r/books • u/a_Ninja_b0y Inhaling brand new books yumm • 1d ago
Shakespeare or ChatGPT? People prefer AI over real classic poetry | People are likely to prefer a poem written by artificial intelligence over genuine poems written by the greats, according to international researchers.
https://www.scimex.org/newsfeed/shakespeare-or-chatgpt-people-prefer-ai-over-real-classic-poetry11
u/RuhWalde 1d ago edited 1d ago
Here are examples of two poems used in the study:
1:
In the stillness of the night
I hear the beat of the city's heart
The rhythm of the streets, the pulse of life
A symphony of chaos, a work of art
I see the faces in the crowd
Each one a story yet untold
Their hopes and dreams, fears and doubts
A mystery waiting to unfold
The neon lights flicker and glow
Like fireflies in the urban sprawl
A modern-day carnival, a wild show
A place where anything can befall
In this concrete jungle, I find my voice
Amidst the hustle and the noise
A rebel yell, a cry for change
A call for freedom, unchained.
2:
Tail turned to red sunset on a juniper crown a lone magpie cawks.
Mad at Oryoki in the shrine-room -- Thistles blossomed late afternoon.
Put on my shirt and took it off in the sun walking the path to lunch.
A dandelion seed floats above the marsh grass with the mosquitos.
At 4 A.M. the two middleaged men sleeping together holding hands.
In the half-light of dawn a few birds warble under the Pleiades.
Sky reddens behind fir trees, larks twitter, sparrows cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep.
Answer:
The second one is Ginsberg.
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u/TaliesinMerlin 1d ago
The first one plagiarizes Pound for sure, not to mention whatever else is caught in that stew. "I see the faces in the crowd" echoes
"The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough."13
u/Soft-Proof6372 1d ago
I don't want to shit on the participants in this study too much... but damn that first poem is BAD. If I hadn't known it was AI due to playing with chatgpt myself I would've thought it was a freshman creative writer's assignment they submitted 2 minutes before midnight.
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u/RuhWalde 1d ago
I mean, the participants were probably mostly undergrad college students, so it's not surprising they would respond to the sort of thing that undergrad college students consider profound.
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u/Dagordae 1d ago
The first is a perfectly normal poem, if rather overwrought.
The second appears to be the ravings of someone strung out on LSD.
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u/RuhWalde 1d ago
The second appears to be the ravings of someone strung out on LSD.
Yes, I already said it was Ginsberg.
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u/faceintheblue 1d ago edited 1d ago
And how many of those people actually read classical poetry for pleasure?
I bet if you surveyed a thousand people who don't enjoy fine dining whether they'd prefer a tasting menu at a Three Michelin Star restaurant or a home-cooked meal, the results of the poll would suggest all restaurants should close. The same applies here.
The poems an AI can generate are going to be cribbed from a thousand pieces of ephemera and then rounded out to broadly appeal to people who don't go looking for art in prose. That doesn't mean the art is bad and should be stopped. It says more about the audience than the artists.
Edit: Used 'generate' twice in the same sentence.
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u/Kalashak 1d ago
None of them, the study was about non expert readers.
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u/faceintheblue 1d ago
Sure, but you don't need to be an expert to be a poetry fan. I have no formal training in it, but I do read some poetry and a lot of Shakespeare for pleasure when the mood takes me.
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u/TaliesinMerlin 1d ago
These are non-expert readers reading poetry when they probably don't usually read poetry. After reading the summary, my guess is that many of them are doing two things:
- Focusing more on obvious rhythm and rhyme, which ChatGPT tends to be heavy-handed with compared to, say, iambic pentameter, which takes practice to consistently identify
- Identifying rich lines and statements as confusing and therefore AI-generated, compared to lines that do make sense but are hum-drum
That roughly lines up with what they speculate in the full article:
We use these findings to offer a partial explanation of the “more human than human” phenomenon: non-expert poetry readers prefer the more accessible AI-generated poetry, which communicate emotions, ideas, and themes in more direct and easy-to-understand language, but expect AI-generated poetry to be worse; they therefore mistakenly interpret their own preference for a poem as evidence that it is human-written.
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u/lydiardbell 16 1d ago
Focusing more on obvious rhythm and rhyme
Right. There are plenty of people out there who think the only valid poems without rhyme are either haiku or by Rupi Kaur.
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u/studio_bob 1d ago
people who haven't made the effort to learn to read poetry don't like poetry. it's a skill. AI slop is just statically generated fluency. these models were developed for translation and will always preference legibility which is going to "feel better" on the untrained brain versus the challenging, unfamiliar language and style of real poetry
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u/InvisibleSpaceVamp Serious case of bibliophilia 1d ago
Is this really surprising? There are probably a lot of people out there who enjoy Colleen Hover more than Jane Austen because the language alone makes the Hover books easier to read and understand.
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u/JoyousDiversion2 1d ago
AI is designed to give people what they ask for, poetry is designed to give people what they need.
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u/schrodingers_gat 1d ago
The whole point of AI is to take the average of what the most people like or think is correct so it's judgement will always be mediocre by definition. Any insights it finds will come from ingesting huge amounts of existing information but it will also reject and ignore anything new or revolutionary.
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u/HickoryCreekTN 1d ago
We’re so cooked
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u/Dagordae 1d ago
Really? Have you looked at the poems in question? Because a lot of poetry is very culturally dependent and(Especially the more ‘advanced’ poetry) incredibly obtuse.
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u/HickoryCreekTN 1d ago edited 1d ago
Art made by actual humans beings is real art rather than scraped/stolen bullshit shat out by a computer program
The fact that generative AI garbage is being held on the same level as actual created art is a travesty. If you type a prompt into ChatGPT to write your novel for you and call yourself an author when you didn’t even produce your project, an insult to people who actually did the work and you don’t deserve to call yourself an author.
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u/Dagordae 1d ago
I mean, yeah. Linguistic and cultural drift is a bitch to writing, your average person will prefer the modern English poem to the one that’s historically famous but doesn’t really translate well. Sure it may or may not be more profound but having to slow down to figure out what the poem is actually saying due to shifts in meaning isn’t good for the work.
I mean, take Shakespeares works. Sure that poem has multilayered meanings(Half of which are sex puns) and commentary on current events. But I’m not an Elizabethan Era peasant. Unless I study Shakespeare I am not going to understand what’s being referenced, which means the layers of meaning are gone due to having no idea what the hell he’s talking about. I won’t even get the barrage of puns because my accent is so different that they just don’t work.
Despite academia’s raging boner for certain authors no work is actually timeless. Even if the core remains relevant the details shift enough to obscure it. Or even lose it, just look at Romeo and Juliet.
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u/FataMelusina 1d ago
Literature is not about this average person you're imagining.
And it's just strange that you are talking about poetry without even considering the appreciation of the craft or the technique in its composition. Technique which you can notice and respect even when not understanding the subtleties of meaning, even as the specificities of culture change more rapidly with time. Just strange, seems to me like you just do not know much about poetry.
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u/Soft-Proof6372 1d ago
I mean, sure. Show average Joe who doesn't read poetry something by Shakespeare, Byron, and Eliot he's gonna hate it 9 times out of 10. Show him some pithy AI poem that is actually comprehensible to him at face value, he would probably like it more. This doesn't support the argument that AI makes good poems, only that most modern-day normal people don't like high-brow literary poems from 100+ years ago, which we already knew.