undergroundmusiccompanion.com
General Category => The AI (SkyNet becomes SELF-AWARE) subboard => WAPO Articles and Stories => Topic started by: droidrage on February 04, 2025, 08:45:46 PM
-
AI is taking down T.S. Eliot. I blame us.
ChatGPT isn’t better at writing poetry. We’re worse at reading it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/02/04/chatgpt-ai-poetry-preference-study/
Diane Sun is a sophomore at Harvard University studying philosophy and linguistics.
In 2022, I was named the national student poet of the West, one of the nation’s highest honors for youth poets. During my year of service, I performed my work across the country, including at the White House. Yet I couldn’t tell the difference between T.S. Eliot and ChatGPT.
Apparently, I’m not alone in this lapse of discernment. According to a study published in Nature in November, Americans are more likely to appreciate AI-generated poems than poetry from humanity’s most celebrated authors: Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath and, of course, Eliot.
In fact, not only did the participants prefer ChatGPT’s poetry, but they also found it “more human than human.” AI-written poetry was 17 percentage points more likely to be judged as having been written by a human than the actual human-authored poetry. It was also rated more favorably in terms of “rhythm and beauty.”
Poetry has now joined a long list of creative pursuits — essay writing, painting, chess and more — at which artificial intelligence is outperforming authentic intelligence. The intrusion of AI into our most sacred modes of expression has largely been met with disgust, anger and fear. But I don’t blame AI; I blame us.
We’re not reading well — or at all anymore. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, the percentage of young adults who read literature declined by 28 points from 1982 to 2002. Twenty years later, literacy skills remain worrisome, as two-thirds of American fourth-graders do not meet national reading standards.
And it’s not just kids: American adults are struggling to read, too. A 2022 Gallup poll estimated that American adults read two to three fewer books per year than they did before 2016. Meanwhile, ChatGPT was trained on the data equivalent of hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of books, giving it the clear edge when it comes to deciphering and replicating the world’s greatest poets, their critics and their critics’ critics.
AI has placed poetry at risk of extinction. Only 12 percent of American adults read or listened to a poem in 2022. When we do encounter poetry, it’s often trendy “Insta-poetry” — short and straightforward verses popularized on social media, a la Rupi Kaur. This more digestible form of poetry has its merits, but it doesn’t challenge readers to interpret the subtleties of form, meter and allusion the way traditional poetry does.
People prefer what they can comprehend, and collectively, we’ve lost our ability to comprehend poetry. The researchers behind the Nature study found that AI-generated poems used more obvious and direct language, making them more accessible to nonexperts. Participants didn’t have to struggle to analyze the nuanced shades of emotion and complex metaphors that adorn human poetry.
But poetry is not meant to be straightforward. Reading poetry is supposed to take effort. The problem is that we’ve become lazy readers and writers, and AI is profiting from that. The headaches of formality, connotation, meter, grammar, allusion and intention have caused us to discard our literary minds and trade them for convenience. But difficulty is the crux of poetry. ChatGPT will never be able to slyly admonish a critic mid-stanza, deliberate over the perfect phrasing with an editor or become struck with inspiration in the middle of personal tragedy.
Poets travel the nooks and crannies of their brains, negotiating their lived experiences, their sparks of inspiration and their heartfelt emotions. ChatGPT, on the other hand, is programmed to take the path of least resistance. It is a “stochastic parrot,” as some machine-learning researchers have put it. The words of ChatGPT don’t correspond to reality but to an algorithm linking words and phrases based on probability.
Poetry is meaningful because it is art created through adversity, from the unpredictable and unanticipated. We cannot expect to appreciate poetry without accepting that sometimes it leads us to places we don’t understand. Embracing the difficulty of the abstract — whether that’s through including T.S. Eliot in our curriculums or writing our own emails — is how we retain our humanity. We must confront the complexities that intimidate us, the texts that force us to pause, the obscure allusions that require additional research to understand. The niche, the avant-garde, the eclectic: These are the labors that come with being human.
It has taken GTP-4 1.8 trillion parameters to even come close to replicating the literary prowess of poets born before the invention of electricity. If we directed a fraction of the funding, effort and attention currently focused on AI toward poetry, ChatGPT would not seem nearly as remarkable in the face of human ingenuity.
Even after my year-long poetry fellowship, it would take me a thousand lifetimes before I could come close to amassing the knowledge of ChatGPT. But this also means that when I mistook a T.S. Eliot poem for AI, I found out there was another beautiful poem I had yet to ponder, and a lot more room for me to grow.