this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2024
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Who the fuck wants poetry written by a machine? The whole point of poetry is that it’s an original expression of another human. It’s not a non-fiction book or decorative art. It doesn’t exist because we think it’s perfect. It exists because it’s a connection to another person.
Like, who gives a shit if a machine can churn out something like Langston Hughes “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” . His life is what gives the poem its meaning.
I’m all for LLMs writing stuff but when people say it can create certain types of art, I want to use one to make a dismissive_wank.png image.
I'll raise you one better: who the fuck wants poetry?
Like I know I sound like a fucking mongrel who can't appreciate art or whatever, but how many poems do you think the average person reads in their entire life? Maybe 2, for school? Poetry is just not that popular of an art form, so of course people aren't going to be good at distinguishing good from bad. Compare it to visual arts, where people have seen multiple examples, at least more than 3 times a year for their entire life, of good visual art.
That's a commodity/consumerist take on art.
I write poetry because making art feeds my soul. I share my poetry because it feeds others, especially other poets.
I don't write poetry to sell it on Amazon.
That's cool, I'm glad you are making something you enjoy. The point stands that the average Joe doesn't actually seek out poetry, be it man or machine-made, and will therefore be an exceptionally poor judge of a poems quality.
I like Ethan Hawke's take: https://youtube.com/shorts/dPBMTpK5yvk
You're right, actually. How many people make a point of reading poetry? I've read a huge amount, especially when I was in school, as well as news articles, and of course an unfathomable number of comments.
Never have I decided to read poetry, not once.
Poets. You know, people who appreciate making and sharing that kind of art.
Who are you to decide what the "point" of poetry is?
Maybe the point of poetry is to make the reader feel something. If AI-generated poetry can do that just as well as human-generated poetry, then it's just as good when judged in that manner.
I’m the Poet Laureate of the Darvaza Gas Crater, that’s who I am to decide it.
I've never heard of that, but assuming that's a real thing and you're telling the truth, it still doesn't mean you get to decide what the "point" of poetry is for everybody else.
You aren't the arbiter of what people are allowed to enjoy or see value in. If 'Poem XYZ' resonates with a bunch of people, but you hate it on principle because of how it was created, that doesn't make their viewpoint invalid. To think it does is extremely arrogant.
I’m sorry but he really is the arbiter of who gets to decide the meaning of poetry, how the subjective experience of emotion is correctly described in written form, as well as the one who decides what is valuable and what should rightfully be cast aside and shunned, and even boooed!
All hail the Darvaza Gas Crater!!!
The Darvaza gas crater is a hole in Turkmenistan that's leaking natural gas and is on fire. I'm quite sure they don't have a "poet laureate", it's literally just a hole in the ground.
But even if it was some metropolis, yeah, he'd be just some guy.
If it's literally indistinguishable from human poetry, about as many people want to read it as there are people wanting to read human poetry. And that's about 12.
I don’t give a fuck if it surpasses human poetry to a focus group or if poetry is popular enough for you to care. I’m making a larger point that it’s a misuse of technology. Some things are pointless without a human personally taking time to craft it. We have loads of inefficiently produced things that exist because they’re “handmade” or came from the heart.
It’s like when Google screwed up during the Olympics with that commercial where Gemini made a little girl’s fan letter for an athlete. The whole point of a fan letter from a little girl is that it’s personal and took time. It’s not supposed to be perfect and efficiently produced. It could be 80% misspelled and written in crayon and be more meaningful than anything a machine produces.
Or maybe accept that this idea was crap all along?
You desperately try to create some form of human superiority, just to feel important. That superiority doesn't exist. There's no value in anything just because it's made with "love", that's an illusion.
Wow, that's a horrendously bleak and depressing take. Of course you can't put a price tag on that (why would you want to?), but you're not seriously suggesting that human love has no emotional value, right?
A love letter from your partner, or the diary of a passed relative, or your child's drawings? All of these things might be objectively worse than something a machine could produce. But would you feel the same when you received a love letter that's just been printed off of ChatGPT? Humans are more than profit-producing machines, despite what capitalists want you to believe. And there is value in human interaction.
Value is a human construct. In absolute terms, nothing has value, in practical terms, a bottlecap can be the most valuable item in the world. What attributes value to things is the human condition, remove the human and you have a tool, perhaps.
Exactly. And putting value into things just because they're made by humans is a stupid idea.
Humans don't exist on a separate plane, removed from everything natural and artificial. That's hubris galore.
It's maybe stupid for you, but clearly not for everyone. For example, an AI could create the History of a planet that we do not know it even exists; meanwhile, I won't call stupid those people interested in reading that, but currently I'll read the History of this planet written by humans, if asked. In a nutshell, my point is there is value either way, but poems written by machines? I will leave those to scientists and scholars, at least for now.
I understand what you mean, and also understand the nihilistic stance, however, the same way humans don't exist in a separate plane, the selfception and empathy toward others (which is not unique to us) allows a more than zero sum interpretation of art. Naturally the technical part can be reproduced by machines but the metaphysical part cannot. What becomes interesting is the notion that the metaphysical can be created post-hoc, which puts us squarely in the same situation as other poster wrote by quoting the passage of "The man in the high castle".
He/she is onto something though. An example of it is games made by people who care and love the field being bold and pushing for new cool and interesting stuff vs. games made by companies just wanting money with 0 effort and using the same boring formula.
Poetry isn't for the one reading it, it's for the one writing it.
Why publish books of it, then?
So they don't have to get other jobs
Literally dozens of them.
Does any poetry have any value without knowing the person that made it?
Knowing a human made it is the point. To be crude, if a sex doll is your girlfriend, you’re single.