The humanities as preparation for the End Times
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The first four panels of today's SMBC:
The rest of it:
The mouseover title: "Anyone who thinks AI endangers poets should first prove that there exists a poetry journal with more readers than contributors."
The aftercomic:
PennSound isn't exactly a "poetry journal", but it's Facebook page has 4.5k followers, which is certainly more than the roster of PennSound's 7 current editors and six student technical support staff, and even more than the 717 poets listed on the Authors page…
Philip Taylor said,
November 28, 2024 @ 3:10 pm
Are "the End Times" what some of us might think of "Armageddon" ? I have no recollection of ever having previously encountered the phrase.
[(myl) See https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/end_times ]
Yves Rehbein said,
November 28, 2024 @ 4:11 pm
Can haz paper?
[(myl) Sure, here you go… ]
Yves Rehbein said,
November 28, 2024 @ 4:53 pm
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/ToiletPaper.png harhar
I mean you speak about journals one would to estimate the readership of the paper featured in TFA.
I'll pay with the appropriate currency, a poem: I receive my news through web-comics – reposte – I'm so lost quote unquote nothing I ever say makes any sense C. Entz.
Jonathan Smith said,
November 28, 2024 @ 7:37 pm
If "the paper" about AI poetry vs. human-authored poetry, here it (or one) is
AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable from human-written poetry and is rated more favorably
Andreas Johansson said,
November 29, 2024 @ 3:55 am
I'm too lazy to read the paper, but how can AI-generated poetry simultaneously be indistinguishable from human-written dito and rated more favorably? The rating system evidently can distinguish, at least probabilitistically.
John L said,
November 29, 2024 @ 8:05 am
Here is a response to the paper in question (which was already linked):
"ChatGPT’s Poetry is Incompetent and Banal: A Discussion of (Porter and Machery, 2024)"
https://cs.nyu.edu/~davise/papers/GPT-Poetry.pdf
Linda Seebach said,
November 29, 2024 @ 1:31 pm
There's an AI chatbot Art Turing test (created by Scott Alexander to be deliberately hard to tell apart) and people did scarcely better than chance telling them apart (I was much *worse*) but the ones that were really AI (which the software knew, but the human raters didn't) were rated higher than the human artists (all real, some celebrated) were.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-did-you-do-on-the-ai-art-turing
Matt McIrvin said,
November 29, 2024 @ 3:18 pm
In Lem's famous story about Trurl's electronic bard, the inventor Trurl (who is himself an AI, along with all the other characters in the story) builds a giant poetry machine that can create superior poetry to all existing poets and often attacks them through verse battles that drive them to suicide. Lem mentions that the worst thing about it is that it only kills good poets–hacks are unaffected because they can't tell good poetry from bad anyway and don't know they've been beaten.
Matt McIrvin said,
November 29, 2024 @ 4:21 pm
Geez, that ChatGPT poetry in the paper is terrible, but I could imagine people fond of Hallmark card verse preferring it to actual Whitman and Eliot.
Philip Taylor said,
November 30, 2024 @ 6:45 am
Superficially, I did prefer the AI versions to the real Whitman and Eliot (rhyme and scansion are, as far as I am concerned, sine qua nons for most poetry, although I make an exception for Betjeman's Summoned by Bells), but I nonetheless felt that improvements were possible :
AI:
The day is gray, the sky is bleak,
My heart is heavy, my soul is weak.
The world outside is a muffled sound,
A lonely place where I am bound.
I long for light, for something true,
But all I see is a shade of blue.
The hope inside me flickers and fades,
As the darkness claims me in its shades.
Me:
The day is grey, the sky is bleak,
My heart is heavy, soul is weak.
The world outside a muffled sound,
A lonely place where I am bound.
I long for light, for something true,
But all I see are shades of blue.
The hope inside me flickers, fades,
As darkness claims me in its shades.
stephen said,
December 1, 2024 @ 5:05 pm
Pardon me, but…
but it's Facebook page has 4.5k followers,
You used an apostrophe there! It's!
Couldn't forbear.
Milan said,
December 2, 2024 @ 2:41 pm
@Linda Seebach,
Yeah, though it is worth noting that many of the most highly rated computer-generated images closely resemble particular human artworks. Also, all of the computer-generated images are attributed to 'AI artists'. So, there has been a lot of human pre-selection. Deep-learning algorithms can't (yet?) RELIABLY produce images that score higher than human creations. Humans must choose those which have the best chance. The study in "Nature" stresses that they did not pre-select the poems.
astrange said,
December 7, 2024 @ 8:04 pm
I'm reminded of this event from 2021 where a poetry editor was fired from their magazine for pointing out that nobody reads poetry.
https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/barren-poetry-magazine-fires-editor-tweet/