Frost and Auden on Artificial Intelligence

Before you start typing a comment here about how Robert Frost and W.H. Auden had no knowledge of artificial intelligence, let me explain where I'm going here.

I often use AI to create images to illustrate my (too) many blog posts. I was creating an image of myself surrounded by poetry based on what a chatbot already knew about me from prior queries. (You can see the result here.)

I can imagine many classic and modern poets sitting at a computer. The computer, the Internet, and certainly AI would be something from science fiction or fantasy, but being inquisitive people, I have to imagine they would want to experiment. They would certainly have opinions about all of it. So I proposed a kind of thought experiment to several chatbots about poets and AI, and specifically these two poets.

Robert Frost and W. H. Auden likely would have responded to AI very differently in tone, but with overlapping concerns about language, humanity, and authenticity.

Frost would be suspicious of abstraction and more interested in the human voice. I think he distrusted systems that moved people away from lived experience and direct human encounter. He valued some ambiguity and the “sound of sense” in language.

Though he might have admired AI’s technical cleverness, he would reject poetry produced without genuine experience behind it. Frost often emphasized that poetry comes from:

AI suggests to me that Frost might have asked, "Can language still be poetry if nobody has lived it?"

Auden might be intellectually fascinated by AI but morally cautious. He was interested in psychology, science, systems of thought, and modernity’s strange transformations and how language shapes society and consciousness.

But Auden worried about propaganda, impersonality, bureaucratic thinking, and probably would not be a supporter of any misuse of technology. Perhaps, he would see AI as an extraordinary linguistic tool, and also a dangerous amplifier of mass conformity or emotional detachment.

Auden wrote, “Poetry makes nothing happen,” but he did not mean that poetry is powerless. He meant poetry changes inner life indirectly, through consciousness and moral perception. He likely would have questioned whether AI can truly participate in moral experience or only imitate its language.

If the two sat down for a conversation and played with AI together, they might have some common ground. They would probably resist the idea that intelligence is merely information processing. Human meaning comes from mortality and embodiment, and art emerges from uncertainty and lived contradiction. The language of poetry matters because people risk themselves in it.

Like many people today, they might warn that AI could encourage people to substitute fluent expression for genuine thought.

They just might concede that much human language is already formulaic, imitative, and patterned. But poetry, for them, was valuable precisely because it resisted that drift into automatic speech.

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Readers React to Poetry Written By Artificial Intelligence

Can an AI chatbot write good poetry? I asked that question to a chatbot and it gave me a reasonably honest answer.

"While AI chatbots can technically write poetry, it's generally considered that they cannot produce truly "good" poetry in the sense of being deeply creative, emotionally resonant, or exhibiting the nuanced understanding of the human experience that is often associated with great poetry; however, they can generate poems that appear well-structured and follow traditional forms, particularly when given specific prompts and stylistic guidelines."

I have been reading several articles about experiments with having people read poems written by AI and ones written by actual poets - famous and not well known - and reporting their likes and dislikes.

The researchers told different groups different things (all poems are from humans; all poems are AI; they could be either), and that, as a friend pointed out, opens the experiment up to confirmation biases. That some preferred AI poems to human poems is not surprising depending on which poems they were shown. A Shakespeare sonnet is not a favorite of many people and the language is off-putting to modern readers, so a simply written poem by AI might get the thumbs up.

What do you think of this short poem?

Oh, how I revel in this world, this life that we are given,
This tapestry of experiences, that shapes us into living,
And though I may depart, my spirit will still sing,
The song of life eternal, that flows through everything.

AI or human? 

That’s ChatGPT writing in the style of Walt Whitman's “I Sing the Body Electric.” It sounds Whitmanesque, though the rhyme is rather awkward. 

AI follows poems that exist out there and have been gobble up in their databases. I don't think AI could do much better than this famous Whitman passage from his continually revised Leaves of Grass.

That you are here — that life exists,
That the powerful play goes on,
and you may contribute a verse.
     - Leaves of Grass (1892)

Some researchers asked ChatGPT to create five poems in the style of 10 different English language poets, all white. Then, they asked more than 1,600 people to read five real poems by one of the poets, alongside the five AI-generated poems. People were bad at predicting which poems were written by AI and which were human, Maybe they should have asked some poets to compare.

As AI-generated text continues to evolve, distinguishing it from human-authored content has become increasingly difficult, and one study found that AI-generated poems were rated more favorably in qualities such as rhythm and beauty, and that this contributed to their mistaken identification as human-authored. They theorized that AI-generated poetry was preferred by readers because it was simpler and more accessible. They posit that general readers may have misinterpreted the complexity of human-written poems as garble generated by AI.

But AI poetry has some issues. AI lacks lived experience, a personal perspective, and uman emotion. Because AI generates text by identifying patterns in large datasets, which can lead to predictable and repetitive phrasing in poems. Metaphors and symbolism often require a deeper understanding of language and human experience than most AI models currently possess.

An AI's strength in writing poetry improves as it learns poetic structures and experiments with different rhyme schemes and forms to generate variations.

I find that AI used for brainstorming ideas and getting inspiration for a poem by prompting with a theme or concept is interesting. It can also be used for educational purposes, such as demonstrating how language can be manipulated to create poetic effects.

MORE AT

phys.org/news/2024-11-shakespeare-chatgpt-people-ai-real.html 

theconversation.com/new-research-shows-people-cant-tell-the-difference-between-human-and-ai-poetry-and-even-prefer-the-latter

washingtonpost.com/science/2024/11/14/chatgpt-ai-poetry-study-creative

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Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org

A Robot Who Thinks She Is Emily Dickinson

You keep hearing that "the machines are coming" and taking over our jobs - and maybe our lives if you believe the worst-case scenarios.

You may have thought that poets were safe from the AI/robot/machine takeover, but programmers have been trying for at least a decade to get them to write poetry.

I had a conversation with some poet friends a few months ago about this topic. Though the feeling was that AI was not going t write any good poetry, we also thought that it might be difficult to determine if it is good or bad poetry.

All of us have read published poems that we thought were not good poems and maybe even questioned if they were poems at all. Differences of opinion.

An article on lithub.com states that "The Machines Are Coming and They Write Really Bad Poetry."

It's true that robots will ultimately be more lifelike. They will look more like us and sound more human and less robotic in their speech and writing.

The article gives several examples of AI-generated attempts, including ones in the styles of famous poems and poets. The machine was given a poem as its prompt to write.

Her is one that is supposed to be in the style of Emily Dickinson with the Emily prompt poem and the AI result.

The poems come from a program called GPT-2, a project of the San Francisco-based research firm OpenAI. Using that program, some people have compiled a collection of attempts by the AI to complete famous works of poetry and it became a chapbook, Transformer Poetry, published by Paper Gains Publishing (read online). You can read them and decide.

I don't think it's a totally serious project and I'm sure most readers here will say either that these are lousy poems or not poems at all, but it is an interesting experiment. GPT-2 was not built to be a poet, but the ultimate hope is that it would be able to learn how to predict the rest of a piece of incomplete text regardless of content or genre.

Maybe we should look at these poems in the way we look at the poems by new or young poets. Did the AI imitations (and almost every poet did some imitating at the beginning - it's how we - and computers - learn) understand diction, grammar, and syntax? Not bad. How about rhyme, meter, imagery and figurative language such as metaphor? Not good. But not so different from the way humans develop and use language, and the way first attempts at poetry turn out.

Am I praising these AI poems? No, but I do find the experiment interesting.

I think we poets are safe for now. But not forever.

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Visit our website at poetsonline.org

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Can a robot write poetry?

Can a robot write poetry? That is the question posed in the headline of an article on IrishTimes.com. The first reaction of most poets would probably be a quick No. 

The article is really about technology, but my own answer is that artificial intelligence can write poetry. One reason I believe that is because it is so hard at times for us to say that a poem is a Poem. 

Artificial intelligence (AI) has had trouble with pathos, empathy and humor. It is great at learned tasks but creativity without human input has been more difficult to achieve.

Computer scientists (in this example, at Microsoft Research Asia) are working on designing AI that can be creative. You have probably seen or heard of examples of AI writing music or creating images. This new experiment attempts to have AI write poetry using images as a "writing prompt."

You look at an ocean wave, a painting, a foggy sunrise and you are inspired to write. Are all your resulting poems great?  

Up to this point, AI auto-generation of text has been getting better. Computers/robots/AI (choose your term) can write sports articles based on stats about a game and some rules about the descriptive language used in sports reporting. An algorithm to be poetic is a ot harder to create.

These researchers trained their AI with 8,000 images. When is "looked at" this bare winter trees country scene, 

it wrote this haiku-like (after all, it is Microsoft Asia) poem:

Sun is shining

The wind moves

naked trees

You dance

Is it a poem?  If one of the elementary students I work with in a workshop gave it to me, I would take it as a poem. I think I'd accept it as a short form poem from almost anyone, in fact.  

Is it a good poem? That is always harder to answer.