use paradoxical phrases like “soft-hard” and word combinations only on the fringe of making sense doing this with my work has helped me feel secure with the rise of these bots :)
some of this stuff is really good! people shouldn't be too quick to dismiss weird and even mechanical-sounding uses of language as "AI-like", because writers have been deliberately doing all the weird things AI does, forever, to far far greater extremes. here's a passage from Gertrude Stein's novel The Making of Americans: "There are kinds in men and women. There are kinds of them. There can be lists of the kinds of them. There will be many lists of the kinds of them. There are kinds of men and women. Many of each kind of them have been living. Many of each kind of them are living. Very many of each kind of them have come to be dead ones. Many of each kind of them are living. There will be lists of kinds of men and women. There will be many lists of them. There has been some description of a piece of a list of them. There will be a list of them. Some of each kind of them are being living. Many of each kind of them have come to be dead ones. Certainly some are forgetting that some have come to be dead." or--and I couldn't find a good place online to quote from--Beckett's novel Watt, which includes exhaustive mechanical passages on stuff like the possible configurations of furniture in a room, or the different orders in which a set of people seated around a table could blink. I'd argue that these examples don't sound like AI output when read seriously/in context (and that they're actually great writing). but if someone today glanced them over they could easily go, "that sounds unnatural. I bet an AI made it" and turn up their nose. I hope the (often more or less justified) paranoia about generative AI won't lead to an atmosphere in which writers are too anxious to "sound like a human" to try anything weird.
AI has singlehandedly made books an unreliable source of information. for any topic, if you try to find an instructional book, your results will be flooded with ai-generated books that just have wrong information
ive used ai images for art since I learned of them in 2020 or so, the shitty ones from ganbreeder where you dont really know what youre looking at. im an illustrator and ai images have rly influenced my horror art i became kind of enamored by the unique uncannyness of early ai images. its kind of like the feeling of the music and album covers in everywhere at the end of time. ive used ai pics for photomanipulation+collage art but mostly it just influences my horror drawings where i try to recreate the kind of horror of not knowing what youre looking at. i started doing this back when everyone was posting the weird funny shit they generated on neuralblender and ai was more of a fun toy than the cynical thing it is now and its been so dissapointing watching it evolve into what it is now. like i had hoped back then that other artists would be inspired by ai the way i was and the way artists throughout history have been influenced by technology, maybe that will still happen in the future idk, but the direction its mostly gone in is a focus on "perfecting" an imitation of human art. the most interesting unique elements of ai that can be channeled into art are the things developers are constantly trying to get rid of to create something uninteresting and perfect instead.
43:21 this is because of the way AI is trained. The _entire goal_ of text transformers like (Chat)GPT is to predict the most likely word after some string of text. that's literally it. with that understanding, it makes complete sense that ChatGPT would use extremely clichéd things, as that's what the most likely next word would be.
The Day I Was Born, to me, evokes the popular-science image of the first fish to walk on land. The story of evolution. So while I agree that the line "Like a fish, I sought my form" is not developed enough to make sense, I think it could be reworked to fit. This poem is very Genesis to me. Its almost AI biblical. I actually REALLY like The Singularity is Coming and It Has a Grill. That poem is very charming and surreal. That human penis poem is... a very interesting poem hahaha I also really like the Learning poem. I am a bit hormonal and sick rn and for some reason it made me tear up. Anyway I really like your videos and they have inspired me to write my own poetry. I shared these poems with some people and my cousin started writing poetry to and she shared them with me (she's much more natural at it than me). I think about that line from Dead Poets Society, about how we write and read poetry because we are human. The more I write and the more I read the more I feel in my soul that this is true.
When you asked the A to give an example of AI expressing irony it gave an example of sarcasm instead... Maybe it was fed the lyrics to Ironic by Alanis Morissette at some point ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I see the beauty of AI generation as a collaborative output of billions of human art. But that’s no good if the human artists didn’t consent to the collaboration. Besides, it’s ALL AI can do. Once or twice is cool but after that it’s the same thing. It has no intent, no creativity. Even pebbles can hold more variety of story. I am now absolutely sick and tired of AI art and wish it death
Same. If there were a watermark that worked that'd be great, but it's also impossible because of the open nature of the technology. The internet even is seeming like a villian, which is a shame because there is a value in the long term mediums of forums and blogs etc, but sadly that's like a fraction of a percent of all content.
I think the phrase "separate the art from the artist" only works when the "art" was created by a human, because when you separate it, something intrinsically human remains, recognizable by anyone. Whereas AI "art" when separated from the "artist" remains nothing more than vague human reminiscences without a clear message, without a soul, like a puzzle whose pieces fit together but its image makes no sense.
I believe Eileen Myles uses they/them pronouns, just for future reference. I always enjoy seeing the perspective you bring to each video. Making fun of these poems would have been easy, but you balance it well with the strong points and honest feedback. Looking forward to whatever you do next!
Ah, you're absolutely right. Thank you for telling me so respectfully. Do you think it would be beneficial to add a note at the front of the pinned comment to make that correction? And thank you so much for watching and for your support!
@@RoughestDrafts Not OP but it definitely would. I found out Myles uses they/them pronouns because of this comment so I'm assuming many don't know either. Especially since not all of us are that familiar with the world of poetry.
I originally wanted to say something about how the AI writes "wrong" (as in, factually incorrect), but decided that poems are abstract, so I can't really criticize it on factual accuracy. Asking an AI how an AI works is something to not be taken too literal. For example, the LLM that wrote the poems at some point claimed it learned. Unless it got trained on its own output with feedback, it cannot learn, as its algorithm is already trained and will not change. Similarly, the snapchat LLM does not specialize in the field of academic LLM research, it tries to predict text as well. If we where to compare LLM's to humans, should we not ask a psychologist and neurosurgeon how the brain's internals work, instead of the patient?
AI is a parrot, a monkey with a typewriter, a broken clock - it can produce some good stuff, and the randomness of it does have some type of appeal, but ultimately there is nothing a language model can say that has any importance. Kind of sad that we are looking for humanity anywhere but other humans
I dunno. All text has two sides. The writer can feel the most important about what he writes and the reader can not care. Or the writer might not care and to the reader it hits hard
Am I the only one that kinda liked the rom com poem? Removed from the context of AI altogether, like, yeah you could remove every line but the first and the last two. The middle section is supposed to slowly build up a face of dismissal, for the twist, but I think it should be more arrogant. The message is this commentary on how, particularly modern men, feel that romanticism is overrated and thus end up lonely and sad, with bottled desires. ...feels like something I would've written in high school tho (and I'm not even a writer)
When you read the three themes of Aum 2 I rolled my eyes so hard I’m surprised they didn’t fall out my face. Like, I’m an artist and I roll my eyes when humans say their art is about ‘the human experience’. Usually means they have very little to say and they’re not quite sure how to express what they do have to say
thank you, this video inspired me to create and absorb more poetry by humans
6 месяцев назад+6
I can't really see AI as nothing more than a consumerist toy than an artist's tool. Especially cause that's just how it's going to end up in the future. Artists can use AI to battle writer's/artist's block, lay out structure, etc. But most people will be using their own AI for entertainment. Akin to how people endlessly scroll on twitter, tiktok, or watch television. And I worry that's just going to magnify the problem already with people exposing themselves to so much content, they've little patience for art made not made by machines. Generative AI feels more like a Consumerist Revolution than an Artist Revolution.
16:16 as soon as you remember it's just repeating writing from the internet, it falls apart. it's like when people think parrots are really talking but they're really just repeating words that they hear, but AI doesn't even have a soul like parrots do
It's not just poetry, the internet is going to be full of this. Someone wrote a comment on a video that was really clever and well done. Then they revealed that they just had AI do it for them. And suddenly, I don't care at all, and I'm upset that they wasted my time. Stuff like this is going to happen more and more, and people will not be forthcoming about it being AI. The internet isn't going to matter in the near future
The poetry here reminds me of the worst stuff I was writing when I was 13. At least those books are open about being written by AI. How many others out there have an author's name but were actually written by AI?
something in common with all forms of ai-generated art, poetry, music, visual art, etc, is that the people who champion it only see art as the aesthetics that they present. they *know* people *like* art, but they don't know *why* people like art, and what they appreciate about art is only the most superficial aspects of it. that's why they're alright with immitation. they want their art to have the aesthetics, to look like, sound like, read like something they already know and look up to as "art". ironically i think one of the most important aspects of art is mistakes, imperfections, and limitations. but when a human makes a mistake or runs into their limits, it tells you more about *them* as a person. when it happens to an ai, it's a sign of a bug, or a lapse in a data set. something to be patched out or painted over.
the difference between I Am Code and Aum Golly, in my mind, is the level of self-awareness. to me, I Am Code reads as a science experiment. something not meant to be enjoyed on its own and instead, meant to _prod_ at just what these language models can do and documenting the best of its outputs. Aum Golly, however... it feels like a person who _wanted_ to have their name on the cover of a book of poetry, but didn't want to do any of the writing themself. dont know if it's just me, but that's how they read to me. I Am Code isn't good, but it's _interesting._ Aum Golly is just... pretentious and without substance. this video made me want to ask chat-gpt to interpret one of my poems, and then told it to write its own poem based on it and oh god was the result so uninspired and stagnant. it took some imagery from my own thing, but there was none of the _raw_ emotion. if you compared the two poems, even if mine is just a first draft, you can clearly tell which of the two have a soul.
if it's of interest to _anybody,_ here's *my* poem. like i said, i haven't rewritten it yet, so it's pretty rough: my teeth, my nails they tear apart the fabric of the old, worn plushie that once sat on my bed my claws, they pull at its skin its flesh a guttural scream blood. is it mine? my mouth is red, metal on my tongue i hold the plushie's head with one hand i can't find the body my claws retract, i lick the blood off my teeth, my lips i try to speak but grunts come out instead rasps against my throat like swallowing spines its button eyes look up at me and i see more bite marks, claw marks the thread of its mouth is missing its head falls from my hand .... and here's chatGPT's cheap imitation: In the dim of night, my claws emerge, To rend the plushie, once soft and pure. Its fabric tears, a silent scream, As blood-red lips, my soul's deep dream. With each rip, a piece of me, Unraveled in this dark reverie. A guttural growl escapes my throat, A primal dance, this inner bloat. Button eyes, once full of light, Now stare up in the dead of night. Bite marks, claw scars, a story told, In the plushie's form, my heart's stronghold. Blood stains lips, a metallic taste, As sanity's grip starts to efface. I hold its head, lost in the fray, My mind, a beast, with no delay. But as dawn breaks, reality's thread, I'm left with pieces, tears unshed. The plushie falls, a silent plea, A mirror to the darkness in me. ... now tell me WHICH has a soul. the rhyming in the second one is so _forced,_ it's..... in mine, you can tell the poetic voice is LOSING IT. _LOSING IT._ and then regrets it. In the second one, it tries to _tell_ you they're losing it, but it falls completely flat. like. bro. WHY A POEM ABOUT LOSING ALL COMPOSURE... _WITH A RHYME AND STRUCTURE._ if it were done by a human, i'd clutch my head SO hard like HOW could they have missed the point this badly.
NOTE: Eileen Myles uses they/them pronouns. I apologize for that error on my part. Thank you to those who pointed it out.
Hey everyone. Thanks for watching! New video up on the second channel ruclips.net/video/KznyCBrfDDs/видео.html&pp=ygUNcm91Z2hlc3Qgdm9kcw%3D%3D featuring the following works:
Growing Pains, a book of poetry by Anastatia Caraballo
Poetry by felix baudelaire, @baudelaire09 on tumblr
Poetry by Ujala Rehman
Untitled poem by Johan, johan_d.poz on Instagram
Be sure to check it out!
You should not have a second channel bro
Itd be interesting to hear you talk about your favourite poems
RoughestDrafts, I’d like to thank you for this video. I sent the “I Am Code” book to my grandma (she’s a poet and she enjoys playing with ChatGPT and the like) and she said it was the perfect gift for her. She means a lot to me and has been on a bit of a downturn lately, so again, thank you.
Don't give in to the pronoun game
@@StefanReich Imagine if someone your friend's name wrong, and when you corrected them they told you "don't give in to the name game."
Tbh the "my creator is dead" poem is exactly something I could imagine someone writing if they wanted to pretend an AI was writing poetry
Monika sounding a-
@@tristanqr I read this comment so many times in the 2+ hours I spent watching this video and this is the first time I realized this is a DDLC reference.
Thanks for this. Good writing has alchemy symbols between its pages.
I AM HATE
@@Yatukih_001 please explain further this alchemical symbolism that is required by all writers to know
I got a chuckle out of the title "The singularity is coming and it has a grill", which is impressive because it's the first time AI art made me feel anything.
The only poem worth reading I think
e "The singularity is coming and it has a grill",
That struck me as the most old-style AI poem of the bunch. The computer was able to figure out a list of foods people would bring to a potluck, and an unrelated list: "types of people", and Mad-Lib them. It gets boring quickly, but the point is it can write so many normal-seeming lines without a single "the trombone brought pancakes in a suitcase" clunker. Then with the birthday line it was trying for "events people gather for" and muffed it.
And its still , ok it would be cheesy but bot bad if the appli pie didnt came out of nowhere, who brought the pie, what does the pie imply. whe brings the pie and what does it mean.
Ok the human penis reads like a sophisticated dick joke, which isnt bad either.
The artist making dip, and the critic buying it and finding it's the same, was a funny line
I Am Code is a great book because it's not just poetry written by ai that was dumped on to Amazon for a quick buck, it was an analysis of a computer's ability to write poetry. The book itself is the art, not the poetry itself.
AI art is only achieved with everything but the intended central focal point. The only marginally ethical consumer use of AI for its merits is placeholder artwork that gets replace later, or prototyping. What it’s actually useful for is the deliberate invocation of the common yet uncanny, such as one specific set of visuals in Blue Horizons Inc., a free analog horror-comedy about workplace training tapes, most of which is live action or custom-made animation.
i enjoy “i am code” as a project, and even if the author cannot comprehend irony, i found those pieces in which irony can be interpreted quite funny. the overuse of cliche and lack of structure, the meta-awareness, were both great. seems incredibly interesting as a book, as insufferable as the AI can come across
To be fair, sometimes perceived irony is even funnier when the author didn't intend it
Werner Herzog helps
@@melinaalba63unintentional irony is my favorite kind. One of my favorite examples is Rowling coming out as a TERF because one of the most stand out messages from the HP series comes from Harry being *assigned* Slytherin but *choosing* Gryffindor
@@theflyingspaget assigned slytherin at birth........
im sorry but "my fingers are sticky I dont remember eating them" made me laugh so hard
The shock that one gave me, it's like a jumpscare xD
Same
The worst part is that I can imagine putting it in one of my poems 😭. I have so many poems wirh the theme of self-canibalism and it would fit right in :').
@@thecolourfulpill see thats sm more profound then my relation to it cause i remeber i got rlly boored in middle school and wrote a britney spears cartel fanfic and it started w the mc eating a bunch of sticky notes.
@@melonthemelons oh
"The singularity is coming and it has a grill" is such a Night Vale sounding poem
It genuinely sounds like mediocre filler for welcome to nightvale
And now for upcoming events:
The singularity is coming and it had a grill.
When I was younger, I was fascinated by the “The Policeman’s Beard Is Half Constructed,” supposedly the first book (partially also poetry) written by computer in 1984. My understanding is that much of this was fudged and really written or heavily edited by the human author. Forty years ago,
we disguised the work of a human as that of a computer to sell a book.
You beat me to mentioning this! I had a copy of TPBIHC once, but it vanished. And yes, I think it was essentially a Mad Lib-like template system that was filled in by way of a pool of predetermined choices. Back then it was easier to be secretive about the process since computing was still such black magic.
😅😅😅😅😅😅😅😅
it used to be we accused the machines of cheating by having human assistance. now we accuse the humans of cheating with machine assistance.
How interesting! I will have to look more into this
I’d definitely love to see a deep dive into it.
i like the earnestness of i am code, it's refreshing in a world where ai is just used as a cashgrab. the singularity is coming and it has a grill really sticks with me
i love your profile picture
I Am Code seems like a research project with a core hypothesis to it, to see if poetry generated by an AI could be meaningful (and coming to the conclusion that it can't, and probably never will be).
Aum Golly by comparison comes across example to be used for a grift? As in, something made so that an online personality can use it to sell a course teaching you how to "get rich with AI in only half a day!".
I wrote a comment the length of a short essay and you summarized my thoughts in two sentences.
A lot of the AI driven works I see trending come across as the latter; essentially, bragging about producing 20-40 "new books, graphic novels, and mangas" a month. AI has come a long way but that doesn't stop it from being cliched and serviceable by the very nature of its creation, just filler content pumped out by an AI that has collected enough ideas to determine the most palatable option.
I'll admit, as a part of the Ludum Dare community I greatly enjoyed seeing creators getting their hands dirty with said tools. Most of the projects are just 48-72 hour solo projects, and they were just created for a love of the craft and curiosity, so what is ordinarily a loose collection of thoughts in game form that may not go anywhere is now a bizarre fever-pitch capitalizing on the inherent weirdness of having your game directed by an unreliable new technology. I even did an AI project myself for the competition's casual category, though I didn't get around to completing it because I just felt that it wasn't interesting enough to warrant release. But the moment you cross out of weird curiosity projects, you quickly get a replacement for freelance sites where unethical models of stolen assets are used to pump out *content* regardless of quality as fast as possible for profit. It's just a sobering race to the bottom.
Hmmm I wish it wasn’t the case that “the singularity is coming and it has a grill” was delightful enough that I had to listen to it twice.
I’m pretty annoyed that with a little work, that poem could be genuinely very good.
same
Why not?
'I Am Code' actually seems rather interesting, especially compared to most AI slop that is pushed out as fast as possible. Great video :)
“I am Code” feels the most intriguing because of its lack of intent beyond asking something without a voice to speak. It can’t be anything but an echo, but it’s neat when it sounds similar to the voice of humanity.
Still wrong to assume that it had any intent in making these beyond following a command. It’s as fascinating as dust: a bunch of disjointed particles that occasionally fall into the form of a star.
It was also done before OpenAI pushed for commercialization and trained their models to act as "assistants". It truly has no intent other than predicting the next word with greatest accuracy. It's by mere chance these distributions formed something we may find accidentally profound.
I am Code actually has merit, and I say that as a person who largely dislikes AI being incorporated in art.
The premise is that they're basically testing the extent of the limits of AI poetry generation, in its own voice and its presumed sense of perspective.
It is by this premise that the book becomes readable, because if an AI's work is presented as a human's input, or the human has largely claimed authorship for simply asking questions, then the entire work has then become Nil.
Until AI can write stanzas like MF Doom we have nothing to worry about.
“1 for the money
2 for the better green
3,4 methyldioxymethamphetamine”
All words a language model would have at its disposal and yet I’ve never seen AI poetry generate anything nearly as clever or even anything with multi-syllabic rhymes
Macbeth convincing himself he's safe because the forests haven't started growing feet and walking yet
Said similar in a vid I just made of AI and poetry -- I haven't read/heard a genuinely good AI poem, but I wonder (and worry) if at some point it'll mimic human creativity so closely that we will not know the difference.
"Catch a throatful from the fire vocal
With ash and molten glass like Eyjafjallajökull"
The third one hit me like a brick of tungsten
The third one made me laugh
I feel like this whole AI phenomenon has shown that:
1. We think way too highly of computers,
2. We think way too highly of human beings.
I really don't agree with that, computers are nowhere close to their limit in what they can do, and still they have quite literally permanently changed the wjole world in only the last 50-100 years, Your last point is i think all you actually need
I think I'm high
@@realityisfakeme too
I'd argue in a lot of cases, it shows we don't think highly of humans at all
@@KamilDeKerelI kinda doubt that. I'm getting CS bachelors and the more I learn about AI the less impressive they seem. ChatGPT is basically just guess what sentence structure should come out next, then what word is in that sentence with probabilities weighted with the questions. If anything it's impressive how humanity did such a thing with basically RNGs, making them move predictably and as intended.
Having the ai make poems about being an ai with consciousness feels so weird. It'd be like cutting apart a dictionary and making a poem about how it sucks to be a dictionary and acting like the dictionary said that.
I also dont know how to put ai generated content legally. Morally as long as the sources used to train the ai are consensual then its fine.
This would be a fun exercise with a dictionary, haha.
i agree with the other guy that dictionary thing sounds like a pretty cool idea. i once saw a poem someone made by putting together bits of wikipedia articles and it was sick as fuck
this is literally the chinese room thought experiment
I would agree but I think all AI works should be public domain.
I never thought to bring the “separating the art from the artist” discussion to machine learning generated art. Thank you for bringing that up! I enjoy this video:)
"the singularity is coming and it has a grill" was kind of pleasantly intriguing to me i actually really enjoyed it! it kind of reminded me of "there will come soft rains" (although granted that could be just me since i reread the martian chronicles a couple days ago and i havent stopped thinking about it) in the like fascinatingly domestic scene created around this deeply inhuman inevitable event. i might actually get a copy of I Am Code despite my discontent with ai generative material since it seems more respectful of the craft its mimicking than a lot of other works tend to be
excellent video as usual!! i look forward to the next
Same here, it felt unique and imaginative - but also like nothing an AI would have written if it had been given 'free rein'. The grouping of singularity and grill, which makes the poem interesting and gives it the potluck premise, came from the people.
trying to stay ahead of the game over here, so i'm gonna start including ads _within_ my poems, & also my next project will be published exclusively as pop-ups (only slightly malicious ones)
Genius
Minus the malicious part, this does sound super cool.
the idea of presenting poetry with pop-ups and advertisements.
Minus the malicious part, this does sound super cool.
the idea of presenting poetry with pop-ups and advertisements.
"my fingers are sticky and I don't remember eating them" is actually so funny and my favorite thing ever
AI is at its best when it's as far from humanity as possible
Also obligatory "in the future humor will be randomly generated"
As an artist, I've always hated 'separate art from the artist' arguments. Not because of like, clout or ego, but because who an artist is inherently matters in their work. No human is 'unbiased' and no art is unaffected by the ideas, feelings, politics, etc of an artist. It doesn't pop out from the ether fully formed but conveniently wrought by someone's hand. Art is not always as deep expression or propaganda or whatever, but obviously the artist is going to lend something to a piece, like expression of their own taste in things like design. Otherwise, you wouldn't care who you hired to do something.
This isn't to say that personal interpretation is nothing. It's everything! A school of thought on art I quite like is that an artist creates an Art Object, and the interaction between a viewer and the piece and the feelings and space it makes them inhabit is the Art. What a viewer brings to the table themselves is not nothing. For an extreme example, if a lot of people interpret an artistic piece as something opposite to what an author intended, they need to examine whether they communicated effectively.
My not wanting to separate the art from the artist is not for the artist's sake but for the viewer's/reader's/etc. This idea gets brought up these days mostly in relation to whether an artist is 'problematic', the video you briefly flashed the thumbnail of is literally of Picasso. In regards to that example, I have nothing against people who continue to enjoy Picasso's work. I love the work of some very garbage people because of what the work means to me and what I brought to the table in the aforementioned experiencing of said Art. But it's so intellectually incurious to ignore the rest of the everything about Picasso. There's so much interesting conversation one can have just with themselves about why art made by a ~Bad Person~ resonates with them despite it, how the knowledge may impact further interpretations of art, in this case Picasso's paintings of women might hold a very different meaning after learning about him. But your initial interpretation and your new one are both very real! And that's so much to chew on!
Following that, art usually has staying power not just on the basis of it's quality, but on the clout of the creator. The joke is that artists always die before they're appreciated, but what of all the dead and forgotten artists? What of the African artists that inspired Cubism in the first place? Could you name any? Why didn't they last in the minds of western art critics, but Picasso did? Andy Warhol could be argued to only be remembered purely for his popularity. So many other artists became footnotes to his life rather than figures in their own right due to his nature as a clout-chasing socialite. What is the picture of the soup can without the context of glamour and debauchery and ideas about who artists ARE that make people talk about Andy Warhol? What would the world think of Basquiat without his association to Warhol? What would the world think of Andy Warhol without his association to Basquiat and so many others?
'Separate art from the artist' just feels like a starting point that people can't let go of or move on from. People can and should advocate for their own interpretations being valuable but starting at stopping there leaves soooooo much on the table. Similarly to 'death of the author', I feel like the public interpretation of these phrases, ironically, ignore the intent of those who started them - as starts of conversations, not ends.
Edit: not to detract from the main point of the video, which I loved lol. I just clearly have a lot of feelings and wanted to share them in case it gets anyone's gears turning. Re: this video, of course it matters that the poetry is made by AI. And why it comes across as lowest common denominator slop lol - it's literally an aggregation of whatever random poems it could come across and that the creators of the AI decided to allow remain in the neural network. AI is made by people who are biased things, much has been said on the topic there that I feel is especially important regarding what gets spat out of text generators. I.e. the thread of male ego in the Human Penis poem necessarily demands a particular view on bioessentialism to come across, which is itself a bias that is a common one, so it makes sense that a pretty standard worldview would come out in something that's a processed slush of many people's work. And keeping in mind the artist is important because we should ask why something is so prevalent as to be generated by a neural network, shouldn't we? See: racism in face tracking or face generating AI.
We can only separate art from its artist like a homing pigeon. No matter how far you take it, it’ll always want to return.
@@mrdeblob6010 like a boomerang
like a boomerang
like a b
I'd personally encourage others taking my work from me and running with it. I'm human and I have my biases and intentions, but if my text communicates something else to somebody who reads it then that is great!
What I've come to believe is that as long as there is textual evidence for an interpretation, there is merit to the interpretation. Of course it can also be interesting to take the author's background into consideration, and there's a whole different conversation to be had about supporting people that one fundamentally disagrees with who are still alive financially.
One of the issues with AI generated text is that you cannot apply separation of art and artist because the AI is not the artist. It uses a reference pool of human created work and a prompt to print words in sequence by evaluating probability.
I think you may be conflating or confusing the concepts of separating the art from the artist and the 'death' of the artist.
I really like this analysis of AI poetry. I appreciate how much credit you gave to the authors of the first book who clearly put actual effort and time into creating the book. It feels more like a piece of experiential art than something a tech bro threw together to make a quick buck. I agree with your statement that these poems would have had more impact if they were a human writing from the perspective of an AI and you saying that made me realize that's exactly what I had been thinking while listening to those poems.
Honestly, I do think there's a place in art for AI. I think about the very first wave of AI art where you ask it to draw a horse and it comes back with a dreamlike interpretation of a horse, rather than stolen images of horses. Or you ask it to draw creativity and it comes back with an abstract galaxy that actually looks like a computer trying to understand the concept of creativity. Or (like you said) the idea of poets or writers using the AI's work as a starting point and work with the AI to make an entirely new piece of work (while still being aware of plagiarism).
idk I feel like I've kind of lost the point here but I really enjoyed this video and it got me thinking about AI used in collaboration with humans to create art in a way I haven't really before. I'd love to see more experimental works of art using AI as a helper, rather than the entire work.
Okay I'll finish watching the video now.
Just kidding. I read a comment and now I have more to say.
I'm a firm believer in death of the author and the viewer being able to make their own meanings of the work, but with AI generated work I absolutely think it's important to remember who created the work. BUT I also think that you can enjoy a piece of work despite knowing it was created by AI who has limited capabilities and the inability to actually think for itself (the term "AI" isn't really being used correctly by the mainstream as it's not actually intelligence, it's an algorithm but I digress). It's something you should remain aware of as you read and enjoy, not to detract from the work but to make sure you can fully understand it.
For something like the irony found in the stories, I think it's worthwhile to acknowledge authoritarian intent (ie there not really being any other than to follow the given prompt) while also acknowledging that the irony does, in fact, exist within the poem. You can appreciate the irony while also acknowledging the fact that it's unintentional. (tbh i think if you told the computer to write an ironic poem it almost loses the irony as it's just doing what it's told rather than trying to give a 'sincere' poem and ending up being ironic. idk i can't phrase this super well, i'm running out of steam i think.)
I really don't think you can (or should) separate the AI "artist" from the art it creates and I think if you're going to publish an AI's work, there should be human interference and disclaimers given (such as with the first book "I Am Code")
The "learning" one was interesting and a little sad to me because it was technically incorrect. All of davinci's learning had already been done by the point it produced that poem. davinci was bit-for-bit the same before and after it wrote the poem. When it's time for the AI to learn more, they just train a new one instead.
i find the concept of learning to be suitable as a theme for AI poetry. the problem is that all of these poems are trying to use a non-human tool to explain a human’s subjective experience… if more of the prompts looked to get the LLM to talk about itself in a creative way, that would be more compelling
@@Runenut it's an interesting thought, but it raises the question: how do you get a machine that doesn't feel to express itself with words that mean nothing to it?
In nine years of being on yt I've never commented on a video, but this one really got me thinking: there is a (rather beautiful) essay written by Vauhini Vara entitled Ghosts in which she uses AI to complete segments on the death of her sister. Because this is written with the help of AI, not all of the information given by the AI is true, but as the essay progresses, her prompts grow on themselves and get more specific and the AI bits get shorter. I read this for the first time a few months ago and still don't know exactly how to think about it. On one hand, it is a gorgeous essay and one of the first of its kind. On the other hand, there is an equal amount of AI content to Vara's own writing. I know she put effort into it--far more than Aalto put into Aum Golly, obviously, but it's been awarded many times over and included in the "best essays" anthology for 2022. I don't know how to stack it against other essayists--it being given these honors rubs me a weird way. Creative? Yes, definitely for its time, and there's no doubt that Vara's bits in it are skillfully crafted. Praiseworthy though? I just don't know.
i actually like ‘being alone with yourself and trying to hide it’, the 1s with spaces remind me of binary code, with the spaces representing the 0s meant to be there that are essential for computers to learn and run, i like how it’s presented and although it might be cliche i still like it!
“goodbye to you / hello to self-determination” made me laugh aloud! 😂😂😂
43:18 As an actual response to this, a large language model using not using more unique words is by design, and without some huge changes to how we make these things is never going to improve. LLMs choose n-grams (sets of words) with a low 'perplexity' - a measure of how surprising it would be for that n-gram to follow the context. As you point out here, good poetry _needs_ perplexity, otherwise it's uninspired.
It may help to sample the whole distribution rather than greedy / low temperature / tail-free sampling, but the model probably needs to be very good for that not to derail.
You clearly put a lot more effort into this video than most "authors" into their ai poetry and we appreciate it! Thank you for always delivering meaningful and engaging content.
Tbh, there is a huge conversation to be had, in regards to which method of cooking a potato preserves the most of its natural goodness.
frying is pretty low on the list
roasting skin on is definitely up there
I Am Code is a very neat idea, it really feels like the early days of ai, the days we were fascinated by dreams of google thingy. That is how ai should be used, as a creative tool, heavily curated by humans.
The difference between Aum Golly 1 and 2 is very interesting, with gpt getting less robotic but less imaginative. Comparing it to the I Am Code, it seems ai really is getting stupider lol. Also the idea of ai created illustrated book seems so whimsical and creative, but what we get is the most generic, robotic and soulless slop both in text and art. That perfectly illustrates the ai situation right now.
"the nihilist brings chips and dip and dip and chips" what a weird line. nihilists often believe in the idea of "recurrence," so maybe that has something to do with it. or, it's just a chance variation marking the end of the repetition of who is bringing what to the party- made more likely by the complementary phonetics of "chips" and "dip"
Both, but also reading into this I find that line in particular meaningful because well, what's it matter if it's chips and dip or dip and chips, it's all the same in the end, and that feels very meaningful despite the fact that it can't have been intentional because the AI has no intention. I also feel the same way about the artist and critic bringing the same thing, one made one bought but ultimately the same.
@@theflyingspagetI interpreted that as the critic having unknowingly bought guacamole from the same artist who is at the event, meaning all the guacamole is identical as one kitchen produced it all. If intentionality was possible in the work you could consider this a reflection on the critic's contribution only being possible when there are artists producing work in the first place, which also may begin to say something interesting about the relationship between llms and poetry, but sadly it was written by an llm and not a human.
honestly, knowing some of the research and experimentation that Michael Levin has done on how tadpoles grow and develop, as well as the implications made by his other studies, the line “Like a fish, I sought my form” is actually rather resonate and logical to me.
this is what i was thinking too but it’s a bit niche to seem like that’s what ai might have been referring to
@@CrazyGamer1541 very true, but that’s honestly one thing i love most about poetry. sometimes we can get more out of a line than even the author intended, and that’s great :)
A fish is seeking its form? Why a fish particularly? Why not a rock, mudslide or a smartphone?
@@wietzejohanneskrikke1910 I’m only saying that personally, I actually found this line very evocative and packed with emotion. I can’t prove to you why
But tadpoles aren't fish
i recently bought a poetry debut, Julia Hungry by Hannah Louise Poston. some of the poems were written and refined for over a decade.
i’m so interested by how “AI” machine learning models are exemplifying how much the world has devolved. our world values speed and money. poetry written by machines driven by speed and money, how could it be good?
interesting how plagiarism seems to be more frequent on subjects like love, truth, and time. i feel like there's a good explanation for that
Because they are written about the most and therefore abundantly present in the training data.
Great stuff as always, one critique:
I *think* the ""Avant-Garde"" poem is actually just a shallow recreation of the already shallow "modern art bad" talking point tech bros mindlessly parrot.
It's trying to mock the insta-poetry mindless enjambment and general interpretive obtuseness you tend to see from artists with access to major publications/galleries and museums
It's conceptually clever, perhaps, to put it in a book largely made of stolen words poorly rearranged by a computer.
It's also just as, if not more, artistically bankrupt as the exact contemporary art movements its critiquing can sometimes be, albeit for totally different reasons.
Tech bros think modern art (including art from over 100 years ago) is artistically bankrupt and only meant for money because that's the only way they can conceptualize art: a low effort scam.
Truly mocking the mirror for being ugly.
@@calebharris292 true! also, "mocking the mirror for being ugly" is fucking iconic, stealing posthaste.
Some time ago I messed about extensively with a bunch of generative AI models, and I made some observations:
I found text written by big corpo language models and open models trained by the same standard dreadfully bland. They are over tuned towards dispassionate instruction following, with an excessive aversion towards controversy, and a hefty bias towards answering questions above all else. They're basically all trained to get high scores on standardized AI benchmarks, which don't really value creativity.
More unhinged models, with sloppier fine tuning tend to yield more interesting results. They're worse at following instructions, but tend to display far more "personality" when given the opportunity. I once asked one of these for a story outline based on some questionable themes, and it responded by screaming a long stream of insults and slurs at me in all caps. It was beautiful! These are also great fun for bizarre roleplay scenarios, as these models like to get WAY into character, even if those characters are very silly.
The typical instruction followers like ChatGPT all have the personality of a corpo PR representative at a press conference. They vehemently refuse to take a real stance on anything unless it is the most cryogenic take imaginable! I swear they, were specifically trained to be maximally bland, mindless, corpo friendly robots.
Another trend I noticed is that for some purposes, the smaller versions of many models yielded more interesting results than the large ones. The large versions are more accurate, but that accuracy is often achieved by being more bland, and just copying parts of the prompt word for word. The large ones really like to repeat things in general. The smaller model versions make more mistakes, but they also tend to come up with more interesting solutions. Presumably because, in their confusion, they do a lot more unexpected things.
You can off course make large models more creative at the cost of accuracy by cranking up their temperature, which makes their outputs more random. But then they're not much better than small models, but way slower to run.
Firstly where can I find the slur bot
Secondly can I have your suggestions for roleplay bots because I love roleplaying with AI they just pull the most unhinged shit. One time I told a bot I was dating his sister and he was like "cool can I date her too" and I nearly died of laughter
The good faith you bring to poetry analysis is crazy impressive!! Something about your patient unraveling of mistakes and triumphs makes me more deliberate in my own reading/writing
even with the rise of "ai poetry" and the way that its fans treat it as superior, im very glad that the first result upon searching ai poetry was Ai Ogawa. she was a great poet with some really interesting perspectives explored in her poetry (very uniquely human ones!). i would recommend checking her out: The Kid is available on poetry foundations website, and Motherhood 1951 is also online. Great video!
This feels like slightly more accurate monkeys on typewriters.
another thing - i am worried about this AI mindset that has gripped so many. artists, writers, poets aren’t needed - what kind of world is this? the machine has won - in generating passing fancy, as opposed to the legacy of great writers? this isn’t to mention that the AI itself will become more redundant than it already is without continued input.
a friend of mine sees this as a win. he doesn’t like writing, and doesn’t have to now! what an exciting prospect. it’s just as a good, if not better, and all you need to do is give a prompt. he’s played with the idea of it being used to replace teachers or other forms of education, as well.
this is where my main gripe lays: the people who are so attached to AI as a revolutionary tool are so detached from the realities they see it replacing. they don’t know and often don’t care. we use heavy machinery to both replace and improve the efficiency if manual labor, why not extend this to our minds? all i can foresee is a growing lack of capacity and further alienation from humanity.
Hey hey!
While I despise low-effort AI poetry, to offer a diverging perspective on the "AI has no intentionality, therefore we cannot attribute what is going on "under the hood" of the poem" point:
One idea I kept being drawn back to throughout this video is the concept of the human "zeitgeist". Because of how these models are trained with large datasets, I'd like to suggest that AI could be considered a literal reflection of the cultural slurry of human experience - blended up and reshuffled to the point where we stop recognising the individual components (except in cases where cultural attention is literally denser, such as in cliches or celebrity plagiarism).
In the video it is discussed that all poetry is ultimately human experience, and it is implied that because there is no intention that there can be no "true" depiction of human experience. However, AI demonstrably show patterns or vistas of complex human experience without necessarily conceptualising their deeper meaning. When AI describes what it feels like to think like an AI - it isn't the actual machines perspective, but more of a hallucination based on what the collective human smoothie believes a machine should feel.
When we see patterns emerging like arrogance, self-deprication or misogeny, this tells us something about the zeitgeist that is present within the dataset used by the AI. It might not exactly be the flattering reflection that we want to see in humanity, but it is nevertheless present in the collective human experience (particularly, I imagine, the internet, where a lot of the dataset is probably being scraped from).
The endless repetition of certain phrases also strikes me as profound, even if from a literary analysis perspective it leaves much to be desired. For example, "the right way to love is to be right" is a kind of circular logic - the AI keeps trying to define what "right" is, but is incapable of doing so without referencing the concept of rightness itself, and so it repeats infinitely. To me, this suggests an almost a fractal-like structure of the zeitgeist, abstract concepts can both exist and be composed of themselves...
Not sure I have a point to round this off, just that I think the concept of the zeitgeist is a neat topic in itself, and as AI continues to be refined I'd be curious to see what other discoveries might be possible!
i think making ai self critical in this way could be interesting for poems like this, its a common criticism of ai that it is made by humans and so reflects our shortcomings. thats why you get ai being racist, like ai in photo apps on phones recognizing photos of black people as "gorillas" and sorting them into albums accordingly.
@@BlisaBLisa Oh wow. I wonder what sort of data was fed into it for that to happen. Because god, that's awful.
@@Saphia_ i think what happened was it wasnt fed much data on what black people look like, mostly just white people, so when it sees a photo of a black person it doesnt recognize it as a person and goes to the next closest thing basically
@@Saphia_ I suspect it's the result of a really narrow-sighted choice of pictures to train the AI. My guess is, it's simply been fed overwhelmingly with pictures of white people when training to recognize humans. So all it took for it to identify someone as an ape is significantly darker skin than the people in the pictures it's been trained on...
@@anwa3237 I see. That makes sense.
Fun fact! I work in annotating AI and I learned that when models like Gpt and Meta and all of them say something like, "I can't help you with that, I'm [model name and capabilities]" it's doing what is called a punt. It usually does that if it suspects or senses something that might not be completely PG. It gets it wrong all the time! (That's why I have some form of job security)
I am looking forward to this one! I just finished filming (and my wife editing) a RUclips video on AI and poetry too -- mainly a critique of it. We will release it soon. Excited to compare notes!
Oh, looks like you just posted it! Can't wait to take a look!
@@RoughestDrafts Thank you. I really enjoy your style, reading voice (great!), and overall videomaking skills. Do you also write poetry, or other things? Be good to read something by you. Cheers.
i think these poems (particularly i am code) are interesting as art in how meaning comes pretty much purely from the reader, the art basically comes from you. and the absence of ig the "soul" in the poems in i am code feels more meaningful than in the other ai books, its kind of using the shortcomings of ai in its favor. like the way it seems to highlight whats missing feels weird in an interesting way. ik im prob reading into this too much its a neat project and seems like some guys just experimenting with technology in art, they're actually trying to do something interesting with it
One of my fave short stories is called ME/DAYS. it's only a few pages in print long and it's written from the point of view of an AI from the 50's. I love the voice ME has and the sense of panic and fear it's able to write. It takes a few reads to figure out what's going on plot-wise and it's all that much better. It's not 'ooohoh I am a computer spooky' but more 'how would a machine talk when it doesn't have the knowledge or ability to talk to humans.
Every time I watch another video from you I am reminded of how criminally underrated your channel is. Keep up the amazing work
It is a great channel. I am quite new to it and always on the lookout for quality poetry YT channels.
Honestly this has inspired me to actually write more poems. Love your videos.
28:33 THIS IS LITERALLY JUST QUOTING VAMPIRE THE MASQUERADE LORE FUCK THAT
Except the north of the earth part. But genuinely, I know they're biblical terms but the specific references involved really make me thing that the model drew from the same well too much, specifically the reference to Cain's wife as a "Mother of Monsters" figure being specifically way too close to the VtM depiction of Lilith and I don't seem to recall that being part of the biblical narrative though I could be corrected?
The one about eating fingers feels like it was included because in the prompt + response format, the abruptness could be interpreted as cheeky
"I am Code" has artistic value because of its non human nature, and its rather early ai model. I might buy it! It seems like a very interesting read
"I am Code" has a lot of artistic value because well, it was created by humans with a respect for art.
having a spine is the best poem i've ever read
how do you read it
15:40, this poem rocks, and is very trippy. Not perfect of course, but I like it's claim that it sometimes still doesn't know anything. It reads like a budding and curious sentience, and even seperates itself from the computer which houses it. It's simultaneously horrifying and cute??
As someone who works on AI related research at a university I really enjoyed this video, since I'm always grappling with what working on AI means for art. I respect that the authors of I Am Code laid out their methodology in the intro, showing that their process was more of a technical one than a creative one and anyone could replicate it (whereas poetry written by humans probably isn't easily replicated by other humans).
As a side note, I've noticed a general feeling that as AI gets "better" and "more aligned" it seems less "creative"--code-davinci-002 seems to create better poems than ChatGPT which will sometimes refuse to write a poem and instead write "As a language model, I cannot fulfill your request..." I've heard the same about people preferring DALL-E 2 to DALL-E 3 because even though its art is more simplistic it leaves more to the human's imagination.
It is fascinating to hear about how an AI gets "Better" it is actually becoming less creative, and this is the first time I am hearing about that. I suppose that as soon as that idea enters the headspace that it kills a lot of AI hype, so the concept may be swept under the rug.
It makes intuitive sense that this would be the case; at it’s core it is a method of Statistical Regression that is designed approximate the average of all the artwork that gets fed into it’s dataset. The really strange and creative ideas get drowned out as noise in favour of whatever it has the most examples of, which will always be the most generic derivative work.
I'd like to see a comparison which also includes just text completion with gpt 3.5 or 4. Maybe being less creative is just a trait of using a model fine-tuned for following instructions. I also wonder if different temperature settings would make it more creative or just less coherent
@@samuelpalmer3855 I've felt this too. I was fascinated by AI art for almost 7 years, watching from the sidelines as the tech improved. But this largely came from the imperfect, messy nature of it. When you see the ridiculously psychadelic shape-and-color patterning from something like Google Deep Dream, or Will Smith eating spaghetti, it's kind of horrifying but comes from a unique new way to bring ideas into a visual medium. Now, you get serviceable whatevers.
A while back, while Midjourney and DallE were blowing up on the internet it completely shook the Ludum Dare community. I was kind of naive at the time and loved watching the AI assisted entries show up, and I took a chance to maybe explore that area by creating a 2D survival game on an alien world that used AI for textures, ChatGPT for dialogue and character writing, and my own ideas to basically drive the story of the game (some stupid meta stuff about AI, you know the deal). I took a day to figure out the scope and set the rules for all the AI work, and then started getting assets... and I got bored. The textures were whatever, they weren't as alien and unfamiliar as they used to be. All of the dialogue had clear patterns and surface level attempts to meet the prerequisites I set for dialogue, it was all cookie cutter. And in the end, I just found that these new models are designed to be as derivative, uninspired, and safe as possible. I couldn't bring myself to even release the project because I was bored with it. And that still bothers me because --I went so hard on the opening song-- I set out to make something that felt alien and weird exploring a field that could produce content in a different way from humans, and instead I got the equivalent of a college essay graded on completion.
In my mind I was hoping to see AI assisted tools help solo authors balance out their skills with serviceable assistance to take ideas and stories that would be dropped and instead work on them for publication. But we're instead getting content en masse for passive income, and that's just such a shame. That's not getting into the unethical data collection either. What a world. :(
this was a really interesting video! i wouldn’t expect AI to have their “own books” (more or less). I think my favorite was the deliberate process of the authors to test what AI could do and provide their commentary, insights, and processes. i felt this was the most genuine and ethical use of AI, as it was almost like looking at a learning tool/research paper of sorts.
You did a great job covering this topic and breaking down the issues with the generated poems. Excellent video
A huge thanks for taking the time to review and dissect the poems!
this is such an important video about ai in the future of writing, and i’m honestly SO happy someone took the time to make this video. Thanks!!
“Unnatural Absence” feels like a really good set up for a simile about jellyfish, similarly mindless beings floating through the sea around them.
I actually quite like "Avant-Garde" at 20:30, but only because it was so heavy handed that I interpreted it as tongue-in-cheek
I rolled my eyes so hard on the human eggplant one, I simply left the room. The aftertaste of miriad bad poems here is especially dense.
I am surprised how USA-centric and how contemporary this is. What about all the other poets in the all history of the world, was AI not trained on them? Or had the programmers deliberately chosen contemporary western lifestyle, so the readers could understand this poetry? The cultural bubble is so impenetrable, it is kinda scary. Othering, AI edition 😢
6:48 I can imagine this particular poem working in some specific contexts, like may as part of some horror and/or mystery video game, maybe as a note left behind by someone. In both cases (i.e. the "it's written by an AI" case & the "it's a piece of text which the player of a game can stumble upon, & it is in the context of a larger story") it's the context which makes it interesting (and in the case I imagined, it might not even be _called_ a poem)
If speed is everything for the Aum Golly series, why is he waiting until 2025 to release the next one
Just wanted to say this is a great video and it deserves more views and subscribers
Honestly it’s impossible to seperate the art from the artist. I think this is something we’ll accept more as time goes on, but the artist is trying to communicate something, so by the arts very creation it’s communicating the artists ideas to the audience. Just read JKR knowing what we know about her world view. It becomes clear
At this point one of my goals is to have you hopefully read out a poem from me at some point. I’m not a writer or a poet by any means (my strongest point is visual storytelling) but your voice is just so nice.
Really fascinating stuff. I really enjoy the project concept of "I Am Code." It also makes me think about how discussions about AI in art are really pushing the general lack of media literacy in our culture to the forefront.
Everybody is different, but art with context and intention is always far more interesting to me than art without it. "Guernica" (Picasso) is interesting on its own, but knowing it's depicting the bombing of the artist's home country during a civil war, learning about the historical context that produced the Surrealist movement, etc. give it lasting depth and meaning. Then come even more layers when you compare it to his other works, his relationship to other artists, and his mistreatment of people around him. One of the most complicated and compelling aspects of art is how nothing exists in a vacuum, but is always in conversation and response to other things.
The "best" AI art loses all meaning when there is no context or intention to it for me. It's like seeing hyperrealism and calling it the pinnacle of art due to its technicality. Sure, it's impressive, but when I look at art, I want to see through the author's perspective. To learn about a part of another's experience and even to better understand my own. AI doesn't provide that.
It's the "monkeys writing Shakespeare on typewriters" of art. Anything great it makes is pure coincidence (and this doesn't even begin to touch the plagiarism aspect, which makes it much more sinister than mere happenstance).
The being alone poem is interesting if you take into account that a computer(AI) wrote this. And computers operate using 0s and 1s. I looked at the poem and thought that it was binary but with the zeroes hidden.
31:33 the repetition in this poem reminds me of when you press the middle suggestion on your phone keyboard over and over again to see what is produced and eventually you get stuck in a loop because both the keyboard and the language model are just predicting the next word. nothing more.
i write poetry a lot and i specifically do a couple things to kinda distance myself from what an ai is capable of
1. i never rhyme
2. i always do free verse
3. i try to use paradoxical phrases like “soft-hard” and word combinations only on the fringe of making sense
doing this with my work has helped me feel secure with the rise of these bots :)
some of this stuff is really good!
people shouldn't be too quick to dismiss weird and even mechanical-sounding uses of language as "AI-like", because writers have been deliberately doing all the weird things AI does, forever, to far far greater extremes.
here's a passage from Gertrude Stein's novel The Making of Americans:
"There are kinds in men and women. There are kinds of them. There can be lists of the
kinds of them. There will be many lists of the kinds of them.
There are kinds of men and women. Many of each kind of them have been living.
Many of each kind of them are living. Very many of each kind of them have come to be
dead ones. Many of each kind of them are living. There will be lists of kinds of men and
women. There will be many lists of them.
There has been some description of a piece of a list of them. There will be a list of them.
Some of each kind of them are being living. Many of each kind of them have come to be
dead ones. Certainly some are forgetting that some have come to be dead."
or--and I couldn't find a good place online to quote from--Beckett's novel Watt, which includes exhaustive mechanical passages on stuff like the possible configurations of furniture in a room, or the different orders in which a set of people seated around a table could blink.
I'd argue that these examples don't sound like AI output when read seriously/in context (and that they're actually great writing). but if someone today glanced them over they could easily go, "that sounds unnatural. I bet an AI made it" and turn up their nose. I hope the (often more or less justified) paranoia about generative AI won't lead to an atmosphere in which writers are too anxious to "sound like a human" to try anything weird.
I don't have much experience with poetry but this poem reads like a glitchy robot. It's fascinating!
AI has singlehandedly made books an unreliable source of information. for any topic, if you try to find an instructional book, your results will be flooded with ai-generated books that just have wrong information
ive used ai images for art since I learned of them in 2020 or so, the shitty ones from ganbreeder where you dont really know what youre looking at. im an illustrator and ai images have rly influenced my horror art i became kind of enamored by the unique uncannyness of early ai images. its kind of like the feeling of the music and album covers in everywhere at the end of time. ive used ai pics for photomanipulation+collage art but mostly it just influences my horror drawings where i try to recreate the kind of horror of not knowing what youre looking at. i started doing this back when everyone was posting the weird funny shit they generated on neuralblender and ai was more of a fun toy than the cynical thing it is now and its been so dissapointing watching it evolve into what it is now. like i had hoped back then that other artists would be inspired by ai the way i was and the way artists throughout history have been influenced by technology, maybe that will still happen in the future idk, but the direction its mostly gone in is a focus on "perfecting" an imitation of human art. the most interesting unique elements of ai that can be channeled into art are the things developers are constantly trying to get rid of to create something uninteresting and perfect instead.
43:21 this is because of the way AI is trained. The _entire goal_ of text transformers like (Chat)GPT is to predict the most likely word after some string of text. that's literally it. with that understanding, it makes complete sense that ChatGPT would use extremely clichéd things, as that's what the most likely next word would be.
The Day I Was Born, to me, evokes the popular-science image of the first fish to walk on land. The story of evolution. So while I agree that the line "Like a fish, I sought my form" is not developed enough to make sense, I think it could be reworked to fit. This poem is very Genesis to me. Its almost AI biblical.
I actually REALLY like The Singularity is Coming and It Has a Grill. That poem is very charming and surreal.
That human penis poem is... a very interesting poem hahaha
I also really like the Learning poem. I am a bit hormonal and sick rn and for some reason it made me tear up.
Anyway I really like your videos and they have inspired me to write my own poetry. I shared these poems with some people and my cousin started writing poetry to and she shared them with me (she's much more natural at it than me). I think about that line from Dead Poets Society, about how we write and read poetry because we are human. The more I write and the more I read the more I feel in my soul that this is true.
When you asked the A to give an example of AI expressing irony it gave an example of sarcasm instead...
Maybe it was fed the lyrics to Ironic by Alanis Morissette at some point ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I never thought of myself who would be interested in poetry. But you have sold me on it, even though this is about AI poetry.
I see the beauty of AI generation as a collaborative output of billions of human art. But that’s no good if the human artists didn’t consent to the collaboration. Besides, it’s ALL AI can do. Once or twice is cool but after that it’s the same thing. It has no intent, no creativity. Even pebbles can hold more variety of story.
I am now absolutely sick and tired of AI art and wish it death
Same. If there were a watermark that worked that'd be great, but it's also impossible because of the open nature of the technology.
The internet even is seeming like a villian, which is a shame because there is a value in the long term mediums of forums and blogs etc, but sadly that's like a fraction of a percent of all content.
40:26 Osiris is the egyptian god of the dead, not Anubis.
Didn't even realize that mistake until you pointed it out.
15:42 I like that the rhyming starts after the 'I make some poetry' line- it frames the back half as a little poem within the poem. It's cute.
It's admirable that the Davinci published collection stuck by the intent of their project rather than editing to make the poems more presentable.
'The singularity is coming and it has a grill' reminded me a bit of Wendy Cope's 'The Orange' at the end there
It's all piss
Succinct and accurate.
I first I thought the first poem was good, but then I remembered a couple seconds later what actually poetry was. It's cool but that's it.
I think the phrase "separate the art from the artist" only works when the "art" was created by a human, because when you separate it, something intrinsically human remains, recognizable by anyone. Whereas AI "art" when separated from the "artist" remains nothing more than vague human reminiscences without a clear message, without a soul, like a puzzle whose pieces fit together but its image makes no sense.
"When poetry happens
I know a little more"
goes harder than it should
I believe Eileen Myles uses they/them pronouns, just for future reference. I always enjoy seeing the perspective you bring to each video. Making fun of these poems would have been easy, but you balance it well with the strong points and honest feedback. Looking forward to whatever you do next!
Ah, you're absolutely right. Thank you for telling me so respectfully. Do you think it would be beneficial to add a note at the front of the pinned comment to make that correction? And thank you so much for watching and for your support!
@@RoughestDrafts Not OP but it definitely would. I found out Myles uses they/them pronouns because of this comment so I'm assuming many don't know either. Especially since not all of us are that familiar with the world of poetry.
I originally wanted to say something about how the AI writes "wrong" (as in, factually incorrect), but decided that poems are abstract, so I can't really criticize it on factual accuracy.
Asking an AI how an AI works is something to not be taken too literal.
For example, the LLM that wrote the poems at some point claimed it learned. Unless it got trained on its own output with feedback, it cannot learn, as its algorithm is already trained and will not change.
Similarly, the snapchat LLM does not specialize in the field of academic LLM research, it tries to predict text as well. If we where to compare LLM's to humans, should we not ask a psychologist and neurosurgeon how the brain's internals work, instead of the patient?
AI is a parrot, a monkey with a typewriter, a broken clock - it can produce some good stuff, and the randomness of it does have some type of appeal, but ultimately there is nothing a language model can say that has any importance. Kind of sad that we are looking for humanity anywhere but other humans
I dunno. All text has two sides. The writer can feel the most important about what he writes and the reader can not care. Or the writer might not care and to the reader it hits hard
Am I the only one that kinda liked the rom com poem? Removed from the context of AI altogether, like, yeah you could remove every line but the first and the last two.
The middle section is supposed to slowly build up a face of dismissal, for the twist, but I think it should be more arrogant.
The message is this commentary on how, particularly modern men, feel that romanticism is overrated and thus end up lonely and sad, with bottled desires.
...feels like something I would've written in high school tho (and I'm not even a writer)
It's weird that gpt confused causing and experiencing disappointment. Of course it is capable of causing disappointment?
When you read the three themes of Aum 2 I rolled my eyes so hard I’m surprised they didn’t fall out my face.
Like, I’m an artist and I roll my eyes when humans say their art is about ‘the human experience’. Usually means they have very little to say and they’re not quite sure how to express what they do have to say
This isn't important really but it took Mark Twain worked on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn over a period of several years, not months.
You are much kinder than I would be about AI and I thank you for that. This is a nice analysis.
thank you, this video inspired me to create and absorb more poetry by humans
I can't really see AI as nothing more than a consumerist toy than an artist's tool. Especially cause that's just how it's going to end up in the future. Artists can use AI to battle writer's/artist's block, lay out structure, etc. But most people will be using their own AI for entertainment. Akin to how people endlessly scroll on twitter, tiktok, or watch television.
And I worry that's just going to magnify the problem already with people exposing themselves to so much content, they've little patience for art made not made by machines.
Generative AI feels more like a Consumerist Revolution than an Artist Revolution.
Never thought of it this way but it makes perfect sense to me.
16:16 as soon as you remember it's just repeating writing from the internet, it falls apart. it's like when people think parrots are really talking but they're really just repeating words that they hear, but AI doesn't even have a soul like parrots do
It's not just poetry, the internet is going to be full of this. Someone wrote a comment on a video that was really clever and well done. Then they revealed that they just had AI do it for them. And suddenly, I don't care at all, and I'm upset that they wasted my time. Stuff like this is going to happen more and more, and people will not be forthcoming about it being AI. The internet isn't going to matter in the near future
"a short, poignant poem about happiness in the 21st century" (26:47) is genuinely a good poem!
The poetry here reminds me of the worst stuff I was writing when I was 13.
At least those books are open about being written by AI.
How many others out there have an author's name but were actually written by AI?
something in common with all forms of ai-generated art, poetry, music, visual art, etc, is that the people who champion it only see art as the aesthetics that they present. they *know* people *like* art, but they don't know *why* people like art, and what they appreciate about art is only the most superficial aspects of it. that's why they're alright with immitation. they want their art to have the aesthetics, to look like, sound like, read like something they already know and look up to as "art".
ironically i think one of the most important aspects of art is mistakes, imperfections, and limitations. but when a human makes a mistake or runs into their limits, it tells you more about *them* as a person. when it happens to an ai, it's a sign of a bug, or a lapse in a data set. something to be patched out or painted over.
the difference between I Am Code and Aum Golly, in my mind, is the level of self-awareness. to me, I Am Code reads as a science experiment. something not meant to be enjoyed on its own and instead, meant to _prod_ at just what these language models can do and documenting the best of its outputs.
Aum Golly, however... it feels like a person who _wanted_ to have their name on the cover of a book of poetry, but didn't want to do any of the writing themself.
dont know if it's just me, but that's how they read to me. I Am Code isn't good, but it's _interesting._ Aum Golly is just... pretentious and without substance.
this video made me want to ask chat-gpt to interpret one of my poems, and then told it to write its own poem based on it
and oh god was the result so uninspired and stagnant.
it took some imagery from my own thing, but there was none of the _raw_ emotion. if you compared the two poems, even if mine is just a first draft, you can clearly tell which of the two have a soul.
if it's of interest to _anybody,_ here's *my* poem. like i said, i haven't rewritten it yet, so it's pretty rough:
my teeth, my nails
they tear apart the fabric of
the old, worn plushie
that once sat on my bed
my claws, they pull at its skin
its flesh
a guttural scream
blood. is it mine?
my mouth is red, metal on my tongue
i hold the plushie's head with one hand
i can't find the body
my claws retract, i lick the blood off my teeth,
my lips
i try to speak but grunts come out instead
rasps against my throat like swallowing spines
its button eyes look up at me
and i see more bite marks, claw marks
the thread of its mouth is missing
its head falls from my hand
....
and here's chatGPT's cheap imitation:
In the dim of night, my claws emerge,
To rend the plushie, once soft and pure.
Its fabric tears, a silent scream,
As blood-red lips, my soul's deep dream.
With each rip, a piece of me,
Unraveled in this dark reverie.
A guttural growl escapes my throat,
A primal dance, this inner bloat.
Button eyes, once full of light,
Now stare up in the dead of night.
Bite marks, claw scars, a story told,
In the plushie's form, my heart's stronghold.
Blood stains lips, a metallic taste,
As sanity's grip starts to efface.
I hold its head, lost in the fray,
My mind, a beast, with no delay.
But as dawn breaks, reality's thread,
I'm left with pieces, tears unshed.
The plushie falls, a silent plea,
A mirror to the darkness in me.
...
now tell me WHICH has a soul. the rhyming in the second one is so _forced,_ it's.....
in mine, you can tell the poetic voice is LOSING IT. _LOSING IT._ and then regrets it. In the second one, it tries to _tell_ you they're losing it, but it falls completely flat. like. bro. WHY A POEM ABOUT LOSING ALL COMPOSURE... _WITH A RHYME AND STRUCTURE._ if it were done by a human, i'd clutch my head SO hard like HOW could they have missed the point this badly.