As AI-generated text continues to evolve, distinguishing it from human-authored content has become increasingly difficult. This study examined whether non-expert readers could reliably differentiate between AI-generated poems and those written by well-known human poets. We conducted two experiments with non-expert poetry readers and found that participants performed below chance levels in identifying AI-generated poems (46.6% accuracy, χ2(1, N = 16,340) = 75.13, p < 0.0001). Notably, participants were more likely to judge AI-generated poems as human-authored than actual human-authored poems (χ2(2, N = 16,340) = 247.04, p < 0.0001). We 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. Our findings suggest that participants employed shared yet flawed heuristics to differentiate AI from human poetry: the simplicity of AI-generated poems may be easier for non-experts to understand, leading them to prefer AI-generated poetry and misinterpret the complexity of human poems as incoherence generated by AI.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Literally dozens of them.
Poetry isn’t for the one reading it, it’s for the one writing it.
Why publish books of it, then?
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.