by Andrew Dean at Singularity Hub: Here are some lines Sylvia Plath never wrote:
The air is thick with tension,
My mind is a tangled mess,
The weight of my emotions
Is heavy on my chest.
This apparently Plath-like verse was produced by GPT-3.5 in response to the prompt “write a short poem in the style of Sylvia Plath.”
The stanza hits the key points readers may expect of Plath’s poetry, and perhaps a poem more generally. It suggests a sense of despair as the writer struggles with internal demons. “Mess” and “chest” are a near-rhyme, which reassures us that we are in the realm of poetry.
According to a new paper in Nature Scientific Reports, non-expert readers of poetry cannot distinguish poetry written by AI from that written by canonical poets. Moreover, general readers tend to prefer poetry written by AI—at least until they are told it is written by a machine.
In the study, AI was used to generate poetry “in the style of” 10 poets: Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Samuel Butler, Lord Byron, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, TS Eliot, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, and Dorothea Lasky.
Participants were presented with 10 poems in random order, five from a real poet and five AI imitations. They were then asked whether they thought each poem was AI or human, rating their confidence on a scale of 1 to 100.
A second group of participants was exposed to three different scenarios. Some were told that all the poems they were given were human. Some were told they were reading only AI poems. Some were not told anything.
They were then presented with five human and five AI poems and asked to rank them on a seven point scale, from extremely bad to extremely good. The participants who were told nothing were also asked to guess whether each poem was human or AI.
The researchers found that AI poems scored higher than their human-written counterparts in attributes such as “creativity,” “atmosphere,” and “emotional quality.”
The AI “Plath” poem quoted above is one of those included in the study, set against several she actually wrote.
A Sign of Quality?
As a lecturer in English, these outcomes do not surprise me. Poetry is the literary form that my students find most unfamiliar and difficult. I am sure this holds true of wider society as well.
While most of us have been taught poetry at some point, likely in high school, our reading does not tend to go much beyond that. This is despite the ubiquity of poetry. We see it every day: circulated on Instagram, plastered on coffee cups, and printed in greeting cards.
The researchers suggest that “by many metrics, specialized AI models are able to produce high-quality poetry.” But they don’t interrogate what we actually mean by “high-quality.”
In my view, the results of the study are less testaments to the “quality” of machine poetry than to the wider difficulty of giving life to poetry. It takes reading and rereading to experience what literary critic Derek Attridge has called the “event” of literature, where “new possibilities of meaning and feeling” open within us. In the most significant kinds of literary experiences, “we feel pulled along by the work as we push ourselves through it”.
Attridge quotes philosopher Walter Benjamin to make this point: Literature “is not statement or the imparting of information.”
More here.
