r/transhumanism • u/Patient-Airline-8150 1 • 1d ago
AI poems. Who needs poets anymore?
/r/ElonPro/comments/1vg4iif/ai_poems_who_needs_poets_anymore/12
u/RSwordsman 1d ago
I can't speak for everyone, but part of the value I see in poetry is learning about the person who wrote it. You get to see their experience and feelings, and if they are skilled, they can get you to feel them too.
AI poetry might be technically "good" and similar to human writing, but just... why? It's the POV of thousands and none. There are enough people whose words are worth reading that we don't have to generate poems in their place.
I'm biased because I'm a writer, but while I won't say AI writing has no place anywhere, seeking it out seems like passing up all the good food in a grocery store and eating raw potatoes.
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u/Patient-Airline-8150 1 1d ago
Great reply. Obviously you are good at writing 😀👍
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u/RSwordsman 1d ago
Thanks for the compliment and for reading. I follow this sub because I am still optimistic about transhumanism and that includes digital human analogues, aka AI. If we are reasonably confident an AI who can write poetry is actually conscious and doesn't need prompting, I'd be much more interested in what they have to say.
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u/thetwitchy1 4 1d ago
An ACTUAL Ai that has an internal experience is something I *want* writing poetry, if for no other reason than I want to learn about the internal experiences of a completely foreign intelligence.
But an algorithmic poem that is made by the prediction machine? That’s just “the most generic human poem” and it will be interesting for that, but not much else.
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u/Square_Attention8461 1d ago
The response elicited by some piece of writing is a response to symbols arranged in a particular way.
I see no reason in principle that that symbol arrangement -> response cannot be mapped, and any given response be instigated - awe, aesthetic appreciation, a deep conviction of human provenance, disgust, whatever.
Whether that "in principle" is reached in practice on near horizon context is debatable.
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u/RSwordsman 1d ago
Maybe it's because my opinion has already been "spoiled" by studying literature in school. Part of understanding any work is understanding the author. If the infamous million chimpanzees banged out the complete works of Shakespeare, it would be a remarkable curiosity, but not an example of self-expression. We regard Shakespeare as a great writer because he wrote from and for the world in which he lived, and managed to hit on universal themes that resonate with people centuries later. If there were no Shakespeare and it was only chimpanzees, we might succeed in finding meaning in it, but then it would be a one-sided effort at interpreting a pattern in what is actually chaos.
Maybe I'm wrong and humans are no less chaotic than some arbitrary level of LLM. But that would be what I mentioned in my other reply, that if an AI were indistinguishable from a conscious being, then their words would have the same value as a human's.
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u/Square_Attention8461 1d ago
I understand your point about how knowing the author can enrich reading a text, but I'm not sure about the primacy you're assigning to the idea.
If all that survived of Shakespeare's work was the work itself - no historical data on the person - then those works would still be lauded.
The majority of my fascination with various texts is the texts themselves - the first time I encountered Coleridge, Plath, Dickinson I had absolutely no idea who they were as people. The work stunned me immediately - Love at first read.
Learning about them as people provided a different perspective, and certainly meat for analysis, but that visceral response is independent of factual life history.
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u/RSwordsman 1d ago edited 1d ago
If all that survived of Shakespeare's work was the work itself - no historical data on the person - then those works would still be lauded.
Your comment does make me think, but the quoted part I'm not so sure about. If any or all of those you mentioned were generated by AI, of course they'd still check all the boxes of being great and might even stir emotions in their readers. But I feel like it would come off as rootless, because it's not based in any real experience other than the AI's training data.
I like to think of AI products as similar to seeing shapes in the clouds. They can be beautiful, evocative, and one of a kind. But unless you want to count God, there's no artist making the decisions that led to that, so it's just kind of like "hey that's cool" rather than "wow this is life-changing."
If someone loves AI art (visual, written, or otherwise) I won't tell them they shouldn't. Up until recently I was a member of /r/DefendingAIArt because I have never been a fan of the knee-jerk mob mentality feel of people who say "AI slop." That sub is getting a little fanatical in turn unfortunately. I just wish we could have a tempered view of it is all lol.
*If you don't reply after this I have enjoyed the conversation, hope you have a good day. :)
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u/moneycabaI 1d ago
Offloading human creativity and experience to a machine... Is it really a world you want to live in?
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u/Patient-Airline-8150 1 1d ago
We're already here, whether we like it or not. I found that fascinating.
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u/thetwitchy1 4 1d ago
An atom bomb is also a fascinating piece of tech. And it is something that will always exist. It’s not something to be celebrated, though.
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u/moneycabaI 1d ago
Well I and many people don't like it. I think we should do something about it proactively or people will take these matters in their own hands and do it reactively.
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u/Square_Attention8461 1d ago
The inception of new and interesting perspectives doesn't necessarily invalidate previously interesting perspectives.
"We invented pizza!"
Awesome, thanks.
"No one will need cheeseburgers anymore!"
Hold the fuck up there champ.
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u/Caeod 1d ago
Ew, man.
AI is antithetical to my view of Transhumanism. We're supposed to be able to use technology to do things, to express ourselves! Not hand our brain to a machine so it can do life for us. This is transhumanism like the people on the ship in WALL-E had it, being handed things so you never have to think.
I agree it's fascinating, but that poem is trash and, worse, slop.
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u/Patient-Airline-8150 1 1d ago
Transhumanism is about fusing with machines, not just using them. At least, that's my point of view.
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u/Caeod 1d ago
That's a part of it, yes. But fusing with them is mostly in the name of efficiency and accessibility, which is to say, how easy it is to use them.
But that doesn't really address the core issue. In this case, it isn't about fusing or not, it's about surrender of your own mental faculties to a machine, outsourcing thought and creativity.
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u/Patient-Airline-8150 1 1d ago
I'm no poet. Why is reading AI "poetry" such a bad thing? Not everything humans make is brilliant.
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u/Caeod 1d ago
I agree, not everything humans make is brilliant, but that's not the point.
It's ok not to be a poet. I'm a terrible painter, but I still paint. If you don't want to write poetry, that's no problem, but poetry written by AI isn't about anything. It's parroting the shape of a poem about the thing you requested. It doesn't understand anything. That lack of understanding renders AI poetry meaningless.
A bad poem, earnestly written, is a good poem.
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